You’re a Loser

Please excuse the “click baity” title but they say if you deliver truth than it’s not click bait.

If that’s the case, this isn’t.  None of us win every time - and if we did, life would be boring.  

We like winning not because it’s the only thing we need but because we know losing.

Even the greatest athletes, entrepreneurs, and faith leaders fail at times.  You know my favorite saying:

Failures are hurdles of success.

Today, we are going to take it a little farther.  Not only are failures a great way to learn to become successful, but they also define you.  

Yes unpopular opinion, your failures define you!

Recent Memory Lane

Let’s take an honest trip down memory lane from this week.  I am writing this entry on a plane crammed into a middle seat on a Southwest Airlines flight that me and several teenagers (my tribe, ya know the way my mind thinks and the people I relate too?) almost didn’t make it on.

I was in Houston for the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod (LCMS) National Youth Gathering (we call it NYG for short).  It’s truly an amazing experience that creates numerous memories. 

“NYG” happens in a different city every three years. This time around it was in Houston, TX.

The first time I ever experienced a trip like this was in 1998 in Atlanta.  I was dragged on the trip but had a blast.  I will never forget some of things that happened that week.  

NYG is truly one of the most meaningful things in my life.  I learned great things, met great people, and made some of the best memories.  However, not every last detail of the six I have attended was perfect.  

Each trip has had its challenges.  Perhaps the biggest though came on this most recent trip.  The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all of us in many different ways.  I’ve known people who have lost their lives, jobs, retirement savings, and some friends.  

I have mentioned my distaste for comparison shopping ones troubles before so please don’t read this as that sort of attempt.  We had a couple people come down with the coronavirus on our trip.  We took the necessary precautions to isolate those that did.  It wasn’t ideal for them but myself and the rest of the leadership did our best to maintain the quality of the experience for the rest of the group.  

Unfortunately, by the end of our trip, things caught up with us.  Although not COVID positive, we had other people that were feeling run down and we had an important decisions to make.  

The plan was to go to Schlitterbahn, a famous waterpark in Texas today (remember, I’m flying home as I type, with two kind people putting up with the guy who ruined their empty middle seat euphoria five minutes prior to take-off).  Obviously, we ain’t in a wave pool right now.  

Last night we determined it best to get the group home before anyone else came down with something and restricted us from traveling home.  In fact, one of our COVID positive youth was still in the contagious stage and needed their parents to come to Houston to drive them home.

We didn’t want to do it but it was necessary.  Everyone was in agreement that the best move was to act for safety and convenience.  

You could say we lost the battle here at the end by surrendering to illness.  However, it does’t ruin the rest of the trip and it’s likely to prepare us well for the next one.

Distant Memory Lane

Could you imagine only being able to remember your most recent week of life?

That would be terrible!  And this blog entry (probably the whole series, to be honest), would be useless.  We’re here to learn from our experiences.

Think of some of those indelible lessons from your younger years (see the December 1, 2020 E-Impact Blog entry).  They changed your life.  You remember them and are consistently acting as a result of what you learned.

An example could be something simple like burning your hand on the stove or maybe something more complicated like a NYG trip.

The fact is we would not be where we are today without repetition, recall, and growth.  

The key part of the growth is the struggle.

I Feel Like I Been Losin’

One of my favorite bands of all time is 10th Avenue North.  They were named after the street that some college friends lived off of.  Ironically, one of my good friends and former colleague actually lives off that road now in Palm Beach County, FL.

10th Avenue North sings a song called “Losing” and one of my favorite lines in the song is, “I feel like I’ve been losing…”

I love this statement because it defines “losing” exactly how I like to think of it.  It’s a feeling - and only a feeling.  

I haven’t been bashful about my love for sports and competition and I hesitate to even include this point in the blog, but I must.  If there is one thing outside of injuries (the physical results, not the mental) I can criticize about the lessons of sports, it’s they often teach you that losing is objective.  

Losing a game sucks.

Within the context of a game or organized competition, yes, losing is easily calculated by a score.  You can win or lose (let’s not have the “tie debate” soccer fans).  I believe this system is necessary to have a season and universal evaluation for sports leagues.  However, it’s just an agreed upon metric, not a measure of worth.

And so calling oneself a loser is a terrible result of a failed jumpsuit,  game plan, or full season of hard work.

You can be a loser in number but faith, business, and life is way more than a game.  It’s a journey in which struggles contribute to who you are.  They are part of the definition of you and what you’ve accomplished. 

Steve Jobs (another Steve reference, I know) failed many times.  I wrote about this in detail in my book, “Personal Finance in a Public World”.  I was just about to start the next sentence with “Despite those failures…” but I’m changing it.  It’s “As a result of those failures…that Steve and Apple are one of the largest companies in the world.  See E-Impact 64 for some thoughts on consistency.

When you feel like your losin’, you’re actually learning, which is winning in The Impactmaker Movement.

I’ve Got a Feeling

I’m sticking with the music theme here.  How many songs can you name that have a line that says something related?

Here’s the first two that come to mind for me:

“I Gotta Feeling” - Black Eyed Peas

“I’ve Got a Feeling” - The Beatles

I’d be glad to field other suggestions (@bdepa on Twitter or IG).

This is the practical part of the entry.  We must answer the question, “How do we take the feeling of losing and capitalize on it?”

If failure is not just an event, that means it lasts for a period of time.  With a good practice (and hopefully a good memory) you can make it last for awhile. 

I’m not talking about the lousy feeling of coming up short with the bases loaded or letting the team down when it was critical.  I’m referring to the feeling and action in the moment of execution.   

A good sports psychologist would help you kick the “bummed” feeling after a loss.  I’ll leave that up to them.

My intention is to help you learn from what you did during your failure.

I have a feeling that you can use it to propel you and your impactmaking forward.

Questioning Yourself

I might get kicked off the Internet, especially platitude Twitter, for calling you loser, saying that your failures define you, this next point.

Question yourself.

Do it because you care and seek to improve.  

I think each person and situation are unique but here are some generic options to get you started:

What led to the original situation?

Who was involved?

Where was I?

At what point did I lose control or act emotionally?

Who could have helped?

What was my desired result?

Don’t ask yourself (these aren’t bad questions for other intentions):

How did it make me feel?

Why did I mess up?

What did I lose?

Who did I hurt?

A simple memory of the situations you experienced will allow you to relive what happened, and once again, you want to relive the action and not the resulting emotions.

So, question yourself in order to better understand what you did and why you did it.

Document

I’ve been running a daily journal for almost two years now.  It started as some notes I was taking to document my journey from leaving my previous role at a large financial services company to founding Initiate Impact and running my own business.  

I ended up writing the book I mentioned above and it has nothing to do with starting a wealth management firm.  It was such a good practice that I kept it up.  I still record my thoughts for every day.  Some days I keep up with it as the day goes and others I forget until right before bed (or even the next day).  

Overall, this has been a great practice and has made me realize how many things in life we don’t remember.  I don’t believe anyone is incapable of learning and those that learn the best are more able to remember things than to determine them.  In other words, we should work more on retaining the many lessons we receive than to try to learn more.

Documenting your answers to the questions in the previous section is essential to being a “good loser” - and that’s not a reference to the postgame handshake line.  The sports analogy would be a solid film and note taking session to watch back how you and your teammates played.

The best coaches help their players transition struggles to improvement.  The good news about the impact and business space is that you can coach yourself.  

And the Winner Is…

You feel like you’ve been losing.  You’ve questioned yourself.  You’ve learned from it.

Your struggles are part of who you are and key to who you’ll become.

Thank you for taking my click bate.  As a result, you’ve won.

It’s the truth.