You’re Such a Loser

Nobody wants to be a loser but sometimes that’s exactly what we need.

We want to get the job, win the work, be picked for the team, have the clever idea and preferably be proven right when somebody initially disagreed with us.

We are also surrounded by a fairly relentless message that we should be winning at life. Careers should be progressing, businesses should be growing, children should be thriving, relationships should be wonderful and apparently we should also be exercising before 6am while drinking something green.

It is exhausting. And I think we might all benefit from being a loser occasionally. Not in a disastrous, everything-is-falling-apart kind of way. I’m not suggesting you deliberately tank your career for the personal growth opportunity.

I mean the ordinary losses. You don’t get the job. Someone else wins the pitch. You put forward an idea and everyone looks slightly uncomfortable. You make a decision that turns out to be wrong. Someone gives you feedback you really don’t want to hear.

Winning is lovely. It just doesn’t always teach you very much.

When something goes well, most of us don’t sit down afterwards for a deep period of self-reflection. We think, “Great,” and move on.

When something goes badly, suddenly we become investigators on ourselves. What happened there? Did I miss something? Did I prepare enough? Was I too confident? Did I listen to the advice I was given, or did I technically listen while actually waiting for the person to stop talking so I could explain why I was right?

Losing can make us examine ourselves in a way that success often doesn’t. Sometimes you did everything well and still lost. The world is not a meritocracy where every good decision comes with a small trophy.

Part of maturity is learning to tell the difference between something you need to learn from and something you simply need to accept.

You can be humble, or you can be humbled.

I am increasingly convinced these are the two options. Humility is not pretending you are hopeless at things you are actually good at. It is not shrinking yourself, refusing compliments or saying, “Oh, I was just lucky,” when you worked incredibly hard.

It is being able to walk into a room with expertise and still accept that somebody else might know something you don’t.

Most of us know somebody who has never quite mastered this skill. They don’t lose; they are misunderstood. They don’t make mistakes; there were communication issues. Their idea didn’t fail; other people failed to implement it correctly.

Being around that gets tiring remarkably quickly.

Occasionally losing gives the ego a useful little tune-up.

You can fail at something without being a failure.

You can be rejected without being fundamentally rejectable. You can make a terrible decision while remaining an otherwise quite sensible person.

This sounds obvious until it happens to us.

A big part of resilience is being able to be disappointed without immediately making the disappointment mean something enormous about who you are.

Sometimes the most useful response really is: “Well, that went badly.” Then you work out what happens next.

Losing can make you nicer to be around.

There is another reason I think we need a few bumps along the way. People who have had everything go well for them can sometimes develop some fascinating theories about why other people are struggling.

“If they just worked harder…”

“If they were more confident…”

“If they made better choices…”

Then life eventually arrives with a large correction and something happens. You get made redundant. Your business has a terrible year. Someone you love struggles. You don’t get something you desperately wanted. You work incredibly hard at something and discover that hard work does not guarantee the result.

Complexity can make us kinder.

We become less certain that we understand everybody else’s circumstances. We stop assuming that success is entirely evidence of our brilliance and failure is entirely evidence of somebody else’s poor choices. A little adversity can be very good for perspective.

Leaders particularly need to lose sometimes.

If you have spent years being promoted, praised and rewarded for having answers, it can become very easy to believe that being a leader means always knowing what to do. Then something doesn’t work.

Some leaders become curious. Others become very busy explaining why it wasn’t really their decision.

The leaders I tend to respect most are not the ones who never get things wrong. They are the ones who can recognise it reasonably quickly and say, “That didn’t work. What are we missing?”

That sounds simple, but it requires quite a lot of security. If your whole identity is built around being the smartest person in the room, discovering that you aren’t becomes threatening. If your identity can cope with being wrong occasionally, you can learn much faster. It will then make you easier to work with.

Adversity doesn’t automatically make you stronger, and difficult experiences do not automatically turn us into wiser and more resilient people.. The growth happens in what we are able to do afterwards: the support we have, the sense we make of the experience, what we learn, what we change and what we decide not to carry forward.

Maybe we need to encourage and practice also becoming a good loser.

A good loser isn’t somebody who doesn’t care, isn’t disappointed, gets annoyed or complains about the injustices. Rather when we reframe the loss to what we can learn from then it all becomes a learning experience. Someone else can be excellent without it diminishing you and you don’t have to win every round to be doing well in life.

We need the highs because they give us confidence, joy and momentum. We need some lows because they teach us perspective, humility and what we’re actually made of when everything isn’t going our way.

So yes, be successful. Back yourself. Celebrate the

wins. But every now and then, being a bit of a loser might be good for you.