7812jk+Winning+is+Everything?

When Losing is Learning

Is winning everything? In sports, that is a very controversial topic. Many people play to win, but some good few play for fun; those are the real winners. Although some people don’t think so, I believe that winning isn’t always everything.

Although it’s fun, it won’t matter in the long run whether you win or lose. If you win at everything as a kid, you won’t be able to accept the inevitable failure when you grow up. Will it really matter if you won the little league championships when you were 8, twenty years later? What if your trying to sell a product that no one wants? Are you just going to lay down and cry, or bounce back and try again? If you always won, you would never learn anything.

If you lose, you can learn from your mistakes. In fact, it can actually help you win. As Michael Jordan once said, “I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” What he means is if you don’t win at first, you can see what you did wrong and fix it.

No one can always win, so why even try? We aren’t robots, we weren’t programmed to do everything flawlessly over and over. Think of baseball teams who are ranked first in the league and win it all. Even they lose at least 60 games in the regular season. When they lose, do you see them whine about it? No. They train harder so they can win next time. As Picasso once said, “Success is failure that tried one more time.” He means, never give up, you can do anything with a little hard work.

I get what you’re saying if you think winning is everything, there really is no better feeling, but I’d rather lose and learn a lesson, than win and stay ignorant to the importance of working hard. In the 2007-2008 season, the New England Patriots went 16-0 in the regular season, but in the Super Bowl the 9-7 Giants beat the Patriots 17-14 in a very exciting game. This shows that even teams that go undefeated are eventually beaten. Is winning everything? I don’t think so.

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