Sometimes you win and sometimes you learn

They say that losing to learn is not losing and that is totally true. They defeat you only if you want it: if you don’t want it, you take advantage of that loss to learn something new about you, about what is needed, or what is left over, to achieve success.

Sometimes you win and sometimes you learn. There is not a single human being who has gone through life without knowing defeat. In fact, many of the great feats are an escalation of mistakes, until they become a resounding triumph. Isn’t this how the great discoveries and great conquests of humanity have been reached?

Precisely What makes the taste of triumph so sweet is the difficulty it entails. No one enjoys success that comes to them without fighting for it. Perhaps you can boast about his good luck, but not be proud of his achievement, because an achievement is only an achievement if it combines talent and effort.

sometimes you win

Carlos Serrano is an athlete who holds the world record in Paralympic swimming. On social networks he shares a photo of himself, where he appears carrying a sign that says: “Medals are won in training. They are collected in the competitions.”

The phrase could not be more true. What guarantees success is work on oneself, preparation, effort which involves developing a whole process in which one gradually breaks one’s own marks.

Winning is not a reality reserved for those with the most abilities, but for those who use them best. Winning is a fruit that only those who are capable of setting a goal, fighting tirelessly for it and working over and over again on their own flaws and voids, to become worthy of victory, experience.

The mentality of the winner is characterized because effort and work occupy a primary place. Whoever knows how to win, also knows that nothing comes naturally, but is the product, mainly, of perseverance.

You win first in the fight with yourself to define goals, to trust in what one is capable of doing, to build a decision sufficiently resistant to eventualities and to remain firm, despite vicissitudes. When this is achieved, the rest is “going to collect the medals.”

There is no recipe for success, but the characteristics of the winner can be defined. The first of them is faith in his own work. To this can be added a great capacity to be self-critical, in a healthy way. This means having sufficient capacity to objectively assess his successes and errors.

sometimes you learn

In ancient Greece there was a true cult of competition, particularly sports competition. In those times, such events had a very different value than they do today. Plato, in The Republic, insisted that young people should be educated on two pillars: gymnastics and music.

By gymnastics he understood the education of the body and by music, the education of the soul. For the Greeks it was unthinkable that someone would be able to succeed in a sporting competition if at the same time they did not have great values. as a human being.

Precisely what made an athlete worthy was that “being better” compared to the average. What was exalted was his courage and his effort. The competitions were named with the word “Agón”, which means contest, challenge. That’s where the word “agony” comes from, which in our times refers to a condition that separates life from death.

There are only winners and losers when there is competition. AND There is only healthy competition, when it is directed towards those areas of oneself that need to be worked on, polished, improved. as a condition to achieve victory.

Defeat is always relative. And it is relative because it always depends on the feelings, emotions and attitudes that arise in whoever experiences the impossibility of achieving a goal, at a given moment. It is only defeat, in the strict sense of the term, if what follows is total dejection.

For those who have a winning mentality, the word defeat does not really exist. What there are are situations in which he achieves what he set out to do and others in which he has the possibility of learning something that he did not know.

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