How do you balance the desire to win with the importance of learning from failures and setbacks?

Question

Drew Wartenburg · Answer

How do you balance the desire to win with the importance of learning from failures and setbacks? Approaching competition with a desire and a will to win is an important characteristic for anyone that's going to compete. At the same time, the fact that there is only one winner in any race means that the majority of the time an individual is going to be disappointed or is going to fall short of an absolute win. There are lots of opportunities to learn from failure. I wouldn't call it failure necessarily. Maybe I'd call it disappointment and setback. And a lot of times, those outings where you fall short of a win, it's going to be easier to reflect, find things that are lessons or aspects that you can work on than when you win. A win, in order to win, you have to have everything go your way. Sometimes there's a little bit of luck involved and it's easy to miss pieces that were details that had to fall into place or really line up exactly the right way for a win to occur. And we tend to focus on the outcome. With disappointment and setback, it's much easier to have things that were off stand out in our memory. And those can be points of emphasis to learn from and improve and do better the next time you win out.

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"How do you balance the desire to win with the importance of learning from failures and setbacks?"