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By Ken Kaiserman
Editor In-Chief
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The Value of Losing
Congratulations to the Pittsburgh Steelers who just won the Super Bowl
earlier this month and became champions of the world for a record tying 5th
time.
It must
have been great to hoist the Lombardi Trophy as the hapless Seahawks looked
on in defeat. What a bunch of losers falling flat on their face like a baby
first learning to walk. Of course, they did finish 2nd best –
ahead of the other 30 losing teams that didn’t even win their conference.
While some may consider the NFC champs to have had a successful season, Tom
Seaver once wrote: “there are only two places an athlete can finish - first
place and no place”. How about Vince Lombardi who said: “Show me a good
loser and I’ll show you a loser”. Even in the world sports, where it really
is about winning, or in life, this can’t be the way we think. As a looking
glass into real life, when 31 NFL teams, representing the best players in
the world, are all looking up at the Champion Steelers, we all need to find
and understand the value of losing.
Everybody Loses
While being a
loser requires that you lose, the corollary that losing makes you a loser is
certainly false. Vince Lombardi is known as one of the greatest and most
intense coaches in history. Of course, most of us know Coach Lombardi’s
famous quote: “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing”. While he
always put that kind of emphasis on winning, most of us don’t know that he
also said: “If you can’t accept losing, you can’t win.” While we all like to
win much more than we like to lose, in order to play and be a part of
something greater, we have to be willing to take the risk that we might
lose. It has to be accepted that losing is a natural a part of participating
and of winning.
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Coach’s Corner, Continued
Why Its
Okay to Lose
While
not necessarily intuitive, there are many reasons why we can feel good about
losing and I want to focus on two of these: the first and most obvious
reason to lose is because it will help us to win; the second reason to lose
is that it helps us to win in life.
Losing creates opportunity. Every loss has more lessons about what a team or
individual can do to improve than any win. Losing also provides more
motivation. Winning tends to cause people to overlook errors in judgment
and fundaments that only losing can reveal. It’s through the process that
individuals and teams can discern areas to work on through practice to
improve. Maybe even more important is that losing forces people to recognize
that they want to win. The motivation provided by losing is a key to helping
teams work harder in practice to improve and to play harder to win. Coach
John Wooden’s Pyramid of Success (January, 2006) emphasizes that success
isn’t winning or losing, but the self satisfaction derived from doing your
best to be the best of which you are capable. Both winning and losing should
inspire an individual to improve and to maximize their potential. By using
losses in this way, we can motivate ourselves and others.
We can also
use these lessons to improve other aspects of our life because losing is as
much a part of every day life as it is a natural experience of playing
sports. As parents, we make such an effort to help our kids feel better and
to not let them experience failures. Ultimately, by not acknowledging their
shortcomings, mistakes and losses, we don’t allow them to live up to their
potential. Failing is natural and it creates motivation. Without failing,
kids may not see the need to work harder to improve. Telling kids that they have a "good eye" when the pitch is over the backstop, or
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Coach’s Corner, Continued
saying "nice try" after a mistake may seem encouraging.
However, we should also
understand that it can be fine to let them know that a mistake has been
made. When an error is made we can acknowledge it and then work to learn
from the mistake and ultimately to improve.
By continuing to tell kids that they’re always doing great sends a message
that they don’t need to work as hard. Kids are smart and they realize when
they’re good or bad. Sometimes they need to be protected but other times we
need to also be honest if we want them to succeed in life. The idea that a
person just needs to do their best isn’t always true – sometimes they need
to do even better. I heard of story of an employee who responded to a new
work assignment for a project that needed to be done by a deadline with:
“I’ll do my best”. Well, in this case, it just needed to get done and
failing to finish it, even if that was their “best effort”, was simply
unacceptable. Sometimes, a person’s best is not enough and you need to “get
it done”. This is one of the lessons that you can learn by losing because it
is part of life.
Conclusion
Bud Wilkerson, the famous Okalahoma Sooners football coach who led his team
on a 47 game winning streak, noted that the only way you could meet somebody
that never lost meant that you had to find somebody that never played the
game. While nobody wants to lose, we can use losing to motivate and improve.
We can also extrapolate the lessons of losing to the greater life lessons so
that we can all become the best of which we are capable. Losing is part of
everything we do and has tremendous value. Mistakes are a natural part of
participating so we shouldn’t be afraid of acknowledging our errors and
using them to improve. Our goal, in youth sports and in life, has to be to
see the value of losing and use it to become better athletes, parents and
people.
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