I’m A Loser: Here’s Why
I hate losing. Just ask my Mum; I’ve cried in cars after coming second place in competitions, and to this day I still struggle with the idea of coming up short, whether it be in writing, pitching businesses or the most crucial competition of all, arguing with morons.
Now, how often do I lose? This isn’t a question I am going to answer in this article (and that in itself might be an answer). However, I think we can all agree that losing sucks. If you enjoy losing, frankly, I don’t believe you. My recommendation is to stop reading this article and take whatever growth mindset, positive psychology, self love influencer post/book/podcast you are parroting and bin it.
Losing sucks, I’m not entertaining any reality where you think that is not the case. This being said, I think of losing like medicine, it is very good for you, even if it’s hard to swallow. We can all agree that there is that person who feels invincible, and I don’t mean this as someone who is just confident in their capabilities. I mean someone who is so disengaged from reality they believe they will triumph in any/every contest. Setbacks along life’s journey are required to build character and foster verisimilitude, and one of the best ways to catalyse this unstoppable perseverance is through competing, and at times, losing.
In any endeavour, whether it be in the arts, corporate ladders, or race tracks, people around the world put themselves on the line to test their abilities and see if they can stand amongst the best. Of course, many will never make it to the actual peak, but even those who do, they rarely make it without encountering defeat. Upon reflection, these moments of loss are often what make or break someone’s growth. At the crossroads of defeat, you are left with two options.
1. Turn around to retread the worn path, and maybe pick a new one.
2. Push ahead on the current path (and do so again, and again).
For me, there are several outlets I have embraced where failure is an inevitable possibility. Currently, one stands out from the pack. With this activity, I almost on a daily basis feel the bitter taste of defeat in some quantity on the sweaty mats of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ) gyms (or just ‘Jiu Jitsu’ gyms for the new age experts who say grappling is a new art form).
For three years I have been training across a diverse range of martial arts, but now I am primarily training BJJ (my favourite discipline right now). For anyone who isn’t a practitioner, BJJ is a competitive grappling sport/artform where two athletes attempt to ‘submit’ their opponent under an agreed upon ruleset and time limit. Sometimes, people even do matches without ANY time limit, where the show goes on until someone gives up, goes unconscious, or the referee intervenes.
Without getting into the nitty gritty, submissions usually come in the form of locks or chokes, which can result in permanent damage to an opponents body or the infliction of unconsciousness respectively. However, many matches when unresolved are won by points, awarded for an athlete advancing position and controlling their opponents effectively. The most popular variation of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu contains no striking, however off shoots of the art form CAN include striking (or even be done in cars).
Now is this sport fun? For the psychopaths who do it, weirdly yes. It’s really a sport built on striving for dominance, which by design requires someone to be… dominated (that felt wrong to type).
One of the great minds of the sport John Danaher puts it best. Think of Danaher as the Coach Carter or Yoda of Jiu Jitsu.
“Life isn’t fair — neither should be your Jiu jitsu: Fair play is a wonderful thing but not in Jiu jitsu. Your whole game is to create an uneven playing field using mechanics and tactics that put your opponent at a disadvantage that makes your victory very likely.”
Now, why have I started rambling on about my passion for Jiu Jitsu, especially after only moments before having an existential crisis about whether I’m a loser or not? It’s not just because I’m addicted to training the sport, but most importantly, my god can it be f**king frustrating. After three years I still feel like a complete beginner, and to write the previous sentences, it took everything to not add more expletives. Worst of all, why do I feel like a beginner?
Because I am.
When I spar (or as the in crowd call it, ‘roll’) with higher level students, competitors, and worst of all, coaches, it feels like I’m being tossed around in a fleshy washing machine. In reality, there is a zero percent chance for me to win against these people, no amount of luck will result in me coming out on top, because we are operating at completely different levels of skill.
For all intents and purposes, there is no such things as a ‘punchers chance’ in Jiu Jitsu. But, something I have observed is there are different types of losing. Intuitively, when you enter a competition, it’s easy to think you either win or lose, but this just simply isn’t true. Instead of a binary (winning and losing) I view as a spectrum, and this spectrum I would argue is crucial to understand. When you begin viewing losing this way, how we talk about competitions makes complete sense. While you can be ‘outclassed’ by someone in a football match, you can also lose a close game, one that was neck and neck to the final bell (sorry to keep mixing sporting metaphors)! Sometimes, people say these explanations are just excuses, mental tactics we use to placate and reassure ourselves we are not in fact losers, but the more I’ve started thinking about it, the more I’ve realised we need a diagram. Unfortunately, this one kept coming to mind:
This here is a candlestick stock graph. No, I am not about to sell you on a breakthrough tech start up or the latest cryptocurrency. But for some reason, when I start thinking about evaluating winning and losing, these graphs are what I think of.
Candlesticks on a stock graph represent a few key things for finance analysts, and while I would recommend reading the full article on Investopedia (see image caption), I will summarise them briefly in laymans terms. Candlesticks individually represent a stocks opening and closing price during a day. Furthermore, the ‘tails’ also highlight a stocks highest and lowest price point which it hit during the day. Over time, recording these candlesticks can summarise the long term growth potential, movement and volatility of the stock they are representing, very important for traders seeking to make educated predictions in the market.
But weirdly, I keep seeing how we can adopt this scale when talking about a persons skillset.
Think about it, anyone can be broken down into high or low points, our worst errors as well as finest moments. If you take an individual and apply them to a task, while it may be difficult to identify specifically when they were at their best and worst, over time you will be able to more generally understand the intricacies of their performance.
When you begin graphing these candlesticks temporally, you can see the shift in the value of a stock option over time, so why can’t we do the same with people? Let’s see how far we can take this…
