Ed Latimore explains why losing can be beneficial, even losing in a public and humiliating manner:
Despite my obnoxious posting about my fight on Showtime this last weekend, I hope you had something better to do than watch. If you didn’t, then I’ll fill you in. I got stopped in the 1st round.
It’s heavyweight boxing. When you have two men over 200 lbs throwing hard shots, someone is bound to go down. My opponent (quite the affable fellow outside the ring), landed a great short right over my jab and the fight was short lived after that.
It’s a terrible way to lose. Worse, it was live for the whole world to see. It’s awful but it’s part of life. I move on and become better from it.
In many ways, I learned more from this 3 minutes (technically speaking, the referee called a stop to the contest sometime after the 2-minute mark) than I did from the rest of my 9-year career in boxing. Life is funny this way.
If you can look at things the right way, you learn more from failure than success. Jay-Z once said, “I will not lose for even in defeat, there’s a valuable lesson learned so that evens it up for me”.
Here are 8 valuable lessons I learned from losing on national television.
Embarrassment is the worst emotion to feel
It’s miserable because there’s no real way to confront or conquer it. You can face your fears. You can cheer yourself up if your sad. Embarrassment is just a burden you bear until it heals. The one fortunate thing about embarrassment is that like all other negative emotions, it is extremely susceptible to the power of gratitude.
These are the lessons that gammas never learn, because their fear of failure and the humiliation they wrongly believe it necessarily entails precludes them from putting themselves at risk of failure. They don’t understand that the lessons one learns from losing not only makes success more likely in the future, but that there is no shame whatsoever in a defeat in which one genuinely did one’s best and was simply overcome by a superior opponent.
The most ferociously competitive team with which I was ever associated was the kid’s soccer team I coached about ten years ago. Their first year, they lost every game, and usually badly. As a result, they developed a total immunity to any fear of losing, and, much to the confusion of the other teams, would celebrate every rare goal as if they had won the game. Two years later, they upset the provincial champions who were affiliated with the main professional club in the region by beating them in the championship games of both of the major tournaments. The next year, they went undefeated, won both tournaments again, and this time, only allowed a handful of goals the entire season.
They weren’t particularly big or particularly skilled, but the combination of their intensity and their total lack of fear was intimidating, even to the parents watching them. “They are wolves with a taste for blood,” one opposing coach memorably said, shaking his head, after a game in which I put our leading scorer into goal to prevent him from running up the score, started talking to one player’s father, then looked up to see the kid bringing the ball up past midfield to send a perfect cross to a teammate for another goal. The kid was so goal-hungry that I practically had to tie the kid to the bench to keep him from putting the ball in the net.
And it was their season of “humiliating failure”, all those 13-1 and 10-0 losses, that forged them into an extraordinarily successful team.