The Element of Understanding You Win Some and You Lose Some and Its Hope for Avoiding a Victim Mentality

Step Up To The New Win Some Lose Some Philosophy

We win some.

And we lose some.

We can’t win if we don’t know how to lose.

Just ask any sports person.

Kareem Al Jabbar said: “You can’t win unless you learn how to lose.”

Michael Jordan said, “I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

How do you know if you are a good loser?

Ask yourself:

Do you let your losses turn you into a victim?

Are you quick to blame someone or something when things don’t go as planned?

Do you talk and act like a loser when the chips are down?

Then you have not learned to be a good loser.

People who lose are not “losers”.

It is people who talk and act like “losers” when things don’t go as planned who are “losers”.

“The only way to prove that you are a good sport is to lose”, said Ernie Banks.

If you can’t lose, it means you have let success go to your head.

Don’t let success go to your head.

You should be able to bounce back from any failure, set-back or loss.

You win some, you lose some.

In any area of life, you should be prepared to win some and lose some.

Personal Decisions

You win some, you lose some. 

Because of not being focused during my freshman year of college, I did not have enough credits to do my finals.

However, during the course of my freshman year, I had immersed myself in several different creative activities, which included composing songs and writing freelance pieces for the newspaper.

My freelance pieces caught the attention of Mela, who was a friend of my sister Christine.

Mela worked in advertising, and when a vacancy arose for a copy cub at the agency where she worked, she contacted my sister Christine and said, "We have a job for that sister of yours who writes." 

I interviewed for the copy cub job and the rest is history.

I embarked on a successful career in advertising copy, which culminated in me founding my own creative shop Purple Patch.

You win some, you lose some.

Investments

If you invest your money and expect only to win, you will be terribly disappointed

You will win on some of your investments and you will lose on others.

You have to treat your losses as a learning experience and become wiser about your investments as you continue to invest and grow as an investor.

This is what happened to me.

I had some embarrassing losses and some gratifying wins, but I grew as an investor, and I learned lessons and more lessons, until I developed my sleep well at night approach to investing.

You win some and you lose some.

Political Mandates

You win some, you lose some.

I appear to be one of the losers of Obamacare.

The plans available to me have premiums three times higher than what I could get before Obamacare.

As a healthy person, who takes no medicines and has no chronic conditions, I cannot justify paying these premiums.

So I have made the decision to go without health insurance and pay the fines.

Do I think of myself as a loser?

No.

I look after my health as best as I can.

I know if I do get sick, I will not be denied insurance because of Obamacare.

I think that’s a big plus.

It gives me peace of mind.

You win some, you lose some.

Professional Life

You win some, you lose some.

You may get a great job with a terrible commute.

Or a job, where the pay is not great, but the environment is supportive and nurturing.

Or a job where you enjoy flexibility, but you have no growth prospects.

You win some, you lose some.

You can’t have everything.

I know this firsthand.

I have never had a Goldilocks job.

I have always made sacrifices for what I wanted.

When my daughter was younger, because I wanted to work from home, and be available for her and my mother, I sacrificed promotions, recognition, even dealt with negative appreciation, just to be able to do that.

When Tanita reached high school and needed me less, what I wanted was not to be tied down to one particular job, but to enjoy the flexibility of working on different assignments.

Of course, I have had to make sacrifices to do that.

As a Commissions Consultant, I have to roll off an assignment, just when I am getting comfortable with it, and the team and I have gotten used to working together.

And I have to be prepared to go from an Excel environment to a Varicent environment to an Xactly environment.

Different companies have different sets of expectations of their commissions team and I have to adjust to those expectations.

Further they may have urgent needs which have to be met.

I have to be ready to meet those needs.

On the bright side, I get to meet and work with many different and wonderful commissions, finance and sales ops people (most of whom become friends for life) and I get to sharpen my skills on every new assignment.

Being a Commissions Consultant has increased my network, broadened my horizons, expanded my skill-set and developed my people skills.

You win some, you lose some.

Lifestyle Choices

You win some, you lose some.

As I have mentioned in several posts including What Do Lakshmi Mittal and I have in Common?, I live in a small, economy rented apartment, in which I have lived for the past 14 years.

By not investing in a home, I have never had a place to call my own, and I have never experienced the thrill of seeing a home investment pop in value.

But on the plus side, I have never had to fix anything.

Further, at the current time, I am renting at a rate that’s 25% lower than what new renters are paying to live in my apartment complex.

I have met some wonderful friends because of my decision to live in my apartments, and that must be factored in as well.

I have written about these friends on my blog.

One of them, Cindy, is a writer herself, and has written several posts on my blog:

High School

Letters to Lucas

Reprising Joyce Kilmer

Flying Lessons

Laundry Day

I met Aunty Valarie and Kim, whom I wrote about in my post The United States of Friendship– Part 6, in my apartment complex.

I met Nadya, whom I wrote about in my post – The United States of Friendship – Part 7 in my apartment complex.

I met Becky, who has been my steady walking companion for over 3 years, in my apartment complex.

You win some, you lose some.

Living in the Bay Area

Living in the Bay Area has its pluses and its minuses.

It is expensive, it is busy.

It takes me one hour to get to my current assignment in Sunnyvale.

But on the plus side, the Bay Area offers great weather, many great companies to work for, and an amazingly diverse population.

Besides, I have family here.

You win some, you lose some.

Humbling Situations

The element of winning some and losing some was brought home to me starkly when I was an advertising copywriter

We would have to come up with lots of ideas, most of which would not see the light of day.

In fact, our best ideas were often rejected.

But you win some, you lose some.

I definitely won big by getting to be the person who wrote the Fiesta campaign.

It is no different with my Commissions Consulting projects. 

On one of my projects, I came in right after a consultant who had developed an Excel commission model.   

I soon found out this Excel model was double crediting sales reps on some deals, because it was based on assuming the sales rep name would be only in one SFDC field (owner field) and not in two SFDC fields - owner field and co-owner field.

I did not know how to fix the model, so I created my own model and began using that.   

But before my assignment ended, a new Controller was hired, and he decided he did not like my model and began implementing his own.

The work I had done on my model was thrown out of the window.

You have to learn to deal with stuff like this.   

You should develop the mental tools to do so.

If you have read my post The Element of Imagination and Its Hope For Developing Toughness With Compassion and Artful Flair, you will know that the mental tool that I used to deal with my shelved model was imagination.

If you want to read this post again, you can do so here. 

We Will Not All Win the Genetic Lottery

You win some, you lose some when it comes to genes as well.

I am predisposed to diabetes. 

In spite of diet and exercise, every year I get closer and closer to becoming diabetic.

But if disease runs in families, gifts run in families too. 

Writing runs in my family as you learned from my post No Need for 23 and Me. 

There are family traits and gifts.

And then there are family traditions.

We win some and lose some with family traditions as well.

There are some family traditions we will cherish, some not so much.

Singing is one of the family traditions that I cherish. My family loves to sing and whenever we get together, guitars are brought out and we sing.

You can learn about some of my family's favorite songs from my post Family Songs.

Calling each other by pet names is another of our family traditions.

I have been called by many different names.

If you want to know what some of those names are, read my post The Porki and Bonkers Tradition.

Forgetfulness

Ultimately, not being able to get with the “you win some, you lose some” idea boils down to a problem of forgetfulness.

We forget the good things others have done for us.

We forget the good things that have happened to us.

We forget the bad things we have done, or the bad choices we have made.

And we are unable to forget the bad things that happen to us.

We have to learn to remember.

When we remember all the good things others have done for us, and all the good things that have happened to us, we will feel blessed.

Meditate on doing that.

I do it all the time.

When we remember all the bad things we have done, and the bad choices we have made, we can work to avoid repeating those mistakes.

But we should also remember all the good things we have done.

We each have a level of behavior and performance.

If we drop from this level of behavior and performance for a while, it is a question of time before we will return to our normal level of behavior and performance.

We have to remember that we are capable of a lot more than the current situation suggests.

We need to do the exercise recommended in my post How to Feel Good About Yourself When the Chips are Down.

Instead of dwelling on the nasty details of our current crisis, many of which will be draining, we should be 100% focused on bridging the gap between where we are and where we used to be.

“But Minoo, isn’t it crazy to want to reclaim our former glory?  Isn’t that what middle age crisis means?”

Yes and no.

Any attempt to bridge the gap between where we are, and where we used to be, has to take into account current reality.

When I was young, I loved to dance and I could dance all night.

I even entered the Knock Out disco competition with a great dancing partner whose name was Zubin, and we took the second prize.

Today, I cannot burn the midnight oil, and my physical activities are limited to riding a stationary bike and going for long walks.

But mentally and spiritually, I can do a lot more than I could ever do when I was young.

You see, when we are young, all we have going for us is our energy and enthusiasm, and whatever little we learned at school and college.

When we are older, however, though we may not have the same energy, we have the knowledge, the experience, the wisdom and all the different technical, relationship and life skills. 

We can bring all of this to bear on anything we decide to do.

In fact, we have a lot more than the “us of our younger years”.

Say to yourself, “I have a lot more than the I of my younger years”.

It is true.

It is 100% true.

You Can’t Have Everything

Yes, we will win some and we will lose some.

We grow older but we grow wiser.

We get great weather and great opportunities, but life is expensive.

We telecommute but we do not get any raises or promotions.

We have peace of mind and money in the bank, but we don’t have a house we can show off.

We win some, we lose some.

It’s a Question of Priorities

Because we can’t have everything, we have to prioritize.

What do we want most?

Out of a job?

Out of a housing situation?

Out of a relationship?

Once we know what’s important to us, it’s easy to get rid of what’s unimportant and to focus on getting what we want.

For example, there are no built-in washer-dryers in our apartments.

We have to go to the laundry room to do our laundry.

Just say, someone decides they want an apartment with a built in washer dryer.

So they move from our apartments (where they have friends) to another apartment complex which has built in washer dryers.

No sooner do they move, they start complaining that the people in their new apartment complex are not very friendly.

What they don’t realize is that you can’t have everything.

You win some, you lose some.

Ultimately each one of us has to decide what matters to us.

For me, there is no question.

The built in washer-dryer does not take priority over friendly neighbors.

In fact, I have struck up friendships precisely because in our apartments, people have to walk to the garbage dump to throw their garbage and walk to the laundry room to do their laundry.

You win some, you lose some.

Get cracking on your new win some lose some philosophy

As Bob Feller said, “Every day is a new opportunity. You can build on yesterday's success or put its failures behind and start over again. That's the way life is, with a new game every day”.

As always, thanks for reading and have a great day and week...M....A Pearl Seeker like you.  I am so thrilled to have one of my earliest blog supporters and readers, Aarathi back (Aarathi, it is you, isn’t it?).  Aarathi and Ajay, thanks for your comments.  And thanks to the rest of you for your likes, votes and pins.  Much appreciated!