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One of the unique things about HR is our exposure to a lot of losers.
Hold on now, let me pull that back. I already started this post in the hole. I am going to have to dig myself out and quick before you go off to other posts that praise everything you do!
Being a loser holds a bad connotation in many people’s heads. Nobody wants to be a loser. Nobody. People don’t aspire to be losers. And if they are currently a loser, nobody ever w
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Comments
09.19.08
6. The biggest lessons in your life are seldomly from your biggest successes. They come when you crash and burn.
7. When I was starting out in my career, and it sucked, my dad gave me this sage-like advice: Your career is like a toilet, you never know when someone will come along and flush. He was right. Everytime I've thought this is the worst thing ever, someone or something has come along and everything changed.
8. I don't mean to get too Deepak Chopra on you but my last item on the list is this - you are where you are supposed to be when you are supposed to be there. And you will stay there until you learn your lesson. Therefore, if the same shitty thing keeps happening over and over, there's a lesson there. And once you learn that lesson, the shitty thing will stop happening.
09.19.08
Lance - cool post, I like you're writing style. And personally, to lose is win if you ask me. On a less Taoist-tosser note - a good complement to this article might be http://snurl.com/3rmvy
09.19.08
Lance - Good post!! It's great to remember that both losing and winning are temporary states and you should keep pushing to be a winner consistently.
GenerationXpert beat me to it and she's absolutely right: you usually learn much more from a loss than from a win.
09.19.08
Lance, I know this is a mostly pointless comment, but I read this post on your site yesterday and absolutely loved it, and I'm so glad it's posted #1 on Brazen Careerist today.
Great job! There's so much to love here.
09.19.08
I love the distinction of the temporal aspect of states of "winning" and "losing." So true. No one ever stays on top long, and you can achieve a winner's goals if you work hard at them.
Also, I have long considered other's success to be a good thing for me. If my neighbor can achieve something, so can I! I found that in the highly competitive world of opera (where I spent my undergrad) there was so much cattiness and fear of "losing," which I thought was pointless. Are you losing? Get better.
Also - I think the current climate of winning and losing is getting some strange treatment. Did you hear of that kid who was kicked off the little league team for being too good of a pitcher? Since when do we punish winners? We need these people to lead the way by example, so we are that much more likely to be winners ourselves.
09.19.08
@Gen X - Both hilarious and useful. That's just my style.
@Seamus - That post is a great coupler to my post. Hopefully a few people will follow the link over and read that.
@Ian - Yeah, it is a great point (one that I didn't even bring up). In my brilliance, I missed one of the best ways of being an effective loser is learning from losing.
@Monica - You have to admire BC when they make the right choice to put my posts up at #1. Ha!
@jrandom - I do love despair.com. My favorite is the stupidity one. I want to send it to candidates that send me resumes multiple times per week for the same position.
@Milena - Two great points from your comment. If someone can accomplish something, so can you. It should give us hope! And I did hear about that kid who was too good. I just have no decent response for that sort of response. When did we become a bunch of pansies?
09.19.08
Unfortunately, holding those who can excel back isn't a new thing. How many schools have lost funding to gifted programs, whether they're for highly intelligent students, gifted artists, or gifted athletes.
Actually, thinking about it, it kind of relates to your topic. It seems as a society we're so concerned with making sure that nobody loses, that everyone becomes a "winner", and those who can excel have a much harder time finding the opportunities to do so.
And going right to the top to GenXpert's comment:
What you're saying doesn't even need to be taken all new-agey. If you take the viewpoint that we are responsible for our own choices, and that our choices and actions get us where we are, then the lessons we learn aren't the result of anything divine, but really learning from the results of the choices we've made. When we learn from our mistakes, we should (ideally) no longer repeat them, allowing us to move on.
09.19.08
Four quotes come to mind:
"If at first you don't succeed,quit!"
"Be careful how you treat others on your way up the ladder as you will meet up with them again on the way down."
"If I were doing half as good as you, you would be doing twice as good as me."
"You really aren't paranoid if everyone is out to get you."
09.26.08
To follow up Capital,
"May the Lord make my words tender and sweet, for I have no idea when I might have to eat them."
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