Mistakes offer lessons, but the greatest teacher of all, the biggest kahuna as Hawaiians would say, is the Loss. Where did I go wrong? What could have been done better? Or the classic “What Happened?” that you hear from a knocked out fighter. A lot of times it is the subtlest adjustment that can be the difference between winning & losing. Sometimes an entire system needs to be reevaluated & you need to go from the boardgame back to the drawing board.
The Loss is a critical character moment. An error in a crucial strategic moment in the game may have led to this L, but failing to see the loss as an opportunity for growth may be a more grave mistake. Accepting a need to improve is an act of humility. Refusing to believe that you bear any fault is arrogance. Dismissing another’s win over you is toxic to yourself by severing connection with an opponent & hindering your own development.
That L can feel like death. This may be true because a part of you did die: Your ego. I never just let children win, for the reason of breaking them through that stage of ego-centrism. But when they do prevail over me, my own ego gets checked by being defeated by a child, sometimes even at my own game.
We all need to learn to take our Ls in the various ways life gives them to us. Games give us endless experience of confronting that fear of failure by inevitably guaranteeing failure. As bullriders would say, it’s not a matter of if, but of when & how bad.
Losses in competitive play are inevitable. For each L that you take, someone walks away with a W. That can be the best outcome if you are willing to get over yourself. You don’t have to make every opponent your arch nemesis mortal enemy in your mind that seeks to establish eternal dominance through each victory. Hopefully they aren’t too much different than yourself in being someone trying to have a good time through a good game. If you lose & they win, the ultimate goal of having a partner wanting to play again has been naturally & positively reinforced, assuming you didn’t throw a temper tantrum upon defeat. This is where the classic childhood lesson of ‘don’t be a sore loser’ becomes self-evident. For some, it hasn’t been firmly established & you can tell by their passive aggressive dismissive remarks like ‘you just got lucky.’ Even if they did get lucky, luck is an accepted & sometimes most exciting part of any game. So whisper words of wisdom & let it be.
Although graciously taking an L can have a long term social advantage in reinforcing your opponent’s will to play again, I am not advocating intentionally losing for this sake. This would compromise the integrity of the game. Even if you are playing air hockey on a 1st date with your beloved, they will have more respect for you if you shut them out than if you let them win.
Players develop in time. Losses & mistakes are a part of that process. Once a player can understand the error of their plays that lead to those losses, a much more mature & worthy adversary they become. A good farmer once said ‘every season you will learn something that you’ll never do again.’ Put this in play. Game to game like season to season cultivates expert wisdom from every mistake, disaster, & failure.
