Ashish Kothari argues leaders fixate too much on wins and losses. He uses a cycling time-trial example to show why focusing on effort matters more than the outcome, especially when coaching teammates.
You'll never win it all. And all you can do is show up and be your best self and learn from it and keep going better. But again, I see this big difference. Somehow in corporate lives, people just make it about winning or losing. And if you lose that, oh, my God, everything is lost, right? I see it in deals. I'm competing, there are four other firms. And if you lose it, oh, my God, like, we beat ourselves up. We never think about, maybe the other did better. The first response always is, you messed up.
I think that's something important I was able to take for my grandfather and help with teammates with. Because a time trial is an event in cycling, like race against the clock. So there's not really a lot of tactics. It's just times over a certain distance and a teammate is sitting there all upset because she got seventh or something. And like, why are you upset? Are you upset about the result or your effort? It's a big difference. Is the result is you comparing yourself to other people. And you can't always control the result, but you can control your effort.
Are you upset about the result or are you upset about the effort that you put in?
Because the effort, you can change the result, you can't.
100%.
Reducing Regrettable Attrition in Organizations by Fixing the System, Not the People Reducing Regret
