"To be a champion, I think you have to see the big picture. It's not about winning and losing; it's about every day hard work and about thriving on a challenge. It's about embracing the pain that you'll experience at the end of a race and not being afraid. I think people think too hard and get afraid of a certain challenge." - Summer Sanders
Jason Williams called out Charles Barkley for being a loser. "Nobody wanted (him) on their team because he was a loser. So that's what I think about that." Our society is obsessed with winning, to the extent that people feel comfortable labeling others as losers, selfish, underachievers.
It takes no effort to find great players who never won professional championships, Barkley, Dan Marino, Ted Williams. Dean Smith wrote that prior to winning an NCAA title that he didn't believe that he was a loser.
John Wooden spent years developing his Pyramid of Success and definition of success, "Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best you are capable of becoming." Winning is not a prerequisite, because he recognized you could compete and lose or play poorly and win.
This mindset spills into society, where the public loses its collective minds over removal of grade point averages and not awarding a valedictorian. "It's the everyone gets a trophy mentality." The more nuanced approach recognizes different grading systems and communities and the surprisingly high incidence of mental health problems among adolescents attributed to competitiveness and academic pressures.
The best learning is experiential - we learn from what we do. But that also implies that if we teach our children that there are only winners or losers, they perpetuate those flawed lessons.
The worst reputation we can have in sports is being "soft"...a complex indictment of lacking physical and mental toughness. But sometimes our best effort will not win...no matter how much foresight, preparation, and practice we exert.
That doesn't prevent us from practicing winning behaviors: study, preparation, practice, positive attitude, intensity, sharing, teamwork. But we can separate negative behaviors from 'bad' people.
My mother had an expression, "who died and made you king?" I think it's better expressed as "what qualifies you to judge another?" Society gains when we cooperate to lift others up rather than celebrate their shortcomings. But unfortunately, sacrifice will sometimes be viewed as weakness and sharing as lacking a killer instinct.
Daniel Makepeace on Twitter observes, "Ripping others behind their back says more about YOU than them." Yes, we struggle to 'turn the other cheek' when we feel wronged...and I know nobody who doesn't feel that way sometimes. We have a choice about whether we keep playing "Loser Tag."
