Losing

Hardly the first thing that comes to mind when we are asked how to live a life of leadership, integrity, faith, and excellence, is losing. It is not a pretty subject.

Yet life is as much about losing as it is about winning. Of the 32 teams that vied for the FIFA World Cup, 31 lost. There is only one champion in Wimbledon or the U.S. Open. Only one won our last presidential elections, eight lost. There are hundreds of losers in both local and national polls. Every day, we lose a contract, an argument, a game, a place in traffic, a customer. We rarely win all the time.

Still, we seldom talk about losing. Often we deny it. We give excuses. “I was cheated.” “The guy was on steroids.” “He never loved me.” “My boss (or my wife) doesn’t understand me.” Whether it’s a lost job, a friend, a tooth, a contest, or woe – lost hair, losing is entwined in the idea of failure, pain, and humiliation. Not pretty subjects.

It is our response to losing, however, that colors and clarifies our lives. The lessons we learn from losing help surmount the sameness of every day. It allows us to see a purpose behind the drab, dreary details of our lives.

We need the darkness to see the stars, it has been said.

One of the biggest winners, and leaders, of our time is Steve Jobs, father of the Mac and modern icons iPod, iPhone, iPad and who knows what next. At the peak of his creative powers, Jobs lost his job at Apple; he was fired by the same guy he had hired several months back. “I didn’t know you could be fired from a company you founded,” he now recalls, somewhat amused. But back then he was 30, jobless, humiliated.

He refused to wallow in the loss, though. He promptly picked himself up to invent “Next” which he later sold to Apple, that then got him back to the company that had fired him. He also founded Pixar, which birthed “Toy Story,” a trail-blazer in film animation.

Van Gogh failed as a preacher, his first love. What could our world have been if Jobs, Van Gogh and history’s long list of losers just refused to rise above their momentary failures?

Losing allows us to see the world from other people’s eyes, especially from God’s eyes. When accepted in humility, we can turn our losing moments into self-discovery, strength and creative energy, which all mold character, the first building block of leadership.

Losing brings us closer to the ground, where leaders should be.