Sometimes We Win And Sometimes We Learn

They say that losing while learning is not quite losing. And this is absolutely true. You are defeated only if you want to: if you don’t want to, take advantage of this loss to learn something new about yourself, about what you lack or what remains to be done to achieve triumph.

Sometimes we win, sometimes we learn. There is not a single human being who has lived without knowing defeat. Indeed, most great feats are an escalation of mistakes, until it becomes an indisputable triumph. Isn’t this how the greatest discoveries and the greatest conquests of humanity were made?

Indeed, what makes the taste of triumph so sweet is precisely the difficulty involved. No one relishes a success that would fall straight from the sky, without having struggled to achieve it. You may brag about being lucky, but you shouldn’t take pride in its success, because success only really is when it combines skill and effort.

Sometimes we win

Carlos Serrano is an athlete who holds the world record in Paralympic swimming. On social media, he shared one of his photos, in which he appears holding a sign saying: “Medals are won in practice. Competitions then allow us to seize them. ”

This sentence could not be more correct. What guarantees the triumph is the work on oneself, the preparation, the effort which supposes to develop a whole process thanks to which one moves away little by little from his own marks.

Winning is not a reality reserved for those with the most abilities, but for those who use it best. Winning is the fruit that can only be tasted by people who are able to set a goal, strive tirelessly for it, and work their weak points over and over again to be worthy of triumph.

The winner’s mentality is characterized by effort and work as primary values. Whoever knows how to win, also knows that nothing is wild but that everything is produced and comes mainly from perseverance.

You win first of all in the struggle with yourself when defining your goals, you struggle to have confidence in your abilities, to make decisions sufficiently resistant to eventualities and to always be strong, despite inconstancy. When this is achieved, all that remains is to “grab the medals”.

There is no recipe for achieving triumph, but one can nonetheless define the characteristics of the winner. The first is faith in one’s own work. To this can be added a great capacity to be self-critical, in a healthy way. It means having the sufficient capacity to objectively analyze your successes and mistakes.

Sometimes we learn

In ancient Greece reigned a real cult to competition, more particularly sports. At that time, such events had a very different value than today. Plato, in his dialogue “The Republic”, insisted on the fact that young people should be educated from two pillars: gymnastics and music.

By gymnastics he meant the education of the body, and by music he meant the education of the soul. For the Greeks, it was unthinkable that someone would be able to win a sports competition if they did not have great values ​​as a human being.

Precisely what made an athlete deserving was being “above average”. And we particularly appreciated his courage and his effort. The competitions were called “Agôn”, which means fight, challenge. It is from this term that the word “agony” comes, which today refers to a suffering which separates life from death.

In a competition, there are only winners and losers. And competition is only healthy if it involves working, perfecting and improving in order to achieve victory.

Defeat is always relative, because it always depends on the feelings, emotions and attitudes of the person who experiences the impossibility of achieving their goal in a given moment. It is a defeat, in the strict sense of the term, if what follows is a total belittling.

If, on the other hand, the impossibility of achieving a goal becomes a source of reflection and learning, then we cannot speak of defeat as such. This learning makes it possible to review the reasons that made triumph impossible and even to review the objective in itself. Sometimes defeat is a signal warning us that we are on the wrong path, pursuing a goal that may not even be right for us.

For someone with a winner’s mentality, the word “defeat” doesn’t even exist in reality. What does exist, however, are situations in which we get what we were aiming for and others in which we have the opportunity to learn things that we did not know.