Stop Competing With the People Who Are Trying to Help You

By Kevin Owens | OverseasX

Growing up, I would compete with legit anyone about anything. I’d walk past a kid skipping rocks at a lake, find the flattest rock, before sidearming that jawn to the other side. I would compete with my brothers over the dumbest shit, like who could hold the most grapes in their mouth without choking to death…the record is 41 by the way. When you play professional basketball for a living, competition is fucking oxygen. You breathe it. Your entire identity is built around the idea that you are the best at whatever is happening at any given moment, even if what is happening in front of you is absolutely meaningless. That wiring is not easy to shut off.

When you retire, you carry that same competitive operating system into everything you do. You walk into a room and your brain is constantly scanning for threats, still ranking yourself against everybody. I know because I did it…and I still catch myself doing it. After years of building OverseasX and watching hundreds of former players try to navigate life after basketball, I can tell you with absolute fucking certainty that this is the single biggest thing holding retired athletes back from building something meaningful.

Let me be clear…I’m not here to tell you that being competitive is bad. That competitive fire is the reason you made it as far as you did. Most people on this planet cannot comprehend what it takes to survive in professional sports, let alone thrive. You had to believe, with every single fiber of your being, that you were better than anyone guarding you, better than the person trying to take your roster spot. That belief system kept you employed. The problem is that the environment changed…but the programming did not.

In sports, competition is a zero sum game. If I get the starting spot, you do not. If my team wins, your team loses. There is one ball, there are limited minutes, and everybody is fighting for a finite amount of money and opportunity. That structure rewards the exact mindset we developed. But business, especially the kind of business that involves helping people, does not work that way. And this is where so many of us crash and burn without even realizing why.

The most successful people in any industry are collaborating...not competing. They are sharing stages, making introductions, co-investing and building ecosystems together. They figured out a long time ago that there is more than enough to go around and that the fastest way to grow is to grow with other people who are doing the same thing. Meanwhile, down at the bottom, everybody is fighting over scraps, guarding their little corner of the market while looking crazy at the person next to them instead of looking at the massive opportunity smacking them in the fucking face. Competition happens at the bottom…collaboration happens at the top. That’s the motto and the majority of athletes are stuck at the bottom. Our competitive wiring keeps us locked in a mindset that only works when there is a clear winner and a loser. When you are trying to build something that is supposed to help a community, the winner and loser model is toxic.

I will tell you what I have experienced firsthand because I live my life according to facts. I built OverseasX to be an ecosystem for overseas basketball players, a resource hub and community where athletes can find information about teams, countries, agents, contracts, housing and all the shit I wish existed when I was playing. I put in the hours because I lived this life and I knew what players needed because I was the player who needed it. And then I watched people see what I was building, say all the right things about collaboration and working together, and then go build their own version of the same fucking thing. They took the blueprint, changed the font, and started competing with a system that was designed from the ground up to help the same people they CLAIM to care about.

I will be honest, it pissed me off at first. My competitive brain went straight to war mode, like how fucking dare they, I was here first, I will outwork them and outcreate them and outmarket them and I will win this. And then I had to step back and realize that reaction was the exact same broken wiring I am writing this article about.

There are a few reasons athletes default to competition instead of collaboration, and none of them are because athletes are shitty people. Identity is the biggest one. For most of your life, you were The Athlete who won. When you retire, that identity does not fade away. You are desperately looking for the next space where you can prove yourself, and the easiest way to prove yourself is to beat someone else. Building your own thing feels like a competition because that is the only framework you have ever known for measuring success. Then there is ego, and I say this with love and self awareness because my ego could fill a fucking stadium. When you have spent your entire adult life being told you are special and the center of attention everywhere you went, it is very hard to share the spotlight. Collaboration requires you to admit that someone else might do something better than you, or that your idea might not be the best idea. For an athlete, that feels like losing…and we DO NOT lose. In overseas basketball, there were only so many roster spots. You learned, through years of lived experience, that opportunity is limited and you better grab yours before someone else does. That mindset follows you into business and makes you believe that if someone else succeeds in your space, it means there is less for you. Which is almost never true, but try telling that to a brain that spent a decade fighting for survival.

Unfortunately, when athletes compete in a space that is meant to serve athletes, the only people who lose are the athletes they claim to be helping. If there are five different platforms all doing the same fucking thing, what does that mean for the player sitting in his apartment in Greece trying to figure out where to play next season? A bunch of fragmented information. It means five different communities with five different pieces of the puzzle instead of one place that has everything so now athletes have to do extra work to find it because the people who are supposed to be helping them are too busy trying to beat each other. That is embarrassing…and something I refuse to contribute to.

I am not going to pretend I have this completely figured out. I am a work in progress like everybody else. But I have learned a few things from building OverseasX that I think are worth sharing, and it starts with recognizing the trigger. When you see someone doing something similar to what you are doing and your first instinct is to compete, that is the old wiring talking, so name it and call it what it is. That is the basketball brain trying to turn a collaborative opportunity into a win or go home moment. Awareness alone does not fix it, but you cannot fix what you do not acknowledge. From there, you have to redefine what winning looks like. In basketball, winning meant trophies and contracts. In business, especially in a service oriented business, winning means impact. How many people did you help? How many players got better information because of what you built? How many athletes avoided a bad situation because your platform existed? 

When you redefine winning around impact instead of dominance, collaboration stops feeling like a threat. And you have to get honest with yourself about your motivations. Are you building this thing because you want to help people, or are you building it because you want to be seen as the person who helps people? Those are two very different things, and the answer changes everything about how you operate. If it is about helping people, you will partner with anyone who can help you help more people. If it is about being seen, you will compete with anyone who threatens your spotlight. 

The hardest part is being willing to reach out first. Call the person who is doing similar work and have the conversation. Find out where your strengths overlap and where they do not. Maybe they are great at something you are terrible at. Maybe you have built something they need. The only way to find out is to put the ego down and pick up the phone. I know that feels vulnerable, but in reality it’s strategy.

I played professional basketball for a decade all over the world. I know what it felt like to walk into a gym in a foreign country with a bag over my shoulder and nothing but my competitive fire standing between you and a flight home. That shit kept me alive during those moments, and I will never apologize for having it. But the best thing I have done since retiring is learning when to turn it off. OverseasX was never meant to be a trophy. It’s a tool, and tools work better when more people are building the house together.

So to every former athlete out there who is building something, creating something, trying to make a difference in the space you came from: stop looking sideways. Stop keeping score against the people who are trying to do the same work you are doing. The players who need your help do not care about your ego or your brand or whether you were first. They care about getting the information they need to survive and thrive in one of the most difficult careers on the planet.

Competition made us athletes…but collaboration will make us leaders.

With OverseasX, you'll never have to walk this journey alone.