Collegiate and pro sports taught me success and bouncing back are siamese twins.
We can try to blame or complain or push responsibility on someone or something else. At some point in our lives, we all become victims —to our emotions, feelings, stimuli, and unfair beats.
But what we do next and how quickly we respond will determine our ability to live a thriving, memorable life.
A fixed mindset robs us of the value that losing provides.
The cycle of losing and winning is never over.
You may be winning now and forget why you hate losing until you lose again.
Losing is part of this human experience; the sooner you embrace it, bounce back, and use what you learned as jet fuel, the more successful you become.
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Do this one thing to start winning more
Say, “Fuck it.”
I lost. So what? Fuck it.
What can I do better tomorrow?
I can get a great night’s sleep, eat well, exercise, write down what I need to do better, and take care of myself. I can heal. I can study more. I practice better. I can learn. I can adapt.
Winning isn’t always on me, but the process of being great at my craft is.
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You can be a happy competitor and improve performance.
Take Steph Curry.
His joy is infectious. His passion is felt and seen while you watch him on the court, yet he always fails. He loses big games. He has off days when the stakes are high. But he bounces back. He goes to bed just like the rest of us and promises to show up and stick with being happy about his chosen craft tomorrow.
Eventually, if you stay happy and keep bouncing back, you will win.
But people quit when they lose. Get disenchanted when times get tough. Lose their focus when the dip happens.
Losing, struggling, and failure is momentary, but they teach us how to live, compete for happiness, and win our craft sooner.
Elite athletes know how to bounce back because of how many reps of failure they get early in life. We don’t take it personally and quit. We don’t react to every loss like there’s no tomorrow.
The most successful athletes, startup founders, and creators use adversity as happy fuel for the work they get to do tomorrow.
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Stop making these blunders
Stop being so attached to your definition of success.
Your expectations can create internal tension and lower your performance.
Success starts with accepting losing as a natural occurrence, even if you do everything possible to prevent it.
Just compete your ass off.
Dive for the loose ball.
Practice as hard as you fucking can.
Laugh at your airball.
Break from the herd.
And more importantly, we lose because we’re still learning the process of how to win. We gain weight because we lose the motivation to work out and eat well daily. We lose money because we haven’t figured out how to save and invest better. Partners leave us because we didn’t know how to sustain love, grow inside the relationship, or heal our internal trauma (or vice versa).
What you do about losing will determine if you remain a loser. It’s more important think about how you will respond to losing when it happens.
- What will you do when you get knocked down?
- What will you model to your kids when adversity hits you in the jaw?
- Will you learn new skills in a marketing job when you’re 45 years old?
- Will you apply John Gottman’s relationship principles to your love life to keep it intimate and fresh?
And I’ve lost, failed, and acted like a loser many times because I didn’t choose to bounce back, learn from it, and let go.
There doesn’t have to be a good reason you lost today — it just happens.
Knowing and being aware that losing happens is where you start. Doing something about it consistently is how greatness finds you.
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What are you responsible for doing?
You lost the biggest game, deal, or job of your life.
You got shot down when you asked her out.
Your boss said no.
You lost 100,000 dollars in cryptocurrency.
Your tenant destroyed your first rental house.
Your check bounced.
Your first Subway franchise bombed.
Yes, these all happened to me.
Fuck it!
It’s time to move on.
Pro sports taught me how to respond better.
And no one cares if you lose in pro or collegiate sports. They cut you. They fire you. They bench you.
No one comes to fix your shattered dreams, businesses, or broken relationships — you do.
If you fail to take responsibility, you are practicing the art of being a loser.
So get up, dust yourself off, and I say, “This loss is on me. I can do better tomorrow.”
Losing happens because of the unpredictable nature of life.
The unseen variables of competition.
The values of your company.
Regardless, you have to take ownership of where you are and what you’re doing. You must take the rudder and sail your ship where it needs to go, even if there’s no wind (yet).
Take responsibility and extreme ownership of your responses. Internal change comes from learning, growing, and bouncing back to success faster.
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Don’t always play the hand you’re dealt
If you are playing at the wrong table, you will always lose.
One way to stop losing is changing the cards, hands, and table you choose to play.
Subtract the cards that take value, meaning, happiness, and success from your life. It’s okay to fold, move tables, and figure out how to play a better hand somewhere else if you internally know this hand doesn’t make any sense to you.
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Why must we lose?
Bouncing back from failure depends on your natural strengths, effort levels, consistency, and mindset.
If you are on day one of running an ultramarathon, don’t run 25 miles today.
Set your own pace, ponder on your plan, write down your program, define your own success, and learn from your failures.
Take responsibility for your daily execution.
Build it out in small chunks of doable action.
And do it.
Walk when you need to walk. Run when you feel like you can.
That’s all you can control.
But don’t quit on yourself when it feels too big or sad or miserable to handle. Be compassionate and kind to yourself, and remember bouncing back always looks different.
Internally, it can be growing your self-awareness to heal your baggage and move on.
Externally, it can be getting your body moving in the right direction.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
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 The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men’s Lives is a Killer |
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Photo credit: Slav Romanov on Unsplash
