Losing is not a Waste of Time
No matter how how good you are at what you do, eventually you are going to lose. Someone or something else will be better than you or get lucky, or you’ll simply make a mistake. Let’s talk about how to not feel like those times are a waste.
So You Lost
This comes to us courtesy of the same friend inspired “I Want it to Suck More,” who remains anonymous per their request.
After a particularly lengthy and grueling competitive activity in which we lost, I commented that I had performed better than I ever had before, yet we still lost. “What a waste of time,” I lamented. My friend immediately responded with “It wasn’t a waste of time. What did you just say? You did better than you ever have before.”
He was right. I was so utterly fixated on the end result, the victory or defeat, that I was losing sight of what I learned during the experience. Of all the things I had done that had worked, that I could repeat and build on in the future. I just needed to use everything I had done right as the foundation for my plan of action the next time, and avoid the few mistakes I had made while building on the excellent performance I now knew I was capable of.
What Did You Learn?
As with so many other things, this lead to me thinking of how this could be applied to every area of life. How many times have you been compelled to write off an entire experience as a complete waste of time simply because the end result wasn’t what you wanted it to be? Resist that urge. Think critically about the entire experience, about everything you did and din’t do, about every choice, hesitation, and mistake. There should never be any undertaking that is a complete waste of your time: there is always something to learn.
Your failures and losses are some of your greatest lessons. Not just because you learned what didn’t work. That part is fairly obvious by the fact that you didn’t succeed in the end. It takes extra work to think past your feelings of disappointment, anger, shame, and so forth to look at everything that may have worked and could have led to victory and success if built upon correctly.
With this insight, you have a better foundation to start off your next effort with. You’ve already learned at least some of the things that work. Now you can build off of those, and also have the room to try more new things that will either lead to success this time or help you narrow down your list of what works and what doesn’t.
Your Losses
As always, I want to hear from all of you. Tell us about the losses that you’ve learned the most from, about how you’ve overcome the disappointment and gleaned lessons from them.