Winners are those who practice winning everytime. Yes, it is not like winning something is not under our control . I would debate that winning is always under our control.
Ofcourse if we are chasing an objective result, you will have a boolean answer of yes or no , did you win or not. But that isnt the nature of our work, life , relationships or plans or anything for that matter. The outcomes more often than not are not binary
When you start a task , you either accomplish it exactly the way you thought it would be or a part of it. Sometimes though you end up doing something completely different. That is the futile nature of whatever we do, so having a binary result as a definition of winning is also incorrect.
Then how is winning under our control ,when the results are not under our control? That is exactly what I hope to explain. For us to progress, we need to win more often than not. A win is nothing but progress. Progress can be bite sized or hill sized, but is progress and hence a win can be either also.
If you have made progress of whatever type in what you do , you have won. Sometimes we make huge strides and that is a more resounding win than a lesson learnt in doing a complete failure. But you still have a win , because this lesson will lead to resounding wins in the future, you have set the basis of a future win and that is progress.
And hence winning is an attitude and habit. We need to inculcate a habit of winning by winning more often. However small it may be. And if we do any task, we learn something about it. Looking for those little lessons, signs of progress is the habit of winning. We will have more wins in more successful endeavours of ours and less wins in failures. But there are wins, and if we make it our business to find our wins, our minds will be tuned to the idea of winning.
We will crave for wins but also we will find wins faster. We run faster when we know we are for sure going ahead. Doubts hold us back. How do we know we are going in the right direction? by winning more often. By finding our wins even in the more calamitous failures of our life.
If we make a habit of finding even the smallest strains of progress in our daily lives, we would win more often than that. As James clear says in atomic habits , even if we make 1% progress everyday of a year, by the end of the year we would be 37 times ahead of when we were at the beginning of the year. Habits, progress and therefore wins always compound. Once we cross a certain threshold our wins become bigger and more spectacular. Similarly if we hold back ,our fall becomes spectacular once we cross a threshold.
In my mind , my end goal is to be able to keep emotions aside even in the worse of moments and look for the little wins in those. I call it the "lobster theory". I will credit my friend Ankit for helping me with the name. But what it means is that there is something good even in the worse moments of our lives. Like the sinking of the sea boat is the worse of disasters but atleast the fish and lobsters onboard the ship who would have been dinner would have returned to their habitat. Now I am no marine biologist and cannot vouch for the validity of this specific example. All I am trying to say is to find a value in everything we face which shows us the signs of progress.
These signs of progress are what will help us compound our wins in the future. Now why is it for us to look for those wins? It is to register those wins in our minds, use those lessons for our next endevour. These will be the foundations of whatever we do next in our lives. These are the multipliers in our equations which will lead to compounding results.
These are the multipliers which will move the needle of success in the right direction, it will make us a better person and human being. It is the human culture to learn from everything around us which has helped us evolve to who we are now and where we are now.
So win often, every day , in everything we do. Don't worry about the size or significance of the win. That is compeltely pointless.
