Why Losing Is Worth Its Weight in Gold
W e all have at least one in our lives. They aren’t shy. They’re “doin’ it for the ‘gram.” They’re sunset heart hands in Hawaii. They’re stacking racks on the Strip. They’re table dancing at Tao. They’re making it rain in Miami.
They flaunt. They taunt. They stunt. They strut. They pout. They floss. They flex. They brush their shoulders off.
They’re “Winning at Life,” and their egos come with a giant sucking sound.
They have hungry eyes. They’re ravenous for your attention. Your adoration. They want you to want to be them. How could you not? They have everything you could ever want and more.
Well, I’m not buying what they’re Snapping. Somewhere beneath the mascara, botox, filters and Photoshop, there’s just a little too much hot air. A single pin prick, and they might just implode, with a slow whimper and the sound of sweaty rubber folding in upon itself.
The Winning Culture
America’s obsession with winning began long before Charlie Sheen doused the term in drugs and tiger blood or Donald Trump said told us we’d be tired of winning in 2016. Those two arrogant, self-satisfied moments in time, however, are perfect examples of the dangers of a myopic focus on victory.
Winning seems to occupy a special place in the American Dream. Someone must have added a few fancy trophies to the mantle in the pre-Covid Christmas card, just above the well-coiffed heads of your children. But I see the smoke and mirrors. A white-picket-fence house in the suburbs and 2.5 kids never equaled happiness, and our fixation on winning employs a similar subtle sleight of hand.
Trophies come in many forms.
It could be the typography, lettering, color and stock of the business card you show off to your professional associates over a scotch at the Harvard Club. Velvet-rope enclosed bottle service. Maybe a new yip-yapping, Louis-Vuitton sized designer “comfort” doggie. Ocean-front property in the Malibu. The clichéd midlife-crisis, candy-apple-red convertible Corvette. She could be your new bleach-blonde, partly plastic trophy wife.
It could also be your “chiseled abs and stunning features.” It could be that Mensa score you accidentally seem to drop at every cocktail party. Or maybe you’re winning so much you just need to give back and, say, casually etch your name into the side of a building.
We swap our self-esteem and purpose for achievements, wealth and material possessions.
It doesn’t matter how elaborate, sophisticated or awe-inspiring the façade you build. If you’re self-worth comes from your trophies, it will always just be a flimsy veneer, teetering on the brink of collapse. None of these masks have anything whatsoever to do with who you really are.
Just as Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) in “Fight Club” famously said…
“You’re not your job. You are not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You are not your f*cking khakis.”
What Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club author) is referring to here is very same sleight of hand I mention above. The old flashbang switcheroo where we swap our self-esteem and purpose out for achievements, wealth and material possessions.
In psychology, this switcheroo is known as substitution. Friends might ask you: “How’s life? Are you happy? Do you like your job? How’s your marriage?”
Many sidestep these questions like they’re a left hook about to land square on the temple, whip out their bedazzled smartphone and point to their Instagram profile to show you their shiny, happy, perfect little life.
Well, pictures are just as good at concealing the truth as words, and you didn’t answer the question!
I was certainly one of those people. I’d been wary of social media and didn’t use it much, but I would point friends to the importance of my work. “My client moves the market every month,” I’d say. “I’m leading a team of 25,” I’d say. “I’m one of the youngest SVPs,” I’d say.
But then one day I got a visit from Mark Manson’s Disappointment Panda, the fictional superhero in “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck” who “tells people harsh truths about themselves that they needed to hear but didn’t want to accept.”
And Disappointment Panda told me that I wasn’t actually a unicorn to whom the rules did not apply. That I was expendable. That the money I’d made by sacrificing my free time wasn’t worth a whole hell of a lot. That all the political bs I ate to protect employees from poor treatment didn’t really matter once I was no longer useful. That I could only be the golden boy while I was minting money. That when I started to unravel under the pressure, I would be cast away like a month-old quart of sour milk.
Why We Want to Win
“If you ain’t first, you’re last!” — American racing legend Ricky Bobby (Will Ferrell)
Here in America. We just love — L.O.V.E. — a good winner.
It’s hard not to romanticize the dynasties, the Cinderella stories, the Triple Crown winners, the buzzer beaters from downtown, the ninth-inning walk offs.
I’ll admit it’s dangerously seductive. I too was caught up in our obsession with winning. Every now and then I feel tempted to channel Polk High football champion Al Bundy (Ed O’Neill in “Married with Children”) and show off my high school soccer ring.
As children in sports, we’re taught to “Go hard or go home.” “Leave it all out on the field.” “Play through the pain.” “Win or die trying.” For me, losing was failure, and failure just wasn’t an option.
While these motivational pep phrases did light a fire on the soccer field, there is a dark side to them as well. They have the potential to spill out over the edges of sports and into every part of life. If you’ve built your self-esteem on the back of your sports victories or if your parents showered you with praise and conditional love only when you demonstrated excellence or academic success, then winning can become a way of life.
A loss is more painful than a win feels good.
We all know people who don’t like to lose. Ever. They are uber-competitive. It doesn’t matter if it’s the milk quart challenge, the quarterly sales record, the closest to the pin contest, the longest continuous stream at the stadium urinal or most commonly (especially in my case) an argument, they need to demonstrate to themselves that they are the superior. Winning isn’t simply everything — it’s the only thing.
There’s a problem though: Winning isn’t forever.
Not convinced? Just go ask a retired pro.
For every Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan, there are thousands of professional sports stars who rocketed into money fast, flaunted their wealth, were too generous with friends and trusted the wrong people to help manage their money. And then their engine sputtered out, and they plummeted back down to earth with their fair-weather friends and social media stalkers burning up in the atmosphere along the way.
If, ahem, when obsessive winners lose, well then, stand back. Clear the path. A giant redwood is about to come down. There’s a reason lumberjacks have such a high fatality rate — falling timber can be painful.
Their egos usually don’t allow them to actually hit the ground, however. The threatened ego self-delusion mechanism kicks into high gear to explain away a loss under the guise of cheating or dumb luck. In cards, it’s what’s known as a bad beat. “I should have won because of my superior talent, exceptional intellect and catlike reflexes, but you got lucky and robbed me of my rightfully deserved victory.” And ta da! The loss is magically transformed into a self-centered ego stroke.
Let’s be honest though, we all do this. It’s in our nature. Humans don’t like to lose…anything.
In psychology and behavioral economics, it’s a cognitive bias known as “loss aversion.” And losses are quantifiably more painful than winning feels good.
Israeli psychologist and Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman walks through several wager scenarios in his amazing book “Thinking, Fast and Slow.” Basically, losing $100 hurts twice as bad as winning $100 feels good, and you’re much more likely to take a bet with questionable odds to avoid losing money than you are to win money.
It turns out that instances of social pain — being picked last for a team, the death of a family member, being dumped — actually impact the same circuitry in the brain as physical pain (the anterior cingulate cortex). Through functional MRI studies of brain activity in a game called Cyberball, leading social neuroscientist Matt Leiberman revealed why we are so loss averse: Social pain actually hurts!
This is no affliction reserved for exceptional sports superstars. It affects us all. Remember this the next time you have trouble breaking up with someone, watching your child leave for college, losing a bet, admitting you’ve picked the losing side in an argument, giving up your holiday to meet a deadline and then even when you’re trying to quit that job.
The Dangers of the Winning Life
This obsession with winning is a zero-sum game mentality. In other words, someone wins and someone loses. Someone is dominating, and someone is being dominated. In this oppositional construct, everything is David versus Goliath, and someone’s always going to die.
It’s just the way it is, right? It’s a “dog eat dog world,” right?
Well, that’s exactly what the people obsessed with winning want you to believe. Of course, they say that! They have a vested interest. It’s a core foundation in their mental model of the world. It allows them to continue on with any kind of behavior and give moral accountability the slip.
Believing the world is a zero-sum game enables all the world’s bad actors to employ their gold-medal mental jujitsu and claim that the end justifies the means.
This view is responsible for the worst horrors the world has ever seen. Genocide. Homicide. Rape. Discrimination. Theft. Arson. Physical and psychological abuse. Manipulation. Deception. Insider trading. Water boarding.
Take your pick. Dealer’s choice.
Unless the perpetrator is an absolute psychopath devoid of empathy and emotion, rest assured that they have done some perverted calculus in an attempt to justify what they know to be bad behavior.
Bernie Madoff just wanted to give people consistent 20% YOY returns. Hitler and the Third Reich just wanted to make the world a better place. “Holy wars” were just believers claiming the rightful place of the “one true religion,” sort of like missionaries spreading the principles of the Bible (but with swords).
Granted, these are extreme examples. We all, however, do use the pursuit of trophies or “the ends” to justify our behavior or “the means.” It’s okay to torture your junior team if it means a bigger bonus for you (and a proportionately tinier bonus for them). It’s okay to spend all weekend drinking your face off because you had a bad week and need to de-stress. It’s okay to grease the wheels of a college admissions advisor because then your kid will get a tier-one education.
A hunk of gold-colored plastic on a slab of marble
Moral people tend not to buy the justifications, and that’s how a social network begins to subtly shift. Slowly absorbing more ethically malleable people who buy into the grand delusion and excluding those who frown on said behavior. Until you sober up one day and wonder where the hell all your friends went.
I did it. The draw of status and wealth made me deal in situational ethics. I used to try to frame my job in PR as intriguing, important and somehow intellectual by saying that “I told selective truths for a living.” People compromise their ethical integrity every day for the allure of trophies, which ultimately don’t even do anything for you. They’re just a hunk of gold-colored plastic on a slab of marble.
“But they look so pretty on Instagram,” an influencer might counter. “My followers always like glamshots where I’m dripping in jewels, flaunting like a fashionista, pouting an immaculately painted face and teasing exotic island beaches.”
Hey, Disappointment Panda. Back me up here.
“Sure, making a lot of money makes you feel good, but it won’t make your kids love you,” says the Panda with trademark Eeyore despondence. “What you consider ‘friendship’ is really just your constant attempts to impress people.”
Thanks buddy. The trophies are external and leave you empty on the inside. There is no “if I can just get X, then I will be Y happy equation.” Besides external validation is totally unsustainable.
Growing egos need ever bigger trophies upon which to feed or the façade begins to fracture. Sports cars lose their luster. Fast-tracked careers sputter out, and success fades. Economies are fickle. Flat-screen TVs will always get flatter, smartphones will always get smarter and the Joneses will always have a bigger yacht.
You might as well try to catch the sun by chasing the horizon. Doesn’t matter if Elon Musk is riding shotgun — it’s just not going to happen. You’re looking for happiness and self-esteem in all the wrong places. Happiness, meaning and purpose only come from within.
There’s nothing wrong with highlighting your picture-perfect moments on social media. The sharing of authentic human connections and relationships is one of the great promises of social media technology. The challenge is that algorithms prioritize the exceptional moments and extreme behavior because they drive higher user engagement. The influencers, sports stars and celebrities normalize these “exceptions” to the norm that is the messy, ugly and painful struggle the rest of us call life.
As users attempt to emulate or reenact influencers’ heavily fabricated shiny, happy faces in beautiful places, standards in real life start to shift. Social presence and follower engagement slowly starts to take the place of authentic sense of self and human connections; users start to judge themselves against the yardstick of their friends’ content and metrics. Life begins to be lived “for the ‘Gram.”
Arrogance and egotism are placed on a pedestal, table dancing in a slutty dress high above much more meaningful qualities like humility, empathy and authenticity. In chasing ever greater adoration and “like”-driven dopamine hits with addict-like obsession, social media users are encouraged to brush aside healthy behavior and human connections for increasingly outrageous and amoral stunts.
Why Losing Is Worth Its Weight in Gold
Let’s get one thing straight: I am against participation trophies.
“Dissatisfaction and unease are inherent parts of human nature, and…necessary components to creating existing happiness,” Manson writes in “The Subtle Art.”
The real world does have winners and losers. If you protect your child from loss, then they’ll never be able to handle it when it arrives. And, unfortunately, the real world doesn’t care to coddle egos.
There are no trite “growth-hacks” for building inner strength and confidence.
Think about it from an evolutionary biology point of view. Our brains developed in such a way that losing would suck, that it weighed on our minds and hurt. It serves a very specific purpose: to make us hone our skills and get better so that we don’t lose next time. We may not have to fight over the spoils of the hunt anymore, but we do need to develop increasingly sophisticated skills to be successful in the rapidly evolving global market.
The pain of loss and the stress of failing leaves an imprint on your mind. According to Elizabeth Stanley in “Widen the Window,” traumatic experiences create new neural pathways in our brains that force us to remember and relive that experience in all its gory detail. It is true that some people can lose hope and wallow in their losses and failures, but it is also true that overcoming these painful experiences can help individuals build character and the resilience to overcome adversity.
This is real character, built from within upon grit, focus and hard work. There are no trite “growth hacks” for building inner strength and confidence that lasts. It takes time and patience. Losing isn’t pretty. Vulnerability is uncomfortable. Resilient character is built on sweat and tears, on failed projects and feedback sandwiches, on being cheated by a stacked deck and learning how to flip the odds in your favor.
Perhaps most importantly, this sturdy character helps one develop a more sophisticated depth of emotions. Having allowed themselves to genuinely feel and accept major losses, these imperfect, mortal humans know what it means to be defeated, vulnerable, weak and without hope. As a result, they can understand the pain of others in similar moments, develop empathy and ease their pain through authentic human connection. The emotional impact of loss helps to lay the foundation of our ethics and morals so that we know how to treat each other with respect and fairness.
Celebrate those who struggle valiantly through failure.
Win-or-die egomaniacs don’t have these tools. They’ve spent all their energy preventing, denying and explaining away their failures. Eventually, they’ve hyped themselves up on trophies and external praise for so long that they begin to buy their own line. The mask is mistaken for the true self, and they actually believe that they are special and entitled to act however they so choose.
The framework of their world is fragile; it’s built upon appearances rather than substance. They paper over their insecurities with their peacocking persona, shiny objects, Instagram filters and conditional friendships. But somewhere deep inside, beneath all the machismo and debutant stunts, they’re full of fear. They’re scared of being exposed. They no longer know what’s behind the façade. Sooner or later the Disappointment Panda brings a stiff wind to their door, and their ornate house of cards will come tumbling down.
That’s why losing is actually blessing. The grit and grime of failure shatters the grand delusion and awakens us from our self-seeking slumber. Loss cuts us down to size and reminds us of the imperfect nature of the human struggle. It replaces entitlement and arrogance with perspective and humility. The respect and empathy for others learned during our fall from fantasy enables us to form authentic, mutually beneficial connections with others. We’re no longer afraid when we venture out of our comfort zone, and our eyes are open to seek out true meaning and purpose.
Celebrate those who close their ears to taunts and jeers and struggle valiantly through failure. Praise those humble champions with the wisdom to realize that a rising tide can lift all boats.
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