Define Winning

Winning should be 100% personal.  And anyone that hinges their happiness on someone else's potential success might want to re-think this life-model. Or, at least, consider my point-of-view.

Here is my best attempt to defend that statement.

Ever get frustrated when 'your' team loses?  The fact that you even have a team to root for is a victory in and of itself.  Isn't watching your team and bonding with fellow fans good enough? (Note that these two things have nothing to do with what is actually happening on the court/field, etc...)

And what about parents that are overly harsh on their kids when they fail?  No victory can be achieved without failure.  The biggest success stories stem from the most colossal screw-ups.  Success is found in the process of learning, recovering and progressing. Scolding a child for a failure is often failure.

Winning and losing are symbiotic like a bicep-tricep combination.  To do a pull-up, we need our triceps to 'fail' (relax) in order for our biceps to 'succeed' in pulling us above the bar. Losing, in this case, simultaneously creates winning.

Back to the sports analogy: When your team loses and frustration sets in, this emotional reflex is actually success!--it shows you have the ability to feel passionate about something.  Losing is also a reminder that you can't always win. Perfection isn't possible. (And probably not much fun, anyway).

American culture places tremendous emphasis on winning; perfection. Our society's definition of winning is also usually a 'you vs. me' scenario.  This is a classic 'distributive' situation. That is, there is a defined amount of success available and each of us is trying to get as much of this success as possible. We aren't told that we can all win.  Why can't we all win in our own way?

Each of these examples are outcome-based, which is why we believe we can't all win.  Success is always related to final outcomes and never processes.  But, it's the processes in life, usually a combination of failures that lead to winning, that should be the key metric in our personalized definitions of success.

Failure+Failure+Failure+Failure+Failure=success (and sometimes more failure).  
                (Process portion)                                (Outcome portion)


Final outcomes are short and proportionally a minute piece of the overall process in anything we do. Processes are the substantive part of life we seem to overlook. This is why winning should be 100% personal--the effort, learning, tribulation is 99.9999% process and .00001% outcome.

Success/winning is (almost) all you. Others may help you throughout life's journeys, but the path to success is unique for all of us. We have to live our processes. Because no one person's processes are exactly the same as another, success is different for each of us. Why there is a definition for success/winning in the dictionary is beyond me...

The bottom line is this:  You determine what success is.  As life changes, you have the freedom to change this definition. Success/Winning is entirely personal because no one else is living your life. No one has the right to tell you what your definition of success should be either.

The next time you watch your team lose (and get frustrated) or look down on someone, you are likely judging and reacting to them from an outcome perspective and neglecting to consider their process.

You can't control someone else's process so be careful to wrap up too much of your own happiness in what other people do.  Manage your process.  Fail. Succeed. Lose.  This is the only way to truly Win.