In this world, we see losing as a failure, a disappointment. What most fail to understand is the value of losing and the way it can teach us more about ourselves and how we can improve. Losing helps us to understand and evaluate our weaknesses, and learn from them. From this, we can get better and try again. Donald Trump was quoted as saying, “Sometimes by losing a battle, you find a new way to win the war.”
As human beings, we are driven to succeed and accomplish the things we want. When someone doesn’t do as well as they’d hoped, it lights a fire in them, makes them want to have another go and do better. Losing motivates us to keep trying, to not give up on what we want to achieve. It helps us to strive towards what we didn’t accomplish the first time. By losing, we find the motivation to get right back up and try again.
When we lose something, whether it be a sport competition or a job, we are often blinded and don’t see the big picture. Sometimes we all just need to step back and take a good hard look at what we’ve already accomplished up to this point. For example, even if someone didn’t win their swimming race at the Olympics, they should still be proud of themselves for just getting themselves to that point, for being among the best in the world at that particular sport and for training themselves hard enough to make it to the Olympics. Winning isn’t everything. If all that matters to someone is winning, they would find themselves in a place where they don’t learn anything, where they don’t have anything to really strive towards. Winning should not be the reason someone loves and appreciates something and wants to do well at it.
Losing helps to gives us a better, more open perspective on things. It gives us the time to take a step back and analyse our performance and look for ways to improve ourselves in order to do better next time. We can also use this time to recover from the feeling of a loss. Losing can make us