As I finish up the turkey preparations this morning, I’m reflecting on a powerful experience this past week for which I’m grateful. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that my daughter’s water polo team from St. Ignatius was preparing for a showdown in the semifinals against juggernaut Sacred Heart Prep. It was a heck of a game, particularly close in the first half, but SHP prevailed and went on to win its 4th (I think) consecutive CIF crown. I could go on about the game and the great plays but the experience I want to share this morning is how our team handled losing.
The night of the loss Coach Paul Felton sent an email congratulating the girls on a great effort and concluded with a provocative quote, “Losing, in a curious way, is winning."
This stopped me in my tracks. How do we think about losing? How do we teach losing in our culture?
There are two all-too-common approaches. One is to declare everyone a winner, trophies and As for everyone. The other is that losing is an egregious sin, deserving of ugly out-of-control tirades by coaches and parents on the sidelines. (There are direct parallels in business and politics but I’ll leave those for the discussion afterward.)
In my mind, neither is appropriate. We don’t have to teach the desire to win - we are born with it. We shouldn’t dilute the great feeling of accomplishment by sharing it falsely. And, we don’t have to teach that losing is no fun. We all feel that way.
What we need to teach is how to win and how to lose. I did some simple research to see how we are doing. There are 20,205 books listed on amazon.com with the word “winning’ in the title, but only 4,597 that include the word “losing” and many of those have to do with dieting. While there are a few good books, for example, parents may know Wendy Mogel’s book, “The Blessing of a Skinned Knee”, the vast majority of literature is about winning.
Winning sells books but we can’t win without losing, at least if we are pushing limits and reaching for lofty goals.
Some will say there is no such thing as a good loser or (mis)quote Vince Lombardi, “You show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser” but I’m not talking about people who like to lose or are carefree about losing, if there is actually anyone who feels that way.
I am talking about people who strive to win but lose, who set lofty goals and don’t achieve them, who try something great and strike out. How do we encourage these ambitions? And, how do we cope with losing?
Here are a few pearls of wisdom I found buried in the literature on winning:
“There is no comparison between that which is lost by not succeeding and that which is lost by not trying.” - Francis Bacon, Sr.
“I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.” - Thomas Edison
“The greatest accomplishment is not in never falling, but in rising again after you fall.” – Vince Lombardi
"History has demonstrated that the most notable winners usually
encountered heartbreaking obstacles before they triumphed. They won because they refused to become discouraged by their defeats."
-B.C. Forbes
And the full quote that Paul Felton shared with the water polo team. Thanks Paul for your teaching!
"That's what learning is, after all; not whether we lose the game, but how we lose and how we've changed because of it and what we take away from it that we never had before, to apply to other games. Losing, in a curious way, is winning" - Richard Bach from Jonathan Livingston Seagull
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