The Lessons We Learn From Losing

Judy Derby
3 min readSep 9, 2022

Losing isn’t all bad!

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Losing is never an easy thing to do.

Whether your team is down by 20 points, or you’re trying to get rid of those last 20 pesky pounds, losing can really hurt. This is a lesson we learn early in life.

Ask any 5-year-old and they’ll tell you winning is much better!

Even as a mature adult, losing brings back all of those feelings you had when you were 5 and getting trounced at Chutes and Ladders or Go Fish.

As much as we’d like, cognitively we understand that there’s no way we can win every single time. At 50/50, let’s face it: the odds just aren’t in our favor.

Learning how to deal with loss is a major life lesson.

How we react to losing reveals a lot about our basic character.

It can expose an inclination toward being petty or a tendency to be empathetic and noble.

But losing can also give us a purpose and motivation to succeed.

People who’ve lost before become less impulsive, they think more deeply about life and take more calculated risks in the future.

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Judy Derby

Hey, ya’ll! I’m a retired social worker who always wondered what I should be when I grew up. Still don’t know. Love trivia, random thoughts and short stories.