By David Hegg
With the Major League Baseball season heating up and the political season in full swing, our nation is again all about winning and losing. We are, after all, a country of competitors, and it has been ingrained in us from birth that winning is everything and failing can’t be tolerated. Just ask the scores of coaches who get fired at the end of every season. In America, it is “win or go home.”
As a child, I remember learning to play checkers with my grandfather. He was a real competitor and never let anyone win. One day, after he had beaten me several games straight, I made what I thought was a straightforward, sensible request. “Grandpa,” I said in childish grammar, “teach me how to win you.” What I learned the hard way was that winning doesn’t just happen. You have to work hard to gain the skills and intelligence to win more often than you lose. And you’ll most likely have to endure a load of failure on the way to victory. Simply put, you have to lose to win to learn what not to do to be good at what must be done.
Years ago, I had a friend who played for the Los Angeles Lakers for several seasons. After retiring from the game, he made a career of training other basketball players in the finer points of shooting a basketball. He told me he made all his students force some bad shots during their practice games so they would learn what it felt like to make bad choices. By insisting they attempt ill-conceived shots, they discovered what a good shot was and what it takes to be in good shooting position. In other words, he needed them to experience failure to know what it took to succeed.
But today, many refuse to acknowledge that risking failure is necessary to achieve future success. We must be willing to try and fail, try harder and fail again, and keep trying until success is gained. In other words, we have to be willing to go “all in” and lose if we ever expect to master life with all of its variables, complexities and challenges. But today, too many are failure-adverse. If they can’t win, they won’t try. If there is pain involved, they won’t get involved. The prevalent attitude of entitlement is making it the norm to expect success without sweat, victory without pain, and happiness without the hard work of perseverance.
I once had a professor who told us, “Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.” He meant that we often have to endure a sharp learning curve along the path to accomplishment. Great things are usually hard things. Hard things take time and courage to master. And too many who learn this hard truth stop trying.
But those who start and steadfastly refuse to quit will often find their tenacity rewarded with progress and, eventually, success. They refused to allow some poor performances to thwart their dream of winning. That’s what historians usually refer to as an iron will that separates the winners from those who rarely had what it took to win.
Today, I call it grit. It is the grinding determination to press on when every thought in your mind and bone in your body screams quit! Grit is the X factor. If you’ve got it, you consider perseverance a daily practice. If not, you’ve probably already settled for something that fits your nature. But it’s not too late to conquer your belief that winning is out of reach.
No fear is more destructive than the fear of failure. It keeps so many of us from trying something that, while offering benefits, is too hard at first. But the more brutal truth is that life doesn’t wait for the timid. The days we spend refusing to attempt the spectacular can never be reclaimed. Today is the only day we have, and it can best be spent pursuing something that matters, regardless of its challenges and obstacles. Don’t be afraid to lose. You’ll find that perseverance – grit! – can make losing the onramp to success.
Local resident David Hegg is senior pastor of Grace Baptist Church. “Ethically Speaking” appears Sundays.
