Sometimes You Win--Sometimes You Learn: Life's Greatest Lessons Are Gained from Our Losses

by John C. Maxwell

That’s what happens when people won’t pay the price of

learning by being willing to change.

leaders resist change as much as followers do—unless the change is their idea!

“For every thing we gain we lose something.” We like gaining, but we don’t like losing.

Unfortunately, if you resist change, you are trading your potential to grow for your comfort. No change means no growth.

The person who insists on using yesterday’s methods in today’s world won’t be in business tomorrow.

If you want to get better, you need to be willing to change.

Tenacity is a fantastic quality. But tenacity without a willingness to change and make necessary adjustments becomes dogmatism and leads to dead ends.

As I grow older, I have come to realize that most of our regrets will not be a result of what we did. They will come because of what we could and should have done but didn’t do. The final price we pay is called missed opportunity, and that is a heavy cost.

They hurt enough that they have to They learn enough that they want to They receive enough that they are able to

If you want to see positive change in your career, quit looking for a better employer and become a better employee.

Changing my attitude. That is completely within my control, and the beauty of it is that this one change can be a major factor in changing my life for the positive. In controlling my own attitude and choosing to think correctly,

Successful people don’t allow their feelings to determine their behavior. They behave their way into feeling

“I make plenty of mistakes and I’ll make plenty more mistakes, too. That’s part of the game. You’ve just got to make sure that the right things overcome the wrong ones.”

I believe the key to being free from the stranglehold of past failures and mistakes is to learn the lesson and forget the details. That brings not only mental advancement but emotional freedom.

What I’ve discovered is that I still make mistakes and face losses, but I learn more quickly from them and am able to move on much more quickly on an emotional level.

What a truth...

“If I had my life to live over again, I’d make the same mistakes, only sooner.”

“Do something every day that you don’t want to do,” advised author Mark Twain. “This is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.”

“Have you not succeeded? Continue! Have you succeeded? Continue!”

If you want to develop maturity and gain the value of learning, you need to learn to give up some things today for greater gains tomorrow.

I realized that I couldn’t give my children self-esteem. I could love them unconditionally, but they had to find their self-esteem themselves through their actions and choices.

“I tried and failed. I tried again and succeeded.” What more could a person be expected to do?

Winning Isn’t Everything, But Learning Is

Microsoft founder Bill Gates observed, “Success is a lousy teacher. It makes smart people think they can’t lose.” It also makes them think they don’t need to learn.

“You haven’t learned anything until you take action and use it.”

If you want to be successful, you must be willing to fail, and you must be intent on learning from those failures. If we are willing to repeat this fail-and-learn process, we become stronger and better than we were before.

you’re willing to consider failure as a blessing in disguise and bounce back, you’ve got the potential of harnessing one of the most powerful success forces.” —Joseph Sugarman

Political theorist Benjamin Barber said, “I divide the world into learners and nonlearners. There are people who learn, who are open to what happens around them, who listen, who hear the lessons. When they do something stupid, they don’t do it again. And when they do something that works a little bit, they do it even better and harder the next time. The question to ask is not whether you are a success or a failure, but whether you are a learner or a nonlearner.”

Growth is a process of trial and error, experimentation and improvement. The failed experiments are as much of that process as the ones that work.