Growing up in a very competitive family I often heard phrases like ‘Winner takes All’ and ‘Second place is the first loser’ or what quickly became my personal mantra, ‘The person who says winning isn’t everything has never won anything.’ I actually have said that out loud on several occasions. If anyone reading this has ever heard me or anyone else utter that phrase, I truly apologize on the behalf of all of us. Don’t get me wrong, my family is amazing and truly meant well. They tried to impress how important is to be the best at everything you did, from athletics to academics. Second best just wasn’t acceptable.
As I went through life I realized that these expectations were not all that realistic. In actuality, we all win some and lose some. This got me thinking about how I wanted to raise my own children.
I started giving some thought to how competitiveness and winning and losing truly impact our lives. How much good and conversely, damage can winning and losing truly do? Is it affecting our overall health and wellness in a positive or negative way? Does winning actually make us happier and healthier? Is it really better to have tried and failed than to never have tried at all?
There are a lot of conflicting opinions out there.
I recently read an interesting article on Jim Kelly, the former quarterback for the Buffalo Bills; the article was based on an interview Susan Spencer of CBS news had conducted. Starting in 1990, Kelly did something no other quarterback in history has ever done: He led his team to FOUR straight Super Bowls.
It hasn’t happened since, and Kelly said, “It will never happen again. There’s no way. To do what we did, I’m very proud to say I was quarterback of those teams.”
Kelly has never watched a single one of his game films from these Super Bowls., citing that he has no reason to relive any of those losses. He says, “I’m at ease now, knowing what we accomplished, even though we didn’t win them. I fell all right with that.”
Not just in sports or academics, but in life in general, we try to be stoic, and console ourselves with positive thoughts, remembering all the lessons we have learned and ultimately how we played the game. As that other saying goes, winning isn’t EVERYTHING.
Well, then again, IS it?
Concurrently, Spencer interviewed Psychology professor Ian Robertson, Of Trinity College in Dublin. Robertson has a very different opinion of how winning affects us. According to him, “Winning’s probably the single most important thing in shaping people’s lives.”
He sounds a lot like my own family.
In studies Robertson conducted, he talks about what the affects of winning truly are. He states that all species have hierarchies. He told Spencer,”Your position in that hierarchy will determine your health, your mental function and your mood.”
In his book, “The Winner Effect,” what makes winning so much fun is primarily chemical. “Winning increases testosterone, which in turn increases the chemical messenger dopamine, and that dopamine hits the reward network in the brain, which makes us feel better,” says Robertson.
Turns out felling better can even help us live longer.
According to studies conducted by Duke University Neuroscientist Dr. Scott Huettel; winners do live longer. The studies showed that Nobel Prize winners outlive Nobel nominees by over two years, baseball players inducted into the Hall of Fame outlive those players not inducted by two-three years and Academy Award-winners live, on average, four years longer than other actors.
Well, what does all this mean? Does it mean if I try and fail my overall happiness and potentially my life expectancy will be negatively affected? Will our children live less happy existences if they go through life not in first place? I don’t think I can answer that for any of us, but it is an interesting thing to consider.
After careful consideration the following thoughts are what I want to focus on going forward and hopefully instill in my own children.
You see, at the conclusion of her interview with Jim Kelly, Spencer asked if he was given the chance to rewrite his own history, would he have rather played in those four Super Bowl games and lose them all, or goes to only one and wins that?
He chose the four games. “Because there are a lot of guys that have won one Super Bowl. But to be able to quarterback that team four times shows what we have inside our hearts. It shows toughness, the resiliency, and how we never, ever gave up.”
The Hall of Famer translated this ‘toughness and resilency,’ into his post football career. Not only has he been successful in his business ventures, he founded The Hunter James Kelly Research Institute at the University of Buffalo. Here, neuroscientists study Krabbe Disease, the disease that claimed Kelly’s young sons’ life. He has truly made a difference.
He is definitely an inspirational ‘loser.’
So I have to disagree with Professor Robertson, that winning is the most important thing in shaping our lives .Instead I think I’ll take a lesson from Jim Kelly’s playbook, it seems his biggest victory may be that he has learned to not only live just to live with his losses, but empower himself from them.