Fool First, Hero Later
All I Do Is Win
A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.
T-Pain
All I do is win, win, win. No matter what. There’s money on my mind, I can never get enough.
Well, kind of.
We see and we hear people say this. If we’re on the interwebs, we hear it often. We see examples of this and some of it appears plausible.
It isn’t.
Unless you’re T-Pain. Sure, it’s a DJ Khaled song, but be real, T-Pain is the one winning. Have you heard him sing without auto-tune? Dude’s a beast.
So, understanding that T-pain is the exception, everyone else saying that is spouting bullshit. They may believe it, but belief isn’t what makes things real. T-Pain is the one that proves the rule.
Alright, take T-Pain out of the picture so we can get a more accurate look at wins and losses without him screwing up the curve.
May as well include the link to that page.
Now tuck that bit of knowledge away. You’ll need it LITERALLY FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE. This frustrating principle affects just about everything.
Including success.
Alright, success is a toughie. A singular concept that is tough. A tough one, as they say. It’s defined by… you. Me. Everyone ever and we all have different definitions.
It can be overcoming an obstacle. It can be winning or being triumphant. It can be getting what you want. Though getting what you want isn’t always the best thing for you. So if you get what you want and it turns out to be bad for you, was that a success?
That may imply that success is temporally relative. Which is SUPER LAME and NERDY. Ain’t nobody got time for that. What we CAN understand with only that last paragraph is that success is complicated. We can agree on complicated, no?
Yes. Dad says yes.
Let’s add a few more complications to our ever growing pile. Success for one person is failure for another. Take American Gladiators. If you’re a contestant, success means getting through the round. If you’re an underpaid gladiator, success is keeping the contestants from… success. If you’re an audience member, success is watching the gladiator succeed in the most brutal way possible.
Yes, we went through all of that to say success is on the future to define. That’s especially true when the lens of success focuses on people.
And all of THAT is to say that if someone—someone who is NOT T-Pain—tells you that all they do is win, that’s is a boast. It’s hyperbole. Or it’s some character defect. Psychosis?
Well, it may be insecurity. Whatever their reason for it, know it’s nonsense. It doesn’t exist.
The Precursor To T-Pain
Before we get into the precursor to T-Pain, more widely known as the precursor to winning, please note that this piece was originally written free of playfulness. It was completely serious.
And I HATED it.
So now we have T-Pain.
Moving on, let’s discuss winning. Let’s discuss the precursor to winning. That is, of course, loads and loads of CASH MONEY. Except not really. Even with loads and loads of that delicious cash money winning will not happen without losing.
However, losing is only as helpful as how it is done. You must learn to lose PROPERLY. There’s a ton to unpack here so I’ll try and do it in a few short sentences.
First, winning. In this piece we’re going over winning in the meta sense. Winning beyond a single game, yet encompassing each single game itself. Each iteration of game and said game. Let’s put a pin in that for now. Just know winning and success are both the same level of extracted annoyance. They’re absolutely riddled with nuance and subjection and singularly personal relevance.
Which means it’ll need its own piece. Perhaps even its own book. Someone will write one I’m sure.
Luckily we all want to win. We want to win, and win, and win. No matter what.
So how do we win?
Simple! We lose. And we lose properly. We go out there and we lose and we lose and we lose.
As we do so we need to remember that hanger on word: properly. That’s a toughie. What the hell is losing properly?
One thing it is not a placeholder for is EFFICIENTLY. We’re not running around attempting to lose as many games of kickball as we can. This is not good behavior. It’s weird. Don’t do that.
When we lose we need to pay attention first and foremost. WHY did we lose? WHY did they win? WHAT should we do better next time? HOW did we prepare? HOW did they prepare? All that jazz.
Then we add a tiny sprinkle of grace. A little dash of awe. From time to time we can even mix in a cup of admiration. That’s reserved for when we take on the masters, generally. Take a look at your opponent, your adversary, your wall you failed to scale.
There’s likely something to see in them, in it, that we can appreciate. Perhaps, in the case of the wall, the impeccable construction and massive material use. Maybe it even has a funny mural on it. We all like those.
Or in the case of kickball, perhaps the opposing pitcher has a MEAN roll. Maybe they have an absolute UNIT of a 4-hole kicker whose mother was an ostrich and daddy was a mule. How wonderful they can take such meaning and joy in perfecting their art of swinging their leg with as much precision and force as humanly possible in order to win at intramurals.
Honestly those things ARE worthy of praise, of some admiration. Believe it or not that’s a simple case of harnessing wonder, of awe, of GRATITUDE. You got to go up against an adversary that was either evenly matched or better than you. How lucky you are.
Seriously. That’s such a damn good thing. Don’t make the mistake of taking on the ‘woe is me’ bullshit attitude we seem to think is the proper way to be after we lose. If you ain’t aiming to beat the best, don’t play.
Except you must play. So shut your mind hole up when it’s telling you things are unfair, go pay attention, then beat those monsters. And when you LOSE IN THE ATTEMPT, the INTENTIONAL, LEGITIMATE ATTEMPT, know you are one step closer to becoming triumphant.
The Blessing Of The L
Oh you lucky ducky you. The blessing of the L word. It’s likely not the one you thought of right away. Lumpenproletariat was your L word, wasn’t it? I knew it.
You commie.
The ragged masses deserve love too.
LOSING. Okay, admittedly I didn’t disguise which word would be used here, but I needed an excuse to use lumpenproletariat. Apart from societal pitfalls and fun, obscure words, there aren’t many applicable contexts for it. That should be considered a big, fat L for the word.
But out of that loss the word just took, it has gained obscurity, which then makes it fun. I’d consider that a win…
Take this to the bank, kids: If you lose properly, that is, if you face your loss voluntarily, with humility and attention, then you're engaging in a psychological and even spiritual process of reordering yourself in relation to the world.
First, proper losing reveals ignorance and insufficiency. I could have chosen the word OR there and it apply, but in no way did I want you thinking that it is a mutually exclusive revelatory event. I’d say, generally speaking, they tend to come in pairs. They may not be related, but they will be together.
Like a couple. Hopefully.
This revelation allows LEARNING to occur. That’s another good L word. It’s also an L word that is PAINFUL. Literally and figuratively. Before, during, and after. Much learning happens because we feel pain, emotional, physical, or otherwise. Then the neurological distress, or perhaps pain, of reshaping and remapping within said brain housing group happens, and afterward we reiterate many of those changes as we see how it has affected the shape of our reality and continue to make adjustments.
It’s a lot.
So, learning of an ignorance or an insufficiency allows you to fix shit. If you’re not aware something is broken, you won’t fix it. You can’t. You don’t know it exists. This first transformation loss provides is epistemic: it reorganizes your understanding of what you are, what the world is, and where the fault lines run between the two.
Second, it elicits awe. Awe can be a pleasant feeling, but that’s not all it is. Awe emerges when you encounter something GREATER than you. Which, by the way, requires some degree of humility to experience. So humble yourselves, peasants!
Generally this also involves something that exceeds your current capacity to fully understand. Something that would require GROWTH to grasp. This is PRECISELY what loss can represent in that chaos you face when you lose. Be it in a failed relationship, poor judgement during crunch time, or a physical defeat which reminds you of your finitude.
Awe and the voluntary facing of awe and the chaos it represents is psychologically catalytic. Your current frame of reference dissolves which opens the door to reconstruction. It’s beautiful. Thinking about it gives me chills.
Finally, proper loss fosters the development of character. Face loss with honesty, face it voluntarily, and face it with wonder or the intent to learn. If you do so, you are opening yourself up to the opportunity to CULTIVATE VIRTUES. We don’t get much in the way of virtue cultivation when interacting with modernity. Though I imagine that has been true in each iteration of modernity, it continues to be so.
Therefore when we get this opportunity we must seize it. Carpe cultivation or whatever those crazy Romans said. Seize that resilience, that gratitude, that humility, and that fortitude. You will—and I mean this literally and for absolute certain—you WILL become someone capable of carrying heavier burdens for yourself and for others.
How nuts is that? You losing helps THOSE AROUND YOU. Those you love. Those who depend upon you.
Weird.
Losing PROPERLY allows you to transform into a more complete and competent person. You’re more in touch with reality rendering you more capable of dealing in it and with it which is just a more complicated way of saying you can contribute more effectively.
The loser, if they lose properly, becomes someone who can win without arrogance, lose without bitterness, and live with meaning even in the face of tragedy.
That is no small thing, no small feat. That’s the emergence of a sovereign individual. The one who stands upright, speaks the truth, and voluntarily confronts the unknown. That’s becoming.
So start becoming.
Thus sayeth Dad.
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I love you writing brother. Thank you.
Good advice, thank you