The Beauty of Losing on Your Own Terms

So much is made of winning in the world.  We hear that winners go further, that winners outlast and outwork losers and that the world celebrates winners (and not losers).  If you were to ask some of the biggest winners in the world, it is very likely that they have some huge failures and losses.  The best winners do not hide from losing.  They seek it out knowing that the only way to be a winner is to lose more than anyone else.

That does not mean that they seek out losing for the sake of losing or that they look for the wrong people to associate with and get bad advice from.  Winners recognize that there are 2 types of losing and they choose as much as possible to choose one over the other.

The first type of losing is getting bad advice.  This either happens by accident or by design.  Someone gave you bad advice, you took it, and lost something or made a mistake.  In the end, it doesn’t matter if the person giving the advice knew it was bad, only that it was.  The only reason it matters after the fact is that you now know that you should probably not take advice from a person that advised you poorly on purpose.  If it was an accident, then you can decide if you want to continue to take advice from that person if they demonstrate that they made an honest mistake and that their advice is usually good.

We will often be faced with getting advice in an area that we do not understand.  It could be something technical that we do not understand, like medical advice or technology, or it could be something that we have no wish to know about like repairing a car or doing our taxes.  Either way, the best policy is to trust but check.  You could make a brief study of the subject and based on that you could decide if you like the advice, or you could ask for other opinions.  Getting a second or third opinion can often be the best way to assess whether advice is good.

The second type of losing is making a mistake yourself.  No one has given you bad advice, you did something, and it did not work out.  Why does this happen?  It could simply be that you did know enough about what you wanted to do.  It could be that you did not have enough skill to do it.  It could be that you had bad timing.

This is the type of losing that winners seek out because you can learn and grow from it.  You can learn from getting bad advice too, but if your goal is continue to get advice, then you need to learn much less and get better at choosing advisers, as mentioned above.

If you are losing with a goal of getting better, then you can correct your mistakes and improve.  If you did know enough about the subject, then your goal would be to learn enough so that you will win at it eventually.  If you did not have the skill, you will need to deliberately practice and learn the skills required, put in the repetitions, as Arnold Schwarzenegger says, until you can win.  If your timing was bad and you did something at the wrong time, like bought or sold something, you would need to learn better timing.

Often these skills take a long time to acquire and that is why winners are content to “lose” until they are good enough to win.

The great thing about this type of losing is that correcting it is learnable.  Also, you are doing it yourself, so you do not have anyone to blame and no one took advantage of you. 

As you can see, losing on your own terms, with the goal of winning, is much better than losing when someone gives you bad advice.