Episode 2

Available for over a year

One view of life is as a series of competitions. We compete for jobs; life partners; prestige and almost everything we value. How, though, do we choose where to compete, which battles to fight and when to walk away? Human beings, we are told, live in a competitive world. The rhetoric surrounding business, sport, indeed life, is so often about winners and losers. The survival of the fittest; the rat race; climbing the greasy pole to the top of the tree. We can't all be good at everything and one of the trickiest decisions we have to make is where to compete. Where, in the myriad of possibilities should we put our effort, how do we work out which races to enter? In this week's Human Zoo, Michael Blastland asks whether, in this competitive existence, we really are any good at knowing what we're good at. Presenter: Michael Blastland Producer: Toby Murcott A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.