I'm only competitive with myself -- I just want to learn. I'm not happy if I'm not learning something and practicing some of my skills. But I'm also quite happy

I'm only competitive with myself -- I just want to learn. I'm not happy if I'm not learning something and practicing some of my skills. But I'm also quite happy lingering on something and really exhausting its depths. Do you know more than I do about something? There are lots of things that you (the general you, meaning anyone) know more about than me. All I want is to learn from you, and teach you some things that I know (which reinforces my own learning). That's it. One of the reasons I left my last job was because it was very much a competitive, back-stabbing sort of environment. You could only get "better" in that environment by actively making someone else worse. How that makes sense when your goal is to produce a research product, I'll never know. I guess what I'm saying with all of this is, I'm happy to see other people admit to the overall viewpoint that you've shared here.