I Don't Like Losing
What a Stupid Title. Who Likes Losing? What Revelation Could Possibly Be Shared on This Groundbreaking Topic?
Nothing.
Remember, I am in the valley. These posts are not what they used to be. Remember when they were funny?
Ok, that made me laugh. I was trying to weave that into the last post but couldn't do it.
Back to the losing.
I may have one of the best attitudes towards competition. I love competition, I love playing games, and when I play, I play to win. But when the game finishes I honestly don't care if I won or lost. In the moment it was important but after the moment has been enjoyed it fades into insignificance.
Let me prove it
Whenever I am with my friend Dave, we play badminton. We are two overweight 40-year-old dudes that are terrible at badminton. We have some skills, but if the courts are busy, it's clear that we are the worst players there. This is even funnier when you look around and notice that 23% of the players are over the age of 70, and they still could smoke us. Dave and I live 16,000 miles away from each other, so we don't play a lot, but I got to play him in November last year and again in January this year. I remember when we played in January, the question was asked, 'who won last time?'. I remember when we played in November, we fought so flipping hard, and it was an epic victory... I just have no idea who won. Now that I think of it, who won in January?
This attitude carries over to sports I watch. I don't watch a lot of sport anymore, but there was a time that I did. When I was young, I just wanted my AFL team (it's football, but not the kind you're thinking of) to win the grand final. Fast forward to 8 years ago, I was sitting in bed on a Sunday morning, and my wife said, 'wasn't the AFL grand final yesterday?' (Note: she doesn't care, but it's a big deal for my family, and they often talk about it). I forgot about the final, so I looked it up on my phone and saw that my team was one of the teams in
the grand final.
'Oh, honey. My team was in the grand final... Oh, they won... what is #threepeat?'
It turned out that they had won for the THIRD YEAR IN A ROW.
Today I still support different sports teams and I would happily watch a game but if they get ahead too much I will start supporting the other team. I dont' want my team to win, I want the game to be a great story.
I have upset my sports fanatic readers.
Only joking, sports fanatics don't read blogs.
Hey, the humour is coming back.
But what does this have to do with losing?
I woke up today and realised that in another area, we had lost a significant amount of money. I won't go into detail, and it is nothing sinister, but we had plans, and due to a mixture of ignorance, bad luck, and more ignorance, this will cost us a bomb. It was avoidable, but we missed that boat over 2.5 years ago. It sailed by, and we didn't even notice.
This has been on point for this valley season. There have been a number of other events with unnecessary costs that could have been avoided but had to be paid. I didn't really handle them well, especially the biggest one. Well, this one is 20 times bigger than that one.
But, funny enough, I am handling this so much better. What made the difference?
This blog.
I am not sure how you write, but I have no idea what is going to come out when I start any post. I had no idea I would talk about badminton with Dave or the Threepeat story when this started, but that is where it led. So, yesterday I knew I needed to write, and I did. The process of defining valley season actually helped me. I hadn't verbalised it before, and it wasn't until I did that I could paint a picture. Sure, it is incomplete, different from the pictures I usually paint, but at least I knew what I was dealing with. The process of sharing was therapy, and it is helping.
So what is the life lesson?
I told you I don't do them anymore, but feel free to imagine an inspirational paragraph about sharing your journey with others helps lighten the load, etc. etc. Oh, and it can also link back to the whole losing part but put it in a positive light. That would have been awesome.
But I have got nothing.
Copy and paste this into Chat GPT, and it will finish it for you.