How do you lose?

[Brutha]

If you take risks you will lose sometimes.
Unfortunately there are much more books and articles writing about winning than about losing.
Winning is sometimes easy.
Losing on the other hand is hard.

What do you do when you screwed up?
Sure you should learn from your mistakes, what does that mean?
Should you feel bad emotions when you lose to condition your brain against getting the same result another time?

[Dan.Linehan]

I think it depends on the situation. I tend to take failures as lessons in "what not to do." And then I just refine my approach from there.

[JimOfferman]

"Why do we fall? So we can learn to pick ourselves up."
- from Batman Begins

Failures are lessons, success is the reward for learning them.

[DayInTheLife]

What do you do when you screwed up?
Sure you should learn from your mistakes, what does that mean?

It means there is no reason to interpret failure as a negative event. Unless you throw up your hands and give up, then any given failure only brings you closer to success.

The problem occurs when we subconsciously believe that a given failure becomes a permanent part of us. We have a tendency to make past failures into a part of our identity. "Who am I?... Oh yeah I'm that guy who sucks at running a business."

The kind of conditioning that results is not helpful. We place a disproportionate amount of importance on avoiding the emotional sting of failure that it often prevents us from trying anything again. So often people deny themselves a chance at what they want because they cannot face the prospect of the emotional sting of losing.

How much it hurts depends on how much you let the loss define you. If you are aware than your identity cannot be defined by ANY events in your life, then loss or failure does not hurt.

As soon as you can stop feeding the emotional response to failure with compulsive thinking, it has no negative effect on future attempts. You never have a choice but to continue your life from where you are. Always. So there is never a good reason to lament failure.

[garentee]

.367 is what baseball great Ty Cobbs' Life time batting average was. He had the highest lifetime batting average of any hitter in Major League baseball. Which means he only got a hit 36.7% of the time. This always puts things into perspective for me. He failed to get a hit 62.3% of the time. We always like to think that we are going to win at everything we do but the reality is that that number is a pretty accurate portrait of winning and losing in my view.

[Brutha]

Failures are lessons, success is the reward for learning them.

Do you think that learning from failures is easy?

It means there is no reason to interpret failure as a negative event. Unless you throw up your hands and give up, then any given failure only brings you closer to success.

Do you tell that to the people at the next furneral you attend?
Don't give up your desires to party with the dead person?

It means there is no reason to interpret failure as a negative event.

That is just not true.
You don't have to interpret failure as negative.
The question is whether choices to see failure as negative is a viable rational choice.
People who feel no pain due to inhereted disability all die in accidents because they are unable to judge certain situations as negative through feeling pain.

In poker you sometimes play a bad hand and bluff to increase the return of the good hand, because your opponent will more likely think that you are bluffing when you have a good hand.
If you choose not to play bad hands at all you have an disadvantage in poker.

I think that you have a similar disadvantage in life when you elimate everything negative out of your mind.
It important to play some of the bad hands that life deals to you.

If you are aware than your identity cannot be defined by ANY events in your life,

You can make the choice of not learning from any events in your life, but whether that is a good decision is an entriely different question.

[MrNotebook]

It all depends on how we define it from within. To me, losing is when I totally give up - therefore, I can't truly say that I've ever "lost".

As long as I can continue to maintain the attitude of "getting back up again", then I know I'm on the winning path.

[Christian223]

I talk to myself and encourage myself, saying things like "It was a good try!, it was just a try you can keep trying and with each try you get better!, well done! thats the way to advance!, one step at a time, keep going!" , that way i got over the initial bad feeling of not reaching my goal, it works very well for me, and its very important to me too.

After that i try to see what things i got from that experience, the good and the bad, what new things i learned and what what bad things i should never do again.

But the most important things regarding failures are goals, and what affirmations you have aquired. For example, i know that getting to a long term goal takes much time, and many tries too, so I KNOW that failing lots of times is inhebitable, but each try, success or not, is something to learn, if i put some effort on learning from it. Each try is a necesary step, i just need to keep walking, never stop, and focus on the end goal, keeping my motivation up.

[JimOfferman]

Originally Posted by Brutha

Do you think that learning from failures is easy?

Why would it be hard?

You do. You fail. You analyze... and then try again with what you just learned.

We have all learned to walk like that and it works for most other things too.

[Corvette]

Originally Posted by Brutha

If you take risks you will lose sometimes.
Unfortunately there are much more books and articles writing about winning than about losing.
Winning is sometimes easy.
Losing on the other hand is hard.

What do you do when you screwed up?
Sure you should learn from your mistakes, what does that mean?
Should you feel bad emotions when you lose to condition your brain against getting the same result another time?

If you're pushing the envelope by living consciously and expanding your consciousness everyday, you should be having a huge mixed bag of wins and failures.

In my experience, the failures hugely outweigh the wins because there's so much to learn, and you can only learn by putting your internal model of reality to the test on a regular basis. Also known as pushing the envelope.

Bearing this in mind, we therefore accept failure as a daily occurrence. However, we also come to see that:

1) The next day we are still alive. Bad emotions are there, but they will fade with time. Each time gets a little bit easier till we no longer care about failure. This is conditioning your brain that failure can't kill you. Thus it is slowly demoted as a threat and therefore generates a smaller emotional response each time.
2) The bigger the failure, the bigger the payoff in terms of improvement to your reality model.

Accepting failure is a natural requisite of growth.

[Angela]

There is no failure, only feedback.

[Ecce Homo]

Originally Posted by JimOfferman

"Why do we fall? So we can learn to pick ourselves up."
- from Batman Begins

Failures are lessons, success is the reward for learning them.

Originally Posted by Angela

There is no failure, only feedback.

Great stuff guys!

[JustBe]

Interesting question!!!

As I am an element water.. I for sure know how to loose..

Begin with a project. Get some thought of fear.. Then do something else to experience some more pleasure. Then as you doing something else extract a new project and the cycle begins.........

Or this one:

Begin the day with reading email, reading news... Now my mind is full of 'interesting' things. Then do Priority 1... Experience a very challenging thing (difficulty, realising it's hard work, painfull thought coming up...) then my mind switches to something I read, that "interesting" thing... thinking about it...


Begin with a project, do some action for this project, fail in this action is NOT losing.. Its falling forward.

It looks like I am breaking losing loops now.. I have to say that the mind is very clever to stay in comfort zone......

Really thanks for bringing this question up.

[JustBe]

I noticed it is a very interesting point when the mind switches to something else.

Cause when the mind switches, that means there is 'fear'.

I never really understood what was meant by 'fear'. Thought 'fear' was something like you experience when you meet Kaspar the friendly ghost. A real physical reaction.

[JustBe]

Originally Posted by Angela

There is no failure, only feedback.

There is however procastination by not facing fear in the proces.

If you start project A and you end with feedback for project B then something went wrong.

E.g.

You work on project A. Getting a thought that kicks you out of the process of working on project A. Drink Alcohol to experience more pleasurable thoughts.. Thinking about a new installation in home to tap better beer.. Browsing internet for a new installation... And YES I got feedback for this action. A tap installation is still yet too expensive. Eh what project are you working on?

There are a lot of substitutes for 'Alcohol'. Reading news on the internet could be one...

[Alexjstrandberg]

We make mistakes to learn and grow from them, to evolve. If we dont learn the lessons from out mistakes the universe will continue to send us similar people, similar situations that are designed to teach us something until we wake up and learn.

No, you shouldnt add bad feelings to your mess ups. Its a common thing that people do and it makes them miserable. They think if they beat themselves up enough that they wont make the same mistakes but the universe doesn't work that way. Repression through ignoring, negative conditioning wont get you to stop making them. Whenever you repress something it will appear as though the problem is solved but its not-it's only a matter of time before the things that you repressed come bursting through the surface and you melt down.

Or if you repress then the unwanted feelings, thoughts, behaviors will come out in other odd and unhealthy ways

[newmark]

Brutha, I feel you already know the answers to your questions. Of course learning from failure is hard. But that is no reason not to. We just need to keep going.
Positive thinking is now a craze, but the negative is part of life too. However, becoming negative, of course, brings its own problems and is certainly best avoided.

[Brutha]

Brutha, I feel you already know the answers to your questions.

There are two questions. The one whether you should lose where a have a definite answer to and which I consider not that interesting (but which a lot of people in this thread tried to answer).

The other question is the one I asked about the 'how', for which I don't really have an answer.

[newmark]

How to lose? I am not sure whether I have an answer either. I usually look at the failure as logically as possible, without emotion, and try to see what went wrong.
Then I put the failure, along with its emotions, in a mental box and leave them alone whilst I work on whatever new plans I have.
Have you ever tried keeping the negative emotions to condition your brain? How did it work?
The closest I've come to this is with fear, which has once or twice in my life scared me so much that I never rested until I had achieved my goals. And it was a good motivator. However, on whether this is the best way, I have doubts, and it is certainly not a method I usually choose to use.

[teenphenom]

W. Clement Stone refers to himself as an "inverse paranoid." Everything in life moves you toward your goal. There is no losing, because ANYTHING NEGATIVE can have an equal or greater positive. If you fail a math test, it could mean you're not meant for math and if you were to head to a career in law, you may end up a legal prodigy and a partner of a firm one day. If you get rejected by a girl, you won't be as nervous next time because your brain says, "Okay, that wasn't so bad."

[coLLege kid07]

Originally Posted by Brutha

Do you think that learning from failures is easy?
Do you tell that to the people at the next furneral you attend?
Don't give up your desires to party with the dead person?
That is just not true.
You don't have to interpret failure as negative.
The question is whether choices to see failure as negative is a viable rational choice.

In poker you sometimes play a bad hand and bluff to increase the return of the good hand, because your opponent will more likely think that you are bluffing when you have a good hand.
If you choose not to play bad hands at all you have an disadvantage in poker.

I think that you have a similar disadvantage in life when you elimate everything negative out of your mind.
It important to play some of the bad hands that life deals to you.
You can make the choice of not learning from any events in your life, but whether that is a good decision is an entriely different question.

Negativety is ones own perception. One person's view of negativety is way different than another persons. If your looking for a higher up perspective on this issue, you'd then realise that you can choose your view on the situation. So would you rather choose "pain" (negativety) or pleasure (seeing the situation as a learning opportunity and growing from it).

I'm not really sure you can compare failure to a funeral. Everyone is going to die one day...so I'm not sure you can consider failure dieing.

Originally Posted by Brutha

People who feel no pain due to inhereted disability all die in accidents because they are unable to judge certain situations as negative through feeling pain.

Feeling pain is a normal human reaction. If you can't feel pain than obviously that will inhibit your ability to tell you are getting harmed.

Lastly what is rational? Your rational may be way different than someone else's rational. Is there such a thing a rational....no it's an illusion.

Hope this helped.

[coLLege kid07]

Originally Posted by newmark

How to lose? I am not sure whether I have an answer either. I usually look at the failure as logically as possible, without emotion, and try to see what went wrong.
Then I put the failure, along with its emotions, in a mental box and leave them alone whilst I work on whatever new plans I have.
Have you ever tried keeping the negative emotions to condition your brain? How did it work?
The closest I've come to this is with fear, which has once or twice in my life scared me so much that I never rested until I had achieved my goals. And it was a good motivator. However, on whether this is the best way, I have doubts, and it is certainly not a method I usually choose to use.

Failure is your perception which is thus ran by the mind. If you realised you had the ability to change this reaction...you would thus probably choose to see failure as a learning experience and use it to grow. As steve said, "You never stop growing..it continues all throughout your life."

[Brutha]

Feeling pain is a normal human reaction. If you can't feel pain than obviously that will inhibit your ability to tell you are getting harmed.

If you have the goal of feeling unharmed and being unharmed (a comman goal), feeling pain is failure.

I'm not really sure you can compare failure to a funeral. Everyone is going to die one day...so I'm not sure you can consider failure dieing.

So say your dad has cancer. He doesn't want to die and beat cancer. If he doesn't beat it he failed.

Hope this helped.

It didn't address the main question but was about the area before the actual question.

[coLLege kid07]

Originally Posted by Brutha

If you have the goal of feeling unharmed and being unharmed (a comman goal), feeling pain is failure.

I'm not quite sure where you're coming from. That kind of goal is very unrealistic and I can see where you would feel pain.

Originally Posted by Brutha

So say your dad has cancer. He doesn't want to die and beat cancer. If he doesn't beat it he failed.

Well if he doesn't beat it he dies. I'm not so sure I understand.

Originally Posted by Brutha

It didn't address the main question but was about the area before the actual question.

I'm sorry what's the main question...?

[Brutha]

I'm not quite sure where you're coming from. That kind of goal is very unrealistic and I can see where you would feel pain.

Why is it unrealistic? I didn't harmed myself yesterday so I succeded with that goal yesterday.
Do you mean that one should only set goals that don't give you the option to fail?

Well if he doesn't beat it he dies. I'm not so sure I understand.

Then why hasn't he failed in his battle?

I'm sorry what's the main question...?

Once you accept that their is something like failure or negative feedback (and I don't care for the sematic game of how to call it)

I'm sorry what's the main question...?

How do you lose?
There is no losing, there is only negative feedback is an answer of the same quality as "there is no winning, only positive feedback" is to the question "How do you win?".

People always fear the unknown. Some people fear succees and some fear failure.
The public consquences prefer to be blind to failure which makes failure more scary because it's unknown.
There is no no ying without yang and no winning without losing.
If you are balanced you should be better of.

That leaves the question of how to deal with failure once it happens and how to prepare for it.

[jaydeschizo]

Failing is a lot easier than winning. If you do nothing, you fail. If you fail and learn, you win.

[Lauxa]

At first I thought the question was "what constitutes losing?" but after reading the clarification I see it is really "how do you process the input from losing?"

I don't think it is necessary or helpful to feel bad about losing. The only time you should ever even think about it is when you are doing something where that information is relevant to the present moment.

So let's take Scrabble for example (since I like Scrabble). You challenge a word and it turns out that it is a real word and you lose the game. Well, it is only a game, no need to get upset, really no need to even think about that game for a while. So next time you are playing Scrabble, you see that you have the letters for that word. Now you can use the knowledge you gained from your "failure".

Or, say you really like Scrabble so you set an intention to become a better Scrabble player. After you lose, you realize that one thing that would make you better would be to memorize all the 2-letter words in the Scrabble dictionary. So you set a goal to do this. But there is still no need to be upset or to even think about it except for when you are studying. And even then you would not be thinking about losing but about studying.