(Not) A Winner
don’t really know if this is still a thing, but not long ago I had heard (and it’s been quite a joke on several television shows as of late) about certain sports teams giving everybody who participated an award, rather than just the winners of the game, so that nobody could feel left out.
As much as this sounds heartwarming, the reality is, it’s very dangerous, because it promotes the idea that a, everybody is always a winner, but b, that you don’t have to work for something you want. If everybody in the world got the same prize for doing something, what would be the point of trying to better yourself, you’ll get the same accolades, the same pay, the same everything, so why even bother working harder for the same pay off? Worse still, it furthers the idea that failure is somehow a bad thing.
We’ve fostered this idea in our children for decades now, that failing or being a failure is somehow the worst thing you can be. We blatantly ignore the fact that everybody fails and that isn’t a bad thing, because it encourages you to do better. Thomas Edison failed a thousand times to create a lightbulb before he created the lightbulb, that is virtually unchanged from his time ’til now. Failure is what we make of it. I must have created at least twelve blogs all of which were failures until I finally created this one and started to get followers and started to really get likes and comments, even books fail to go where we hope they will. Books published and self published, fail all the time, you know what doesn’t fail? Banks, because we’re too scared to find out what would happen if we let them. Everything else in life, fails, and you know what, it betters them. It makes them stronger, makes them do better, and eventually they will succeed.
Everybody can’t be a winner all the time, it just isn’t realistic, it isn’t fair to children to let them believe that they will never fail, when what we should be teaching them is to dust themselves off, and get back up on their feet when they do fail. To try harder, do better, and know that they will succeed, as long as they don’t give up. Because it’s only when we’re so terrified of failure that we don’t move, that we really fail on a massive scale. It is then that we are permanent failures. Otherwise, failure is temporary, and a necessary learning experience.
