Relaxation makes us stupid.

You think that downtime will make you happy. You may even dream about getting out of the rat race for good. But Todd Buchholz—a former White House director of economic policy, award-winning teacher at Harvard, hedge fund director, and co-producer of a Tony Award-winning Broadway hit show—wants you to know that you’re wrong. It’s the race that delivers the rush. So forget about retirement, zen retreats, and making everyone feel like a winner; human beings are hard-wired to compete. Interweaving entertaining stories and cutting-edge research from neuroeconomics to evolutionary biology to Renaissance art to General Motors, Buchholz draws the counterintuitive—yet wholly convincing—conclusion that competition has not only made us taller and smarter, it’s what we love and need.