Let’s Talk About Losing: Kobe Says: “It’s Exciting!” (Heroic +1 #1,759)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another heroic plus one. In our last plus one, we talked about Maurice Ashley and the extraordinary heroic sacrifices and risks his mom made to help create a better life for him and his brother and sister. As you may recall, when he was two years old, Maurice's mom left Jamaica to try to create a better life for her family in America. It took her 10 years to gain citizenship and reunite her family. As I said before, that's incredibly humbling and inspiring. As it turns out, as Maurice says, her sacrifice, made with good intentions and a willingness to endure supreme struggle, paid off beyond her wildest imagination. Maurice became the first African American chess grandmaster in history, while his brother and sister became kickboxing and boxing champions. All three were inducted into their respective domains. Hall of Fame Heroic families unite. Today I want to explore some more wisdom from Maurice's great new book, Move by life lessons on and off the chessboard. Let's talk about losing. More specifically, let's open our copies of Maurice's book to the chapter called Losing parentheses because you will, in which he tells us, and I quote, no one likes to lose. Yet how we handle our losses is one of the most powerful measures of our eventual success. Those who react badly after a loss, who pout, kick, scream and throw things, generally get no benefit from the experiences. The great champions often look at losing as a way to gain precious competitive insights so they can raise their game to new levels. Losing, much more so than winning, can be a catapult launching your game to new heights. He continues by saying, the late great Kobe Bryant was once asked, what does losing feel like to you? His reply, it's exciting because it means you have different ways to get better. There's certain weaknesses that were exposed that you need to shore up. It sucks to lose, but at the same time, the answers are there if you just look at them now. First, as we've discussed many times, developing a healthy relationship to failure, losing mistakes is the number one thing I'm most excited about with Emerson and his approach to chess, grand mastery. We've talked about that enough lately. See the plus one from a couple days ago and another plus one on how to go next level, both of which are linked in this plus one. So today we're going to focus on Kobe Bryant's truly heroic response to losing. In sum, Kobe says, it sucks and it's exciting. And that is precisely the response we want to have to losing in the various games of life. Know this, we will lose. That's inevitable. The question is, how can you use your most significant losses to catapult, launching your game to new heights. Seriously, how can you think of a time you lost recently? You got it. Yes. It sucks. It's supposed to be painful. Perfect. Now recognize the fact that we all lose. Common Humanity 101 style. Now, what specifically can you learn from that failure? And most importantly, what specifically is one thing you will do to use that failure as fuel for your antifragile growth? Get on that. It's time to catapult our game to the next next level today.