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Triumph in the Game of Life

Kierkegaard thought the most frightful way to live

was to bewitch the whole world through one’s discoveries

and cleverness – to explain the whole of nature

and not understand oneself.

- Karl Jaspers

Here’s a question for you: Did you intend to do today what you did do today? Put in existential terms, did you spend an abundance of your time settled into the will-to-power corridor making purposive choice after purposive choice? If these questions make sense to you, you have probably read enough of this website to recognize the etiology of them. In case this is one of the first articles you’ve read, however, I’m asking: Are you on top of your game? Did you pull off a day that you wouldn’t mind living over and over again? Did you tread surely down the road of your choice toward a bolder version of yourself?

What about your past week? Or your past year?

These are clearly not chit-chatty questions. They bore right into the heart of existential mindfulness. Existential mindfulness means being willing to commit to existential intelligence and to routinely check to see if you are engaging in it. Existential intelligence is the practice of holding all five dimensions of existential time simultaneously in your mind in order to guide your moment-by-moment behavior. The five dimensions of existential time are: a well-digested and understood personal past; a highly responsible present; a delightful future beckoning you forward; a cogent and brave relationship with Fate; and energizing connections with compelling people, places and things. A state of existential mindfulness reflects our belief that, our coefficients of adversity notwithstanding, most of us have a great deal of say in how constructively we administer our existential time.

(Note: There are a lot of words modified by the word “existential” in that previous paragraph. If you are a newcomer to this website, it may help you to read this and this and this before you proceed with the current article.)

You can see the burden represented by the expectation that we be existentially mindful – it puts us face-to-face with the truth that there is no workaround that removes the ongoing need for each of us to self-construct. As I’ve covered in other articles, it is incumbent on us to fairly ruthlessly monitor our self-construction batting average and to fairly ruthlessly maintain elevated expectations that we meet or exceed the success rate of our recent past. There are, however, ways to see this process more as growth in connection and less as our being cast away on a lonely metaphysical island.

This article describes how we can use a wise assessment of external feedback to add to our internal evaluation of our existential progress. I am interested in three specific forms of external feedback – winning, losing and being chosen – for these three states provide complicated yet rich commentary on our current situation in the interpersonal world. And like all social judgments, all three states are valuable yet rarely deeply examined. And if you’ve read much of this website, you’ll know that one huge belief underlying all that I write is the conviction that leaving complicated, valuable human situations unexamined creates unhelpful and unnecessary roadblocks to self-construction.

All this is to say, my goal for this article is to disentangle and explore the states of winning, losing and being chosen to help us all move more wisely through our experiences of them in the service of building better and more energizing attachments.

Defining the term

Before we get started, let me take a moment to define triumph in the way I use it on this website. What we achieve when we are existentially triumphant is what Nietzsche called “peace of soul.” It is a state of mind we harvest when we are making resolute progress toward – look out, here come a bunch of existentialisms – our uniquely personal project that is designed in accordance with our will to power and currently captures many of our most cherished gifts and strongest personality traits. You could say we march through this elusive arc de triomphe when we are surely on the road toward our favorite future memory. These future memories will involve career, family, hobbies, friendships, recreation, politics – the works. Everything humans engage in creates a potential triumph.

And there’s some really good news here, for if you are truly on the journey of a lifetime, almost everything you do can be said to be in service of progressing along that route. For example, if you have just, finally, opened your own practice as a business consultant, the hours you spend specifically on the tasks that directly support your endeavor will be clearly goal oriented. But the hours you spend on your fitness, nutrition, gardening, friends and so on can also be said to be supporting your business goals for they collect within you to define what kind of consultant you want to be. Psychologists refer to this as “self as instrument” – who we are in total undergirds who we are professionally. And, because what we think of ourselves is inextricably tied to what we do well, the more our day is filled with all the things we do well, the greater our peace of soul. So in addition to the appropriate credentials needed to provide the actual financial services, our example consultant wants to be wholly prepared for her day with a fit and healthy body, cut flowers from her garden for her office and friends with whom to have lunch. A good day for this M.B.A. is one that moves some of these ingredients along the road toward an accumulation of time spend as the type of consultant she wishes to be.

As you might have noticed, there was no mention of winning, losing or being chosen in the above defining paragraphs. More similar to the saying “It’s not whether you win or lose – it’s how you play the game,” existential triumph doesn’t require being a winner, being chosen or avoiding losing. Triumph in existential terms involves using all the data that life has to offer us in the construction of our chosen life. And what that means is that winning, losing and being chosen are sources of information rather than sources of triumph. Yes, we can feel triumphant when we win, but we are looking for the existentially-triumphant state of “peace of soul” rather than fleeting happy feelings of winning.

Now back to our topic: how do we use external feedback to help us triumph in the game of life?

First the math

How the world ordains us moment by moment as winner, loser or chosen is a data-rich reality. In order to access these data, however, we have to reject the urging of most competitive cultures that we shake off a loss, minimize a win or take being chosen for granted. If we, instead, see these data as providing precious guidance toward a more coherent self, the answers to those questions in the introduction will be more compelling to answer.

It is often wise, in other words, to view human interactions as having to do less with Fate than with group-sourced feedback. Put more bluntly, when our community rejects our efforts, it is frequently correct to do so. In addition to having the benefit of many perspectives, these combined voices commonly have access to more information than we do about how we stack up against our competition. As difficult as it may be, if we recognize that probability, we are in a position to gather data that can improve our situation. “What are these combined voices telling me about my application?” is a much more shrewd question than is “Why aren’t I lucky enough to have gotten that opportunity?”

It might be helpful here – as odd as this may sound – to take a moment to explore the statistical difference between Fate and society.

Fate, as I have discussed elsewhere, is both statistically driven and completely random. Any able-bodied adult could absolutely go to a miniature golf course and, on their first try, hit a hole-in-one through the windmill of doom. What a fluke! Their odds of doing so, however, increase statistically with practice even though Fate still maintains a mighty influence. Windmill of doom! The words of Louis Pasteur reflect this dichotomy: Fortune favors the prepared mind. The statistically savvy reader will spot the problem with that aphorism, however. Fortune doesn’t have a personality, so it doesn’t “favor” anything. So, with cosmic indifference but slight statistical input, Fate will salt your life in unpredictable ways. You can straighten up your living room every day but one, and, even though the odds are greatly in your favor, sometimes people will drop in on that one messy day. We ignore this complicated mathematical reality of Fate to our detriment because, of course, people will more likely drop in on our messy house if we rarely clean.

Society, on the other hand, is predominantly statistically driven. And these statistics are usually powerful given the sizable pool of data that cultural arbiters use to make decisions. The use of SAT scores to admit students to college is a decent example of this. Although the practice is culturally problematic and also subject to cheating by the very wealthy, SAT scores allow college administrators an incremental predictive ability to make tough choices among thousands of highly qualified applicants. This tiny yet meaningful validity is due to the sheer mass of data available in standardized testing situations. In other words, when millions of students take a test, your ability to “guess” how an individual student stacks up against his fellow students is heightened ever so slightly. (How much grit, test anxiety, life stressors, etc. are also going on is, of course, not captured by the data. These contingencies are supposed to be captured in the statement of purpose.) But, if your SAT scores are 1490, that will give you fairly accurate feedback on how you stack up achievement-wise relative to your peers.

The math of triumph can be summarized like this: when we win or lose, it is up to us to assess whether the statistics used to drive the decision were reliable and valid, not to take the decision personally. Neither Fate nor your communities are usually out to get you. (Although to be completely honest, when Fate tells you "no" it's a generic "no," not a personal one. With human feedback, sometimes it is personal.)

Then the game

Before we can interpret the data to be had, however, we have to understand what game is afoot. If we define a game as a competition for a fixed and meaningful resource, we are probably participating in more day-to-day conflicts that we realize. These competitions can range from the silly (convenient parking places or overhead compartment space or being the life of the party) to the cherished (time and attention from our loved ones or the ability to influence our peers or a promotion at work). So a wise move toward a more coherent life would be to assess the number, type and desirability of the games in our lives. How many times in a week does our pulse race a bit when a limited resource appears in front of us? And how often do we think we care about an outcome when we don’t? And how often do we let the world around us define a situation as competitive? Or even define for us the game to be played? And do we sometimes compete just so we can bewitch our world by being a “winner?”

When we feel our competitive side get activated, we need to stop to think. Is the situation actually a zero sum conflict with fixed resources? If not, can we redefine the game as a possible win-win? And, either way, do we even want to play it? If we use arguing as an example, if someone starts a quarrel with us we often forget that we have the power to set the rules of the game. Do we want to argue until there is a winner and a loser, meaning that it is a whoever-argues-best-wins game? If that’s the case, how important do we want the win to be and what will we do to win? What if we change the game to a contest of who can explain their side of the argument while protecting the friendship? If both participants agree to this second option, both can win. If your “opponent” doesn’t agree, you can still choose to play the game defined by that second option, meaning that you have complete control over whether or not you triumph. If you hold on to yourself and your fighting style, you can absolutely present your side of the dispute and protect the friendship no matter what the other person does.

Another example would be competitive parenting. If you find yourself in conversation with a bunch of parents touting their children’s academic and athletic and musical and linguistic accomplishments, can you remember to establish within yourself whether or not you want to play this game? When someone turns to you and asks you how your offspring are doing, what criteria do you want to use to answer them? And here’s an annoying example – the armrest on an airplane. Do you want to fight with someone who wants to play possession-is-nine-tenths-of-the-law? Do you want to play a game of “let’s establish folk ethics about sharing the armrest at the beginning of the flight?” Or, like many people, are you just interested in going along to get along locked in a tin can at 35,000 feet?

The point here is that, too often we allow a flotsam-and-jetsam strategy to dictate how many games we are playing and what the rules are in those games. Our souls would be much better protected if we could learn to be instrumental in our interactions out in the world relative to the game-playing tendencies humans have. There's nothing wrong with playing games. We just want to be sure that we want to play the games we are being asked to play with the rules being suggested.

Finally the Scoring

If we agree to play, our next concerns would be: Who is doing the scoring and how does one get points? Or even whether or not points are good (e.g. baseball) or bad (e.g. golf). Sometimes we agree to compete within well-established guidelines – elections, athletics and auditions are all examples. Within this infield-fly-rule world, it can be clear what we need to do to win. But the rules for the majority of interpersonal games that folks play are not established. So, as I mentioned above, you have to decide for yourself if you are winning or not. The criteria for scoring points and your score itself only matter to you because whether or not you win only matters to you. Beware of others trying to tell you what the score is and beware of a tendency within you to mishandle the scoring of yourself.

Also beware of people changing the game on you in the middle of the contest. If you have agreed to argue while protecting the friendship, you don’t have to allow your opponent to start engaging in sloppy interpersonal behavior ten minutes into the discussion.

It needs to be said here that many folks enjoy the adrenaline surge of competition so much that winning or losing often doesn’t even matter. These folks can be difficult for the empathically sensitive, competitively uncomfortable types to deal with. The naturally competitive people aren’t uncaring, it’s just that, because contest itself is so enjoyable for them, they lose track of the fact that you may just tolerate the competition because you need to win whatever resource is at stake.

Major league gaming

Your next wise move is to determine whether or not your current activity is in the game of life or is just a game. What, pragmatically, is the existential difference between the two? This distinction reroutes us surely back to the juicy existential concepts of will and will to power.

When a game is just a game, it is a contest that should be entertaining to participate in but should have little to no effect on how you answer those questions at the beginning of this article. A game of life is about your individual will to power. A reread of the article on this topic will remind you that will to power uses high levels of both willpower and will to direct us toward the next vital thing that will create for us a uniquely meaningful situation. Implied in that process is the belief that there are complex personal values driving our will to power. When we will one thing, in other words, we have chosen one crucial route we believe will allow us to substantiate the combination of our individual gifts and our unique personalities.

Complicated as this all sounds, the good news is that every game of life is about the never-ending process of integrating all your internal components into a better and better functioning whole – which means there is technically no winning or losing. There is only doing and then examining. Horribly disappointing setbacks may cause despair, absolutely, but if you can remain crystal clear on the concept that your goal is to locate the route and situate yourself on it, the despair can be tolerated. (The preceding sentence is true unless, of course, a tragedy strips your life down to survival mode, at which point all your talent and gifts will be in service of sustaining your life rather than elevating it.)

It’s important to note that the game versus game of life distinction is on a continuum. It is up to you to decide how much contests concerning career, family, hobbies, friendships, recreation, politics and so on matter to you. And these values vary over time in addition to varying by individuals.

So the game of life is the relentless pursuit of mastery as defined by the values underlying your particular interest in the next good challenge. But just because you can’t win in the game of life, it doesn’t mean you can’t achieve great moments of peace of soul. When your assessment of your situation reveals consistent forward progress, it is wise to intentionally harvest a justifiable sense of triumph. You do this by answering those pesky questions about how your day went.

To summarize, if you are a gifted athlete, basketball can be your current game of life. Every loss helps you become a better player. Every win gives you a hint that you’re on the right track. Being chosen for the all-star team suggests the world is impressed with how you play the game. If you’re like me, basketball is just a game. If I play a game of horse with you and you win, then your win just means you had a better game than I. If I lose every game with you, then you have better game than I. The data tell me that and only that.

Lots to think about.

Competition

No one doesn’t know these two truths: 1) Because we don’t live in the Garden of Eden, much of life will involve competing for limited resources in both inconsequential games and in games of life. And even in non-competitive situations, a setback can represent a loss. 2) At the end of every zero sum game one can find a full range of human mind states – from the euphoric wonderment of a surprise victory to the devitalizing crush of an error-caused defeat. Sadly, however, few of us routinely look beyond the emotional rewards and punishments of winning and losing because these mind states appear to be self-explanatory and because none of us gets existential training in life. We try to be gracious winners and stoic losers, but those reactions are just a function of politeness rather than a route to insight.

If we want to move beyond the unhelpful training of childhoods spent in a patriarchal culture which told us how to react to competition, we need to deepen our comfort with exploring winning and losing. This can be difficult because of those myriad feelings.

Winning

Let’s look first at winning for it’s more complicated that one might think. It’s tempting to think that there is no down side to winning. There can be.

1. How do we feel about the win? Not all feelings precipitated by a win can be pleasant ones. Sometimes we have to face the chagrin of knowing we won unfairly. Even in a victory where we were completely honorable, when we win in a zero-sum situation we do so at the expense of others. That can be extremely uncomfortable for many of us. There can also be a sense of finality to a win in terms of it being an end cap on a long endeavor. Finally, to the extent that we romanticized what a victory could mean to our lives, we may be in for a shock when a win doesn’t actually change our lives forever. Thus a careful inventory of our feelings can help us start the thinking process around what to make of our win.

2. Did we deserve the win? If we think of deserving in terms of well earned rather than signifying that we are worthy, we can learn something about ourselves by thinking this through. We may have crossed the finish line first, but were we dropped off by life half-way around the track? If our behavior aligned with our personal values, our victory can be sweet. If not, we may need to discuss this within ourselves.

3. What did we do right? What could we have done better? It’s easy to forget to debrief after a win because we can mistakenly believe there is little to learn from a win.

4. Was the competition enough to represent a true victory for us? If we were fighting below our weight class what does that tell us?

5. Are we prepared to let go of the status of a past victory? In other words, do we believe we now get to wear our sash forever? Or perhaps a win temps us into laurel-resting behavior.

6. Did our victory distance us from people to whom we want to stay attached? Are we prepared to face encapsulated envy in one of our close friends?

If we fail to debrief after a win and if we lack a rubric to guide our thinking, we run a terrible risk of becoming disoriented existentially. Most of us have been raised to believe that one should always endeavor to be a winner because victory signifies a fantastic endpoint. That sounds lovely. I can see wanting to live there – that highest step of the podium. But what happens when you strive to do so? When you dedicate yourself to being a winner, you are equating the word “triumph” with the word “win.” Can you see a potential trap in that strategy?

If, on the other hand, we think of winning as a data rich and momentary reality, we are then in a position to decipher the data in soul-enhancing ways.

And losing

Time to ruminate about losing. If we weren’t taught how to be good losers and more importantly why to be good losers, which is most of us I believe, we tend to react to losing in a manner reminiscent of how we react to shame. If data are painful, our mind will balk at being asked to truly investigate the details of our recent past and, instead, will look for external sources of responsibility (They didn’t tell me to…) or rationalizations that protect our ego (the ubiquitous “I wasn’t really trying.”) or will pull the sour grapes card (I don’t really care about the election.) Or we avoid thinking about the incident entirely. You know that can’t be smart. Distorting or spurning the data to be had from the experience of a loss makes it an even greater loss.

So can we detoxify the shame of losing a bit? (If you haven’t read enough of this website to realize that the elimination of shame – in any form – is a huge through-line in my self-construction theory, please take a minute to read this. Shame walks along side of you whispering relentless words of self-hatred. Until and unless that voiced is rewired into firm but gentle guilt, your life can contain very, very little triumph.)

Unless you have just lost in a game of totally random chance, when you lose you can easily feel like a loser. You take the defeat to mean you are defeated. But how often is this really true? Don’t most of us equate “loser” with a lack of trying rather than with being someone who is never the winner? Oddly, that seems to be true when we judge others and not when we judge ourselves. Let’s look as some unhelpful ways to conceptualize losing:

• The stigma of loss: “Everyone sees me in my embarrassing state of losing.” The truth is, most people don’t really pay attention to what other people are up to. So even though you may feel you are running around with an “L” on your forehead, unless you constantly retransmit the message that you have lost, most people forget it quickly enough. They will notice if you are being a sore loser, however.

• Your romanticized view of the world is annihilated: “I can’t handle losing.” It’s very, very hard to grow up in the modern world without developing at least a small fantasy of how your life could be a sensationally winning one. Nerds in movies always come out winners (at least the male nerds). Losses can puncture that fantasy a bit and thump you back down with a bitter reminder of how much more preparation you have to do before fortune will favor you.

• Your managed image is deflated: “Shoot. I am such a loser.” Here is a tricky truth – when you are an adult without a meaningful area of mastery, you will be extremely vulnerable to the need to relentlessly and perfectly manage your image. In stark contrast, if you are well down the road toward being the best tennis coach you can be, as an example, then your need to be good at everything else eases remarkably. Your mind tells you “I’m impressive as a tennis coach and am a person who can also do lots of other things – some well, some just for fun.” Absent that mastery of being down the road, though, your mind tells you “I’ve got to be impressive all the time so that people will value me.” (This odd value system represents, of course, another case of misdirection by the competitive dominant culture.) Any loss will then be experienced as a loss of precious image. (More about image management below.)

• Earnest attachment to the state of being a winner. “I’ve just got to win!” Of course people like to win. Winning creates a momentary state of complete confirmation. You won and right then the specific culture that is surrounding the contest has voted you into the winner’s circle. Yay! But people who are exceptionally earnest attach even more deeply to wanting confirmation because they allow themselves to stay wide open to caring about most everything. If you are earnest but not well schooled in the use of loss, your extra deep attachment to being a winner will be much more distressing.

When we stand in a losing situation, we are standing at a boundary. This particular demarcation is a painful confrontation between who we are right now and who we were hoping to be. If we don’t recognize this and if we don’t understand what is at stake, our poor beleaguered brains will often toss us into a defensive stance that blocks out further thinking. Further thinking is exactly what needs to happen when something has infringed upon our boundaries. If you haven’t read the article on appropriate defenses, I recommend stopping right here for a moment and doing so.

And sometimes we create losing situations where none exist. Unnecessary losses are fabricated by the magical wish to live in paradise. This quote from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy captures the futility of wishing the world was different: “The person who gets ‘worked up’ when failing to hit the golf ball or to open the jar lid, is, on Sartre's reading, ‘intending’ a world where physiological changes ‘conjure up’ solutions in the problematic world.” When you combine that perspective with William James’ belief that emotions, especially secondary ones, are both a choice and a judgment, we can start to understand how often we “conjure up” a wounding loss where none need exist. And then, to make matters worse, we embody that state. Road rage is a good example of this. If aggressive drivers see their location in the fast lane as a “win” and any disruption of that position as a “loss,” ragers will take the momentary annoyance of someone cutting in front of them and churn it into a personal assault. The physiological effects of a tantrum cause our limbic system to override our neocortex meaning that we can lose ourselves in the secondary emotions of rage. To paraphrase the McCourt quote – indulging in road rage is stressing out your heart and expecting the other driver to suffer the ill effects. Sort of laughable, right?

So we can stomp around in a losing situation and indulge ourselves in the pleasure of being a grump, but that doesn’t change Fate’s decision. And if we believe in the magical power of a temper tantrum, we will often enact one.

Win, lose or draw then, when we have taken on a challenge out in the world there are data to be had in the results. If we win, we can likely assume that the world is telling us that we are on the right track and we can use that confirmation to help us remain motivated to continue along this demanding road. If we draw, oddly, the data seem the most clear to us – we are getting closer to success! We are tantalized by the closeness of victory and find it almost automatic to continue striving.

Learning from a loss is much more difficult. I think that we can agree that, for many of us, a loss can make us feel singled out and all alone and stupid. As mentioned above, this unpleasant state can compound the price of the loss if it drives us away from examining the data.

But what if we could engage in what Jaspers called “penetrating a whole life with the earnestness of philosophizing” and tried to think our way through to being – not just a good loser – but a smart one? What would shrewd use of the facticity of a loss look like then?

External Feedback

Let’s take a moment here to look at the concept of external feedback. As I described in another article, one of the most valuable gifts anyone can give you is the act of providing thoughtful, gentle, contextual feedback. When you get the message that someone outside of you approves of something you have done, you will be protected from inadvisably jettisoning that something from your repertoire in a fit of self-doubt. You will also, of course, get a moment of satisfaction as you unwrap the gift of approval. When someone offers you a critique or even an outright rejection, then you are being made aware of a possibly important course correction that can take your life in a perhaps better direction.

So when the world rejects your application to participate in a certain way in an endeavor that you yearn for, what do you do with those data?

A Rubric for Sound Losing

One of the things I like to do on this website is curate collective wisdom about how to deal with one of life’s challenges. Let me do that here relative to strategies to enhance your ability to handle losing. I would imagine there is nothing below that you haven’t thought already and probably used in your life, but I find it helpful to have good ideas collected in one place for me to review on a semi-regular basis.

When facing a loss, the first thing to acknowledge is the need to grieve over the loss. The bigger the loss, of course, the more generous you need to be with yourself as you progress through the grieving process. (I have always loved the late senator John McCain’s description of himself after he lost the presidential election in 2012. He said, “I am sleeping like a baby. I wake up every two hours and cry.”) When we lose, we lose something. That something is worth grieving over. Who established the myth that feeling badly when you lose indicates lack of mental strength? Where is it written that we need to shake off a loss? While there’s something to be said for being a good loser in terms of not reacting to a loss with rude or thoughtless behavior that puts others in a awkward position, I think having an emotional reaction to not getting something that you want has a certain purity to it. If you understand the need to be compassionate with yourself about the distress of losing and if you practice working through that grief on small losses as they come up in your daily life, when one of the bigger losses hits, you’ll be capable of smoother sailing. Here are some ways of easing your way gently through the dejection of a loss:

1) Yes, you can say to yourself, you are sad and lonely in this loss. You will get to the point where you realize that these understandable yet unpleasant feelings can deliver a potent reminder that you might want to avoid them in the future by being better prepared, but, for right now, just feel sad.

2) Is your deep grief a reflection of your tendency to be an all-in performer? In other words, when you give it your all, a loss can feel more expensive. If so, can you take a moment to give yourself kudos for your high level of participation and enthusiasm?

3) If you have stuck with this website for long you are a person who believes in the value of an examined life. It can be extremely helpful in a losing situation to bring to mind the fact that winning tends to give you less data than does losing.

4) Is anyone around you really focused on your losing status? If so, why? Are they on your side and offering empathy, assessment and encouragement? Or are they gloating? If it is the former, they are not likely thinking less of you. If it is the latter, they have no redeeming social value to you.

5) You may have not had the right stuff right now, but that doesn’t mean you won’t ever have it. You have both the right and the responsibility to decide for yourself if you want to persevere.

6) Good losers are those folks who tend to have a fairly high satisfaction with their daily lives, meaning they are highly stipulated. If you struggle to lose graciously, take a brief inventory of your recent past. If you have been tilting at windmills too much lately, maybe you can forgive yourself for pouting a little around this most recent loss.

7) Worth repeating – you don’t learn nearly as much from a win as you do from a loss!

8) Doors are rarely completely closed. Even with a huge loss in your life, it is most often true that there are other ways still available to you to win what you are hoping to win. If you can figure out why you wanted that particular opportunity, then it is likely possible to find other ways to achieve it. There are always other auditions (maybe not on Broadway yet), other companies with promotion opportunities (maybe not the sexiest one yet) and other ways to serve your community (maybe not as mayor yet). Just remember the “why” of winning is so much more important than the “what.”

After giving yourself time to manage the grief a bit, you will be able to shift to a cognitive assessment of the loss with a little more sangfroid. Our ability to do this next step determines for us whether or not we can avoid that double loss that occurs when we throw the data out with the bathwater.

Again, I know you know all this – I’m just collecting these thinking processes here for you.

Now, everyone knows that you need to learn from mistakes, and the same is absolutely true for a loss. A kind debriefing needs to happen when things don’t go your way. What happened here? What caused this loss?

1) Did you actually lose? Who established the idea that, in this particular instance, there was a zero sum game going on? Who kept score? How was the winner determined?

2) Was the game one I actually wanted to play? As I described above, in a discussion with friends were you playing the crush-your-opponent-with-any-strategy-available game or the wouldn’t-it-be-nice-to-have-an-open-conversation game? Too often we let others establish what game is the best one to play.

3) If the loss is real, did I deserve to lose? If so, what is the world trying to tell me here? Are there other people with whom I can consult to double-check these results?

4) What external factors were at play here? Were the odds stacked against me for some reason in some way? Did Fate intervene?

5) What internal factors can I identify that may have tripped me up? Did I really want this win? Was I prepared? Did I overreach before I was ready? Was I looking for a shortcut to the top? Do I lack the right stuff here and need to rethink this effort?

6) What is the true cost of this loss? In other words, does it really matter to me relative to how I’m designing my life?

7) If the cost is high and for good reason, what can I do to cover the cost?

8) If the cost isn’t all that high, am I keeping this loss in perspective? A week from now will it matter?

9) Do I want to try again later? If not, why not? If so, why? And when?

10) What kind of relationship do I have with the person (team, company, etc.) who won? Am I able to keep envy in perspective or is it overrunning the relationship?

11) What would it have felt like to win? Can I attach to this image to motivate me to better prepare?

12) Am I a polymath expecting myself to be competitive with folks who may be more singularly focused?

A final and important point about losing: The past is gone. The loss is over. Living there makes no sense. But too often we do that by using that brilliant creativity of the human mind to relive and relive the dismay of having lost. That is what creates the sense of looser-hood within us. We only have to do one thing to escape Looserville – see the loss as an enormous clue about what to do next. A new future is just there, in that next moment or two, waiting for us to use it to our advantage with our hard-fought new insight. But how many of us ever spend time looking at the future as pure raw material?

Is there a part of you that wants to utter “Oh, shut up, please. Sometimes life just sucks, and the bad guys win and win and win. How many times can you be expected to dial back a bit on your dreams for your future before you are asking yourself to live in a tiny box of hopelessness?” You’re concerns are legitimate. It is extremely disheartening when the world tells you over and over and over that you are not going to get what you crave. This bitter disappointment harkens back to the lie we have so often been told – you can be anything you want to be. Sometimes the loss we face is the loss of belief in this false promise. Sometimes dreams don’t come true even when they are well grounded, when we fight hard for them and when our peers are achieving them. If you are one of the severely unlucky, and these people truly exist, you have a huge decision to make – to whom are you going to listen? Are you going to stay loyal to your heart’s desire and persevere or are you going to submit to the “message” Fate seems to be trying to get you to hear and give up on your dream? While it’s a good idea to solicit input from others around this issue, the question can only be answered by you. Please try to find people who can support you – not in the process of making the decision so much as in the process of living with the difficulty that the decision will precipitate no matter which way you choose to go. The people who can support you are those who understand that life is difficult, why life is difficult and that your decision is sublime in it heroic commitment to living in good faith.

And this is the place to say something about cheaters. When someone is victorious over us because they didn’t play fair, they don’t just steal a legitimate victory from us, they steal our sense of social safety. The double loss we experience will send us into a double dose of grieving, and often that grieving process can get hung up on rage (perhaps justified) for the injustice of the loss. What can we do with that righteous anger? We need to stop for a think. Most of us tend to cocoon ourselves a bit too much in a just world hypothesis, meaning that we believe that good guys tend to win and bad guys tend to lose. Cheaters remind us that we are less than ant-sized relative to the long arc of history. True, it may bend toward justice and we may experience many instances of fair play in our lives, but we cannot count on our world to reliably dispense justice on a case-by-case basis. A sensible thinking process would help us accept the reality of a non-contractual world without abdicating our commitment to act personally in a just manner, even if we are wearied by the need to do this repeatedly and often alone.

So we work to lose well no matter the circumstances.

In my mind, Nietzsche’s most famous aphorism (That which does not kill us makes us stronger.) is slightly misleading. I would change it to: That which does not kill us invites us to be stronger. Until and unless we accept the invitation to do the emotional and cognitive work described above, adversity (including loss) is just painful and, as such, it can leave us a much-reduced version of ourselves. We turn loss into triumph when we can metabolize the feelings associated with losing – disappointment, resentment, fear and so on – into working energy.

Chosen

A subset of winning is being chosen. Sometimes this happens for us randomly when the world drops in on us with an unexpected invitation. You’re sitting in your office minding your own business when your bosses’ boss comes in to tell you that your have been identified as the person to head a wild and crazy new project. Wow, you think to yourself, didn’t see THAT coming. Other times we get chosen because our hand is raised. Who doesn’t love receiving a letter that starts with “We are pleased to inform you that your application for…”

At its most basic, being chosen means that we have been seen and approved. A worldly gaze has swept across us, stopped and registered that we are worthy of being offered something. I’m almost convinced that the most important gift we want bestowed upon us at any point in time is to be chosen. Many of the benefits of being chosen are:

• Being chosen as stipulation: You can see how being chosen means being judged and found worthy, stipulating that who we are currently is worth saying “yes” to. The chooser believes we have the right stuff because we have been doing the right thing. This is wonderful. When someone chooses us we are more than a winner – we are seen as the best now and quite probably for some time to come. And the bigger the criteria for choice, the bigger the stipulation, with the size ranging from as tiny as a text to as huge as a marriage proposal. I think it can be said that being chosen is the ultimate stipulation because it incudes proof – I choose you and certify that with the resulting upgraded status.

• Being chosen as an opportunity: A huge part of the thrill of being chosen, of course, is due to the fact that being chosen comes with prizes – special privileges or opportunities or companionship. Again, these prizes range from small (a friend drops by with a bunch of peonies from her garden) to stratospheric (you’re put on the next team of astronauts to go to the moon.) BTW, it can be easy to take this Cracker Jacks aspect of being chosen for granted in the case of birth privilege. A wise person takes occasional inventory of all the ways Fate has chosen to make his or her life easier with prizes.

• Being chosen as a power shift: To be chosen reflects a slight power shift in that the world has just offered us a proposal. University of Oregon, for example, says it chooses us to be one of its students entering in the fall, and it hopes we will want to be a Duck come September. We all love our moments in the catbird seat when the world has said “yes” to us and is trying to beguile us into saying “yes” back.

• Being chosen as a respite from loneliness: There are two ways that being chosen can ease our sense of isolation – the message that someone has been thinking about us and the message that someone wants to spend time with us. In the first instance, even when the chooser doesn’t appear in our life, when we are picked by someone for something, we can carry the intimacy implied by that choice with us as a companionable memory. Like having a love letter tucked in our pocket, our chosen status can soothe us as we journey alone toward our goals. In the later case, very often when we are chosen, the prize is actual time spent with someone who matters to us. Both chosen states – thinking of you and being with you – help us feel less alone.

• Being chosen as a source of energy: All I-Thou relationships give us literal, physical energy, and being chosen is a robust I-Thou encounter. When we are selected we get psychologically pumped through an actual biochemical surge of neurotransmitters as well as a postural shift that signals our limbic system that all is well in our world. This power stance has been found to alter our hormonal levels, which leads to greater confidence. So when we are chosen our bodies squirt out their own rewarding biochemistry and we stand a little taller. More prizes!

• Being chosen as an end to suspense: Days spent waiting by the mailboxes of life are bleak indeed. When that acceptance letter finally comes, we are released from the misery of waiting and worrying and hoping. Our ship is in!

• Being chosen as a rescue from being left unchosen: Finally, when we are chosen, we are rescued from the sting of not being chosen. Whether we are left on the bench perhaps to be chosen later or outright rejected, it hurts when no one picks us.

As with most human activities, there is a quantity/quality equation to consider when it comes to being chosen. The benefits of being chosen will vary according to who is doing the choosing. We want to be chosen by the people who matter greatly to us and for the talents we most cherish in ourselves. When these two things are true, we are allowed in to do the things we most profoundly enjoy. But this is where some of the existential dilemmas arise. Who do you want to choose you and for what? When you are chosen, how do you react? How do we compare our options when criteria vary from situation to situation? How to we reconcile the value of stipulation from one highly respected individual relative to being chosen by a handful of anonymous folks? These issues are addressed in the articles on willpower, will to power and trust.

Image Management: A Double Edged Sword

The world is a dangerous and lonely place. All of us tiny and insignificant humans feel this as we navigate through a daily existence that is loaded with episodes of winning, losing and wanting to be chosen. One of our greatest advantages in the struggle to succeed is our ability to manage our image. Beyond the clothes we use to costume ourselves, our individual hairstyle choices and the car we drive, we work to constantly transmit a particular credibility out to our fellow humans in terms of what category we want to be seen to legitimately inhabit. Stop and think about the last hour of your life. How many things did you do to send a message out into the social world about who you are? Did you lean forward with a gentle facial expression to signal to someone that you are a good listener? Did you nod knowingly about a factoid that came up in conversation to prove that you, too, knew that fact? Did you stop on the way in from the mailbox to pull two tiny weeds disgracing your flowerbed? Did you deny yourself toast with butter and jam at breakfast because you’re watching your weight? Did you order a new gadget online? Did you speed up on your run when you saw another runner?

There is absolutely nothing wrong with managing your image. It can be said to be a form of respect for others by controlling the impact you have on them. So, yes, please wash the lunch off your face before you face me. Image management is also a legitimate attempt to give folks around you an accurate picture of who you are. No one wants to talk with a prince thinking he is a pauper. It is also sweet to want to have people see the best in you and to hide some of your messy bits.

One edge of the sword of image management, then, protects us from being misunderstood, underestimated and unappreciated, three awful states that indirectly damage our self-esteem. The back edge of the sword of image management is created by the collaborative nature of this aspect of being human. People most often believe what you are projecting and will then participate in a feedback loop to solidify your projected image. If you present yourself as someone who is comfortable with public speaking, for instance, your audience will feel relaxed when you give a talk. As a result, their calm receptivity will likely help you give a better lecture.

If the image you strive to present is closely aligned with your aspirational self, the collusion from the culture in perpetuating this image can be synergistically positive. Put another way, if the data that you are transmitting are solid and if this particular version of yourself is one you are sincerely working to create internally, all is well in the world. If not, a skew will start to form that will send who you are becoming further and further from whom you want to become. This is really not good. For instance, someone who was trained from childhood to appear completely self-reliant can find himself trapped in that image. People will assume that he genuinely doesn’t need anything from anyone and will treat him accordingly. The resulting loneliness might push him further away from people if he believes that others are not extending themselves toward him for other reasons such as stinginess or the fact that they dislike him.

Here are a few more dangers inherent in image management:

• Self-esteem debt: If you are enhancing your brand with falsely derived information, your self-esteem will take a hit because it can only be legitimately established using an accurate assessment of how you are doing right now. If this borrowing against the truth continues too long, you can build up such a deficit you will believe it is impossible to pay it back. Your ability to trust yourself will be tremendously compromised. You can actually end up having to live in the very place you were hoping to escape. As a blunt example, let’s say you present yourself as financially secure, you can fall into the habit of spending too much of your money to protect that image, have none left, and then have to live in reduced circumstances.

• Liar: Hyperbole, silence or outright falsehoods in the service of presenting yourself in a good light are understandable yet extremely risky. If you present yourself as someone who eats well but you know that, when unseen, you eat nothing but fast food, your ability to trust yourself or even know yourself will corrode. You will also be unable to trust your relationships with others because they have been based on too many untruths. Do they like me or do they like who I pretend to be? Do they even know me? So even though it is understandable, disingenuous image management is too dangerous to ignore.

• Distancing: It’s important to be alert to the fact that image management often interferes with many relationship skills. The ability to be effectively assertive, to provide a thorough apology, to routinely build trust and to fight cleanly all rest on a certain level of interpersonal transparency. These skills also require us to step outside of ourselves to see how we are affecting others. Both of these stances – transparency and perspective – are difficult to achieve when too much of our energy is spent on controlling how others see us.

• Stakes race: How do people manage their image when the other person in a face-to-face interaction has no interest in obtaining information about them? Most often they escalate. What this can mean is that the person working to manage their image can get pulled into greater and greater deceit as he or she tries unsuccessfully to “prove” the unprovable to a disinterested other.

• Maintenance effort: The greater the falsehood, the more fragile the con. The more fragile the con, the more you have to remember, enact and protect.

We all do a little of this all the time, but even a little image management takes work – work that we could, ironically, use to actually create ourselves in the image we crave.

When you walk out your front door you are a mannequin representing the brand that you believe reflects who you are. You are constantly managing your image. If you want to be able to do this very important human skill well, you need a coherent relationship with it. The trick is to balance the need for intimacy and the need for truth. Two psychologists, Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham created the Johari Window that elegantly demonstrates this balancing act with a four-quadrant model. The four cells each describe what happens to communication between folks depending on how well you know yourself and how well others know you. I highly recommend giving it a quick look-see here.

As with so many psychological/existential concepts – authenticity demands that we learn how to engage in the multi-step process that is imagine management with clear intentions. Who are we trying to be? How well do we know ourselves? How much do we trust the world? How much truth can each of our relationships handle? And on and on.

Yes, we are all entitled to privacy so that sharing all our warty insides is rarely necessary. Yes, we are all entitled to put our best foot forward in aspirational hopefulness even if it may be a bit misleading at times. And, yes, it is impossible to monitor ourselves so relentlessly that our image management is always well deliberated and intentional. No one can truly say that they know themselves well enough to be certain that what they are presenting to the world is accurate. But self promotion is like any type of branding in that the more accurate the transmission the more likely it will be that you will have “satisfied customers.”

Given all these degrees of difficulty, what can we do to ensure the most coherent management of our image? Because image management is a form of defensiveness and we know that defensiveness involves control of data inflow, what we can do to be careful with how opaque or misleading we are is to watch how much the world around us is changing us. If we start to feel too insulated from those around us and may worry that we are becoming entrenched in who we have always been, we will want to look at how much energy we are putting into not letting others see us as we truly are. If we start to feel too lonely, we may need to rethink how guarded we have been in conversations and try loosening up a bit. As I described in the article on trust, intimacy is fostered when there is an appropriate level of disclosure between people. You cannot like someone if you don’t know them and you can’t know someone if you don’t get at least a peek at who they are inside.

So what does all this discussion about image management have to do with triumph you ask. Harking back to the way I defined triumph in the introduction, we can feel genuine ownership of our victories only if they are based on who we actually are and have been awarded for movement toward the direction we actually want to go. With an overly managed image, it can be difficult to know how to interpret the data of a loss or even of a win. You can also mislead your world to such an extent that it won’t know how or when to chose you. You work and work and work to impress your boss with how much of a team player you are. If you get promoted to team leader but are actually much more comfortable working alone, what have you won?

Conclusion

When we lose we’re not a loser and when we win we don’t get to rule the world. In either case, the world is just letting us know what it thinks about our readiness to proceed, a function of how we are doing relative to other folks and how many slots are available atop our desired podium. When we win we carefully assess the apparent victory to assure ourselves that we chose the game for the right reasons. When our requests for advancement are met with rejection, we are well served if we can take a moment to process the disappointment, feel crummy and then try to move more quickly into data analysis mode. We cannot let a sense of failure or envy over someone else’s win make us so uncomfortable we retreat.

By and large I think the world very often gets it right when it awards us with wins, losses and acceptance of our managed image. Research suggests that the wisdom of the collective can be quite trustworthy and its accuracy increases significantly when the selection group is both well trained and experienced. So when you send your best efforts off to be evaluated by the world, try to tolerate the feedback you receive. When rejections pile up, explore whether it’s because you have yet to have the right stuff at the right time or it’s because you are barking up the wrong tree.

So we can end with more refined questions: Did you do what you intended to do today and how did your world react to what you did? Are your internal judgments aligning with the external feedback you are getting? Do precious and impressive people tell you that you are precious and impressive? The closer you get to answering these questions with a “Yes!” the greater the likelihood that you are living a solidly self-constructed life.

We don’t have to be a winner to triumph. We triumph when we look inward to get to know our unique selves in order to design an appropriate future memory. We triumph when we find a trailhead that will take us toward something in life that we deeply value. We triumph when we can analyze the data to be had from the external feedback our world offers up to us.

In other words, all roads to triumph travel through the land of will to power.