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© Copyright 2001, Jim Loy
In Are You a Winner?, I agreed with the advice that "Winning isn't everything." Now I am about to tell you that winning really is (almost) everything, for a while. Winning is not important, really. But, while you are competing, winning is very important. Noncompetitive people may find that distasteful and puzzling. But I think winning should be important for them too, in life. In life, you may be competing against other people, but you are really competing against life itself, and against yourself. If you are to succeed in whatever you do, winning over the obstacles must be important to you. You want to be good at you job, have a good relationship with someone, be a good parent, be good at your hobby, be happy, then you have to defeat the obstacles thrown at you by life. Winning is almost everything, when you attack these obstacles. And life goes on, and we relax until the next crisis.
A friend of mine is a nurse who pretends not to understand competitive people. But she tells me that she is a good nurse. As a good nurse, she sometimes deals with disease and death. She and the patient are very competitive when facing these opponents, disease and death. Winning is almost everything, while this competition goes on.
In the title of this article, I said "almost everything." We don't cheat. We back off from doing serious damage. We back off from what is truly ugly. Winning isn't that important. We have to live with ourselves. We want the respect of others. And cheaters get burned, they really do.
In sports, we often compete against other people. This is an artificial test that we accept, to test our skills. It is artificial, but it also reflects life. We put yourself on the line, and see how we perform. We test our skills; we test our dedication, we test our bodies, we test our minds, we even test our luck. And we keep score, to see how we measure up. In life we can't always see how we measure up; we can fool ourselves. So in most sports, we keep score, and see if we were fooling ourselves. Winning is almost everything, for just that moment, and then we relax.