I love to read. My reading choices are limitless. I read non-fiction as well as fiction. I read for education, inspiration, and entertainment. I’m currently reading a seemingly meaningless murder mystery. But this week I came across a line in that novel that both inspired and stayed with me, and I’d like to share it with you:
There is a difference between accepting a loss and earning one.
For over thirty years I was blessed with being in a vocation that allowed me to lead several sales organizations. In that capacity, I had countless opportunities to witness competitive players in action. Some seemed to win regularly while others rarely did. There was, however, one common thread between them – none never lost.
In 1989, Toyota entered the luxury car market with the Lexus line of vehicles. When developing their marketing campaign Toyota decided that the simple slogan “the relentless pursuit of perfection” would define the Lexus brand.
“Perfection” may be a great theme for marketing luxury cars, but it is not a great way judge our performance in life. As mortals, we are not, nor will we ever be “perfect.” But that doesn’t mean we can’t pursue, even relentlessly pursue, perfection. That is a worthy goal for winners if it is used and applied prudently. The iconic football coach, Vince Lombardi, is quoted as telling his players in 1959 at his first team meeting as coach of the Green Bay Packers: “Gentlemen, we are going to relentlessly chase perfection, knowing full well we will not catch it, because nothing is perfect. But we are going to relentlessly chase it, because in the process we will catch excellence. I am not remotely interested in just being good.”
While all of us can savor victory; winners learn from losses. They improve. They don’t dwell on the pain of defeat. They don’t look for external circumstance to blame. They look for the opportunity that losing provides for them to improve. That’s the difference between accepting a loss and earning one.
Willie Stargell is one of the greatest baseball players to ever play the game. His relentless pursuit of perfection includes two world series victories and the National League’s Most Valuable Player Award. He once said:
“To succeed, one must fail; and the more you fail, the more you learn about succeeding. The person who has never tried and failed will never succeed. The key to surviving failure is to bend, not break. At times, I bent like a palm tree in a hurricane, but I never broke. One must be flexible to learn from failure. Knowledge always takes the edge off fear. Baseball exposed me to my two biggest foes, pride and judgment, and gave me a system to handle both.
We won’t thrive long solely on pride, for pride makes us spend too much time gloating on our success and too little time analyzing and learning from our failures. Pride is a dangerous distraction for anyone who has his sights set on a specific dream. It inhibits our flexibility and inhibits us from gaining the knowledge from our experiences that ultimately contribute to our attainment of success. Pride inhibits us from learning from our best teacher: our failures.
Judgment is equally dangerous. Each person has different abilities and goals; Judgment traps us in the web of comparison to others instead of allowing us the freedom of following our own dream. To be successful one must abandon both pride and judgment, or risk being doomed to wander lost in mediocrity forever.
So don’t waste your energy worrying about losing. Instead, concentrate that energy toward your next effort to win. Valor grows by daring, fear by holding back. Dare and you might; hold back and you never will. So, dare to be great. That’s the difference between accepting a loss and earning one.
While I may be the best at what I do, I humbly acknowledge that I am still woefully short of being the best that I can be.
Have an AWE-full weekend!
William “Bill” Bacque