Winning isn’t about defeating your enemy.
Winning is about achieving a desired outcome for yourself.
Surely, those who oppose your outcome must be ignored and if necessary pushed aside and rendered powerless to stop you.
You can’t let them get in your way.
But you also can’t let them define your way.
You must always keep your eyes on the prize.
Our sports-consumed, war-obsessed culture makes winners and losers co-dependent players in a zero-sum game.
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Our sports-consumed, war-obsessed culture makes winners and losers co-dependent players in a zero-sum game.
There can be no win without a loss.
No winner to laud without a loser to lament.
If you want to be a winner, you’d better find a loser quick – and smash him.
Let’s see, who will it be?
We define winning as outdoing, besting, defeating, even destroying an opponent in battle and crowning ourselves with the only, lonely garland of laurel leaves.
But I think we suffer from a fundamental misunderstanding of winning, along with the failure to understand what constitutes success.
Success means making your own situation—and the situations of others—better, happier, more fulfilling, and more productive.
Success does not mean racking up achievements, accomplishments, and profits at someone else’s expense.
In the scarcity model, there is a loser for every winner, someone who doesn’t get what he or she desires because the winner gets it instead.
In the abundance model, winning and losing exist as separate, unlinked outcomes, and one person’s gain doesn’t necessitate another’s loss.
If you believe in love, you believe in the abundance model.
Trust me on that one. We’ll explore it together later.
And if you can break the co-dependent knot of winning and losing, winning will become, for you, as much process-based as outcome-based.
The roots of the word win are “to strive, struggle, fight.”
Not overcome, defeat, or vanquish.
Winning is about you, what you do, and how you do it.
Winning is about the constructive work you do to achieve your desired outcome, and the incomparable joy of achieving that outcome, not the comparative boost of preventing opponents from achieving theirs.
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Winning is about the constructive work you do to achieve your desired outcome, and the incomparable joy of achieving that outcome, not the comparative boost of preventing opponents from achieving theirs.
Winning is about giving and getting, not about taking away.
Winning is always additive.
Winning is positively charged.
And victory is indeed sweet when you can say the victory is yours.
Originally published on Tom Aplomb
Photo—Lisa Risager/Flickr