Defeat
Defeat. Its an interesting feeling: knowing that you lost. Some people are more used to it than others; and some people handle it better than others do. Of course, there are different kinds of defeat as well. You can be defeated at something that you don’t really care about. You can be defeated at something that you have poured your whole heart and soul into. You can be defeated at something that you wanted, but that you never gave it the time that it needed. You can even be defeated at things that you didn’t know you could be defeated at.
Success in life is more about how you handle defeat than it is actually about the successes that you have. Those who are successful are usually those who know how to handle defeat well. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it hurts any less, but it does mean that they don’t let it overcome them.
How you successfully deal with defeat depends greatly on how you are defeated. If you are defeated after doing your very best, then it is much easier to hold your head high than if you feel that you lost because of some of lack of effort on your part. Whereas, if you are defeated at something that is of little importance to you then you are not likely to have issues with shrugging it off. And if you are defeated at something that you really had no control over (but still may be important to you, such as a job that you were fully qualified for, but someone else was a friend of the boss or being rejected by someone even if you were the perfect man / woman), then success ultimately lies in being able to let it go and move on.
However, success usually lies in taking defeat (graciously) and learning from it in moving forward.
Recently, I experienced defeat in an unexpected way. There was someone at work that had been intending to get to know better for a few months but had never gotten around to it. It hadn’t been that important to me. Then, one day last week I decided that I was actually going to do something about getting to know her better, only to find out that it was her last day. I hadn’t expected to feel so disappointed because it hadn’t been that important to me (I mean I hadn’t done anything about it for more than two months), so I was surprised to find that I was feeling very disappointed with myself for not having taken the initiative to get to know her better.
That’s the worst kind of defeat: being disappointed in yourself. But in many ways, it’s also the most important kind of defeat in success. If we are to be successful, then we have to experience these kinds of defeats occasionally. They are critical to our success – but only if we learn from them. Because, conversely, if we do not learn from them they will ultimately be the cause of our failure. Successful people have usually experienced many defeats over the course of their life. What makes them successful is that they learn from them and are made better by them. That is the difference between those that are successful and those that aren’t: it’s not in the number of defeats, it’s how they learn from them. Thus, if we are to be successful, we must learn to from our defeats.
