What Are You Going To Do When You Lose?

Let’s face it—losing sucks. All losing sucks. Losing that candidate you’ve been working on for months; losing that proposal you thought you had won; losing an argument; losing an election; or losing that special someone to another—whatever it is, it doesn’t feel very good. It’s a rejection. And rejection hurts.

If you’ve never lost before, I applaud your awesomeness. You are truly in rarified air—keep it up. For the rest of us “losers,” we’ve been given a gift—though it might not always feel like it in the moment. It’s the gift of perspective. It’s the gift a re-examination. And that gift can ultimately lead to great discoveries.

One of my first jobs was as a telemarketer selling newspaper subscriptions by phone. For four hours, four evenings a week, I would make between 100 to 140 phone calls a night. And I would lose—a lot. One sale an hour was considered successful. So every hour, I was rejected or hung up on 25 to 40 times. Only once would someone say “yes.”

Turnover in telemarketing is high because no one likes rejection. For me, that one “yes” energized me to get to the next “yes.” At the end of evenings, after hearing “no” nearly 100 times, I would think about what I could have done differently to turn just one more of those “no’s” into a “yes.” Just one more “yes” an evening—just one more “yes” an hour—and I would go from average to awesome.

So the next night, I would take what I learned the day before and apply it. And I continued to do that. Every night I would have to face losing. Some ideas worked, some didn’t. But over time, I went from four to eight a night, doubling my commissions. At 16, that worked out nicely—I could buy more cassette tapes for my car stereo. But it also taught me that by looking at what wasn’t working, I could make adjustments that ultimately led to success. However, the catch was that each night, I had to admit and recognize one important fact—I was losing.

Too many people often focus on the negative of being rejected, of something not working out how they thought it would and not everyone agreeing with them. But rarely do people ask themselves, “Why?” They never asked themselves what they could I have done differently.  Instead, some people just blame everything and everyone else. They never do any self-examination.

At one of my first corporate jobs, we had an initiative that was not successful. We had what they call “A Lessons Learned” meeting where we reviewed the entire program, got feedback from everyone involved—including the customers—so we could learn from our mistakes.  Losing gave us the gift of knowledge to make different and better decisions on future projects.

However, something that I see today in business, in politics and in my social circles, is that not a lot of people handle losing well. Losing sucks. You’re not supposed to be happy about it. But you have to at least acknowledge that it did happen and that you weren’t on the winning side. Only then can you start to make the changes that can lead to your next success. Blaming everyone else without the self-reflection will never lead you to improve and find that winning formula.

Here are some great clichés to help you out:

Admitting you have a problem is the first step.

Insanity: Doing the same thing, and expecting different results.

Learn from your mistakes.

The biggest lesson I learned from losing is this: I don’t like it. But when it happens, I accept it so that I can begin to change what I’m doing so it doesn’t happen again. Because if I do, there’s a heck of a lot more cassette tapes out there just waiting for me.