As a kid, winning wasn’t really a big deal.  In fact, depending on who I might be playing a game with, I would lose on purpose if I thought the other person might get angry.  It wasn’t that I couldn’t win, it’s that I knew if I did and enjoyed it, it might end badly.  So I got really good at “losing”.  It wasn’t until I got to high school and had the opportunity to win with a group of people that I really understood what it felt like to be a winner.

Pretty sure it was one of those crazy things where all of the right people gathered together at the right time.  High School band.  In the three years I was a part of that competitive marching band, we lost once and it was devastating.  When I say win, I mean 1st place at every competition.  When I say lose, we came in 2nd.  Most people would be thrilled with 2nd, but when you understand what it feels like to work really hard and earn the win, placing 2nd means you didn’t work hard enough, that somehow you let things slip.  It didn’t happen again.

It took that “loss” to renew our work ethic because it’s easy to get complacent when you never lose.  It’s easy to just assume you’ll always be a winner, no matter how little you work.  Once you’ve reached the “top”, you think you’ll stay there if you just maintain what you’re doing.  The problem is, other people who have not experienced winning want your spot.

It’s that way in every area of our lives.  Those people who say that not everything should be a competition don’t understand that life itself is a competition.  Your very survival can depend on it.  In the animal kingdom, this is an every day occurrence of course – life and death.  Winning or losing.

Winning isn’t necessarily about talent, although it plays a part, it’s mainly about work ethic and not sitting on your laurels.  This is not something we’re teaching our kids about right now.  They see major sports or music celebrities and assume that it’s all about talent, ignoring the work that went into where they are.  Anyone can luck into something once in a while, as seen during March Madness, for instance, but it takes work to sustain a pattern of success and improvement.  Our kids don’t see things like professional musicians still taking lessons or athletes training daily or teachers taking more professional development or parents taking parenting classes.  All they see is the final outcome and their lack of experience causes them to assume these professionals just do it naturally, without working.  I see it in things as simple as me telling my students stories about famous “dead guys” and they ask, how do you know this stuff?  And I have to tell them that I work to find the information and read.  I don’t just “know” it.

The enemy of winning is impatience and laziness.  Immediate self gratification has become a huge impediment to teaching work ethic.  Getting to that place where you finally feel you are winning takes time.  A LOT of time.  Research says it takes 10,000 hours to perfect your craft, whatever the may be.  Practicing something 2 hours a day for 13 years is about the equivalent.  Time and patience are important.  What are we doing to help our kids understand that not everything good comes immediately?  And when did  “work” become a bad word?  We create things at school like “home fun” instead of “homework” because kids will be more apt to do it if they think it’s “fun”.  This is silly – THEY know it’s work, even if we rename it and because we’ve not taught them how to work smart or that work is a necessary part of life or that there is satisfaction in work well done, they fight it.  It’s the reason I fought housework for most of my life – I hadn’t learned to find satisfaction in it until fairly recently.  When we wrap our kids up in “bubble wrap” so that they don’t have to experience hardship and loss, when we give everyone a trophy, when we reward kids for doing what is expected rather than for going above and beyond, we are doing them a disservice in life and they will never have the opportunity to really appreciate life to its fullest.

I have worked hard the last several years of my teaching career to teach my students that losing is okay, that’s it’s a process of learning, of trial and error.  Teaching them that it’s alright to feel frustrated and angry but to use that energy to work harder next time is so important.  To just wallow in that frustration and give up because it is too hard will never allow them to feel the excitement of achieving or winning.  And until they experience the “win”, they will want to continue that wallowing.  It’s human nature.  So experiencing that loss is essential because without it there is no appreciation for the winning.

In my own life, I have experienced losing in terms of relationships, jobs, raising my children, my education and so much more.  Each of those losses have helped me appreciate more and more in my life and spur me on to work even harder because I know there are so many more “wins” out there in life to experience.