“Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”
Vince Lombardi
When you feel like you’re on top, platitudes about success and nothing else seem true, but when you feel like you’ve hit a rough patch, platitudes about learning from failure and getting back up ring true.
However, life is not about winning or losing – it’s about experimentation. We all win and lose, many times. We feel the highs of winning and the lows of losing constantly, never really reaching what we perceive to be success because there’s always a higher high and a lower low to take us back down.
Therefore, we have to change our relationship with winning and losing. The entire concept of winning is not a good long-term strategy, because it’s inevitably followed by some kind of failure, and just by the high of success coming to an end.
It’s like a volatile price chart, always spiking and crashing, going through regular boom and bust cycles. No matter how high any asset price reaches, the bust is inevitable.
A better long-term strategy is to do experiments based on testable hypotheses. For example, let’s say you want to make money. Well, you think you want to make money, and you think you want to do it with entrepreneurship.
If you make money through entrepreneurship, then you can ask yourself if you’re happier because of it. If so, the assumption was validated. If you’re not happier, it was dis-proven. In any case, it was just an experiment, and it didn’t wreak havoc on your life.
The same can apply to any facet of your life, whether it’s your career, your relationship, your body, or your spirituality. You might have hypotheses about loyalty in a relationship, career promotions, or maintaining a healthy body. No matter what happens to you, it’s a learning experience as opposed to a fluctuation.
Sure, this mindset change won’t mean that your experience of life will be entirely without fluctuations, but it’ll look more like this than some crazy roller-coaster:
