Is Losing Okay?

Losing is okay. Seriously. Winning a game is not as important as doing your best. True success is knowing that you did do your best; that you did perform to the best of your talents and abilities. What is left on the scoreboard at the end of the game is not all that matters. If you did your best, you have achieved success. I truly believe this will all my heart. This poem sums up my point:

At God’s footstool,
To confess,
A poor soul knelt,
And bowed his head,
“I failed!” he cried.
The Master said,
“Thou didst thy best, that is success. -Anonymous

Yet, it is here that I must confess that I have found a flaw in our great society. I have observed an interesting phenomenon, particularly in schools and sports. This glaring flaw is that we, as humans, have tipped the scales and manipulated the notion of success. I believe that we have taken this idea that “real success is doing your best” too far. Kids have this laid back mentality in school that, “If I do my best and get a ‘D’ that is success.” If that is the kid’s very best, then fine. But, if the kid is capable of getting an “A” he should go for it. In the YMCA, they don’t keep score for basketball games because “its just for fun.” That’s totally okay with me, I love to have fun too. But, don’t we want kids to compete and strive to be better? Don’t we want to become better?
This laid back notion of success is not the kind of environment kids can grow in. Kids need to have the mentality of hating to lose. You cannot better yourself when you think you’re doing your best. When you lose a game 56-6, and that you feel good about yourself that you just got killed is okay. But, it’s not okay that you just leave it at that. If you did your best and got beaten into the ground 56-6, that should make you mad. That should make you want to go out there tomorrow morning and start practicing. Why do you practice? You practice because you want to be better. The sleepy mentality of “just doing your best” is not good. I believe that the ultimate goal in life is to make your best better through hard work and determination. If you practice hard, maybe next time you’ll get beat 56-12. Then next time, 56-55. Maybe next time, you’ll win. You would have never won unless you had realized that to win, you needed to make your best better.
What I’m trying to say is that the mentality of just doing your best isn’t good enough. You want to make your best better. Losing therefore is sometimes a very good thing. Sometimes it snaps you out of the hazy cloud that hangs over your head that “doing your best is all you need to do” Its kicks you in the rear and tells you to get going. Make your best better.

So true. A friend of mine needs to know that.

Thanks for your comment Hero!

I agree that many people need to accept this difficult concept.

Best,

The Minister of High Hopes

I agree with this entirely...I go to a school where our football program has settled for losing season after losing season, simply because they have the same type of mentality this work speaks of. However as of late, that mentality has slowly begun to change thanks to some much needed hard work from the coaches and players.

Excellent. I hope your team begins to win and win and win!

Thanks for your comments!

Best,

The Minister of High Hopes

Yeah, I agree with this compleatly. I have a little brother and he has Mario Party 8 on the wii. I don't know if any of you guys have played this, but its a kick-ass game. My brother doesn't fair too well at it though. I recall one day we were playing a minigame and I kicked his butt so hard he punched me in the face and then started crying because he lost. You see, my brother is a very sore loser-my nose holds the proof- and if he doesn't win he gets all depressed. I try to tell him that it's not about winning, it's about doing your best, but he just won't have that. It is also true that if everyone says "Oh I did my best" and didn't do anything about it, it wouldn't be very benificial. To improve ourselves we must know the feeling of failing. After feeling that we strive for greatness so we won't experience failure-or failure to the degree you have before-. Sometimes people get out of hand with striving for greatness. Perfect example: People who take steroids to improve their playing. That's way out of hand. Really people just need to know how to accept and learn from failure in order to improve. That's all.

Thanks LoVeLeSs,

I'm sure your little brother will learn someday

Thanks again,

The Minister

wow. i love this post! i always thought winning isn't really as important as doing your best! but when you win, you can see your best is really good. im a fan of this post!
Nike

Thanks Nike!
I'm glad you liked it.



-Minister

Hullo Minister!

This is a good piece ! I'm taken in by your arguments, but more in a persuasive way than your "Success pieces". By this I mean I feel more like this is about persuading your readers, as opposed to arguing why. Just as good, just a little different in style.

The quote from "Anonymous" needs to have a quotation mark following the ending, by the way.

TO a certain extent, I agree with the content. However, there's something about the subject that's very seperating and I find that your audience may not be so diverse. By this I mean that the topic you're writing about is so agreeable, that it's hard to find that minority to persuade and therefore all you're really doing is enlightening the situation.

Anyway, hope this helped & I really enjoyed it!
Keep it up,
Ben

Hiya! This going to be hard to critique, lol, because there was so little wrong that I saw it. It's a nice, persuasive essay that I agree with 100%. I want to put this somewhere where I can always read it and share it with everyone else. If I could nitpick something, it is that you should include more. You only briefly mentioned sore losers, and I think you could go into depth on that a bit. Also, you could mention not being a cocky winner and something about contests. Otherwise, great job! It was well written and solid; I can't wait to see more from you!

-Elinor

Thank you so much for all your remarks! I appreciate it.


-Minister