From Defeat to Dominance: How Setbacks Shape Winners

Foreign. Let's talk about half to escape a nightmare situation and think about this. If you've ever been trapped in a nightmare, tossing, turning, you can't sleep, you can't fix it. It's a situation that's come up. You can't get away from it. And then sud, he goes on. It seems like he goes on and on for hours, but know, maybe it's just minutes, but you're sleeping, you're in bed, you can't get away from it. Then all of a sudden, I don't know if you've had this experience, but I. I've had several times. I like, wait. I. I kind of semi wake up and say, wait a minute, this is just a dream. I'm laying in bed. This doesn't exist. It's all in my mind. My mind's trying to work out some kind of issue. All I've got to do is get up, get a drink of water, or turn over and start thinking about something else. And you. Once you realize it's a dream and you say, wait a minute, boom, it vanishes just like that. Well, life's like that too. A lot of things that overwhelm us, people, problems, pressure can feel like, you know, it's. It puts you under a spell. You're stuck. You can't get away. Someone starts yelling at you. You know, a car dives in front of you on the interstate. A situation between coworker blows up at work or, you know, some seeming financial nightmare drops out of the sky. You know, all of a sudden something from IRS comes in and you start panicking. You know, what if this happens and this happens and your mind starts tumbling and all of these things is like, wait a minute. The truth is, you don't have to stay in the chaos. Yeah. If someone's yelling at you, you don't have to get caught up in the yellow. I mean, you can just walk away. I mean, if you're on the phone with someone and they're just going crazy, you know, you can always hang up and they get mad. So what? You don't have to put up. You don't need. Need to fight it. It's all right if they're upset. It's all right if they don't like how you're acting or how you respond. The main thing is to get that nightmare away from you. And the way you do it, just wake up. Clarity comes the moment you choose it. And the best way to get away from a nightmare is wake up and say, wait a minute, I don't have to be a victim here. And sometimes it happens in a nightmare, you're in a dream. Sometimes. It happens more often in life. But just realize you don't have to put up with it. Winning is never normal. And that's actually a good thing. Here's why it's never promised. Even if you're the most prepared person in the room, life can still throw you a surprise. And it does to us all day long. That's the challenge. That's how we grow. You know, you plan, you practice, but then something goes wrong. It boggles you. You know, you stumble, you get off track. Now what? You know, you see this in sports, you see this in life. People have their confidence, they're rolling, and then something happens out of the blue. And what do professionals do? They don't panic. What do winners do? They don't panic. It's like, take a breath. It doesn't mean the win is gone, because here's the truth. Winning involves overcoming something. The people who win, they just recover faster. They stay focused, and they don't let the surprise rattle them. So if you want to win, expect a fight. Stay calm to the chaos. And when you do win, be grateful. Because you didn't just win the game, you beat the odds. Have you ever thought about the fact that wherever you go for help determines where you're going to end up? Here's what I mean. When life hits hard, where do you go for help? Because the answer to that question determines how your life is going to turn out. When the pressure is on, some people shut down. Some go numb. Some pretend nothing's wrong. Others, the smart ones, reach out, but not just to anyone. To the right person. In a medical office emergency, you call a doctor. In a legal situation, you call the police, or you call an attorney, you call somebody who's going to be able to help you out of that situation. So what about your life problems? Who are you calling them? Where you go when life gets hard, Those are the forks in the road that really matter. Because you're going to be sending your life down the road based off the information you get. So here's the thing. Don't go alone. Don't do trial and error. Get good input. Go find someone who builds you up. Because that choice will shape everything. Let's talk about the secret advantage of losing that winners use. The truth that nobody really tells you or emphasizes is that you're going to lose at least half of the time. No matter how good you are, you're going to lose half the time. And if you don't know how to lose, you'll never learn how to win. As Nick Saban, coach of Alabama football, says, our past coach of Alabama football said, never lose and lose the lesson too. So if you're going to get beat, if you don't learn something from it, it's like a double beating. See, losing is your hidden advantage because it shows you the weaknesses in your system, your skill, you're planning, and it builds dealing with that coming back from. It builds resilience. It teaches you how to bounce back and how to make the corrections you need so you can bounce back. It gives you the grit, you hear the grit. You don't just get grit because you're born with it. You get grit because you learn how to bounce back. You know, it's like kids, you know, they, they want to learn how to walk. They fall down and then they get up. You know, they're not happy about falling down, but, you know, they keep getting up. You know, they just keep going. And that's what we've got to do. That's how you develop the grid. You keep moving forward, you make those adjustments. Even when things go wrong and even in long winning streaks, there's losing behind the scene. I could talk about that forever. I won't. You got setbacks, you had bad days. Even in a successful day, there's going to be bad hours, there's going to bad situations, there's going to be blow ups, there's going to be doubt. And the secret is winners don't avoid failure. They learn how to use it. So here's an example. In the beginning, where they started, the Dallas America's team, the Dallas Cowboy football team, they bring in a coach who was an assistant top defensive coach with the New York Giants winning championship New York Giants. And we got our coach, Tom Landry. And then Tom came in there and they lost 17, you know, they went 17 losses and one win. And I think they did that for a couple of years. You know, you might run one or two games, but then they went and started winning and they went to the playoffs 17 years in a row after those initial one or two years. And so they asked Tom Landry, wasn't it depressing going through, you know, from the, you know, the tradition of winning with the New York Giants to the, all this losing and humiliation and, and he, you know, he's very methodical, a technical kind of guy. And he said, no, not at all. He said what would happen is, you know, all the off season, the training camp, we would prepare for the season, we'd have a plan for every game, and we'd have a plan to win. So we'd go into the first game of the season with our game plan for winning. And then we'd get beat. Sometimes we get beat real bad. And we would learn we didn't just play a game. The other team would teach us a lesson. So we would go back and we would absorb that lesson. We would make the adjustments, and we would get ready for the next game. And so we would go in there and with a game plan for winning, and then that team would teach us a whole nother pile of lessons. Then we'd go back home, we'd make our adjustments, we'd learn our lessons, we make the changes we needed to. We'd go out with a new game plan. We're going to win this week. And then we get taught another stack of lessons. And he said this would go on all season long, but we were learning. But eventually we had learned our lessons. And then we spent the next 17 years teaching the other teams how to win, because we had learned by getting beat. We had not just gotten beat. We got lessons on why we were getting beat. We made the adjustments so we could start being the ones to do the teaching. And so that's the way to look at losing. Losing doesn't mean it's over. It means you're learning how to win for real. Let's talk about knowledge and power. They told us that growing up, you know, knowledge is power. You hear that all the time. Knowledge is power. And so we study, we go into debt, and we do the same thing with our kids. We send our kids to college. You know, we study, study, study, and we expect to come out powerful. But guess what? It's not true. You know, learning is just the first step. It's the fundamentals. You go to greatness by using the fundamentals. You know, you got to learn the fundamentals, but you got to use the fundamentals. That's how you go and do something great, have some accomplishment. See, knowledge is not power unless you understand it, unless you apply it. It's not what you know, it's what you do with what you know. It's kind of like in life with money. It's not how much money you make, it's how much you keep, it's what you do with it. And so knowledge comes to you. It's a matter of what do you do with it, how do you use it to your advantage? We all know you gotta work hard to get ahead, but knowledge helps you work smart. You don't have to be doing so much trial and error. You can be targeted, you can be focused, you can be effective. And so the takeaway I want you to have from this is real. Power is knowledge understood and applied to create results. That's when knowledge becomes useful, it becomes powerful. That's how you build leverage. That's how you rise through the system, and that's when knowledge becomes power.