[This is an essay that I wrote a few weeks ago, modified to be a blog post. I know I had started to post them as actual essays with the number and all, but doing them as actual blog posts/articles I believe will prove to be much more usefull to people that are reading this blog. It makes it easier to find through a search and much easier to read.]
People learn more from losing than from winning. When you lose, you can look at what exactly you did wrong, and from that you can see what you need to do in order to change, so that in the future you will be more able to win/succeed. When you win, it is sometimes hard to see where you made mistakes, and therefore difficult to see what you need to work on in order to be better at what you are doing. You can learn a lot from winning, such as what you did right, but in the long run I think that what you learn when you lose is much more valuable.
When you lose, you can learn many things. If you are competing against a particular opponent(s) repeatedly, you can see what they are willing and capable to do to win and you can use that to formulate a strategy for defeating them. The main advantage, however, lies in your being able to analyze your performance and see the what, where, when, how, and why of your mistakes. This is much harder to do when you win.
When you win, you have the same opportunities to look back on your performance that you do when you lose, but it is much more difficult to tell what you did wrong because it did not affect the end result. In football, you can watch a re-run of a play and see the great throw that led to a touchdown, and you’d come to the conclusion that nothing was wrong with the pass. However, if the person missed the catch, you’d be able to critique his speed, dexterity, estimation of the speed of the ball, etc. Those defects may have been present even if he had caught the ball, but because the quarterback anticipated and adjusted for the catcher’s reaction, it looked like a perfect pass. You are much more inclined to notice the defects when you know you did something wrong and are trying to figure out what it is, then you are when you know you did well and that you should do the same thing in the future.
You learn more from losing than from winning because 1) you can see the other person’s winning strategies and prepare a countermeasure, and 2) you are more analytical and critical when reviewing your performance.
Filed under: Bible-based essays | Tagged: losing better than winning
“You learn more from winning than from losing because 1) you can see the other person’s winning strategies and prepare a countermeasure, and 2) you are more analytical and critical when reviewing your performance.”
I’m confused by this sentence; the rest of the essay/article has argued the opposite, that more value is distilled from the experience of losing.
I like the use of the football illustration to make your point. Story is always a good way to draw the reader in, because we are all living in a story, and thus are able to relate to it.
Haha, the winning and losing in that sentence is supposed to be reversed. It’s corrected now, thanks!