Ep. #152: Motivation Monday: The Art of Losing Like a Winner

[00:00:00] Hey, this is Mike from muscle for life and welcome to another episode of my podcast. This episode is part of a weekly series that I have dubbed motivation Monday. Yes, I know. So creative of me. What can I say? I’m just a genius. Seriously though, the idea here is simple. Every Monday morning, I am going to post a short and punchy episode that I hope gets you fired up to tackle the workouts, work, and everything else that you have planned for the week ahead.

Because it’s one thing to know what you want to But it’s something else all together to actually make yourself do it. And I hope that this series gives you a jolt of energy and encouragement to go ahead and do all of those things that you want to do. If you like what you hear, [00:01:00] then make sure to check back every Monday morning for the latest and greatest installment.

So as usual, let’s start today’s episode with a quote. And this one comes from Bob Dylan. Here’s what he says. Quote, what’s money. A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do. Now I have some good news and some bad news for you. Which one would you like first?

If you’re like me, then you like to take your medicine before you eat your dessert. So here’s the bad news in the struggles of life. You’re going to be the loser. Sometimes I’m going to be the loser. Sometimes it happens. We’re not going to win every battle. Sometimes. We’re going to get outsmarted.

Sometimes we’re going to get blindsided by the unforeseeable. Sometimes obstacles are going to prove much more formidable than we had anticipated, but [00:02:00] we have to remember that just because we lose a battle doesn’t mean that we have lost the war. In fact, the art of losing battles is just as important as the art of winning them.

Sometimes. Losing skillfully is the difference between a prelude to a powerful counterattack and a catastrophic disintegration of the entire campaign. An unskilled loser makes for an easy opponent. He loses focus. He leaves his flanks wide open to be exploited. He goes down without much of a fight. He lets you inflict massive damage with impunity.

He also fails to learn from his missteps and can be easily led into other traps and pitfalls. Now on the other hand, a skilled loser is always a threat. I think that’s the worst type of opponent. He makes you scratch and claw for every inch. He might be down, but so long as he still is drawing breath, he’s never out.

He [00:03:00] learns, he adapts, he strikes back. My point is this if we want to know how to win wars, then we better know how to lose battles and to drop the abstract war analogies. I think that this concept applies really to any and all competitive endeavors in our lives, even if they only involve competing against the nebulous marketplace or maybe even ourselves.

The war. That I’m talking about, that’s the big goal, that’s the brass ring and the battles are the milestones that you have to achieve to get there. So let’s take a closer look at what skillful losing looks like and how we can use this to improve our chances of ultimate success in any area of our lives.

First, we should never lose because we got outworked. I think that nobody is easier to beat than the sucker that wastes time chasing shortcuts, weird [00:04:00] tricks, and other ways to avoid the real effort that it takes to win. Lazy people are ineffective and easily overcome, so if we want to be a contender in any field, We just can’t afford to be lazy.

I recently read an interview with one of my favorite biographers, Ron Chernow, who recently released his latest and greatest book on Ulysses Grant. And in the course of writing that book, he read hundreds of books on Grant. He read through dozens of volumes of Grant’s personal letters in the interview.

He quipped that you should never underestimate the laziness of your predecessors. That stuck with me because I feel the same way, at least to some degree, about my personal journey so far over the last five years or so in the health and fitness space, both in writing books and selling supplements and everything else that we’re doing because, my team and I, we’ve achieved a lot.

Quite a bit [00:05:00] in a relatively short period of time. I’ve sold about a million books. Now we’ve built an eight figure supplement business, some very popular blogs, millions of visits a month. And I would attribute a lot of that, not to our outstanding brilliance or skill. I do think we generally are pretty smart and we’re pretty good at our jobs, but I would say.

A much larger factor is just how bad a lot of our competition is just really bad. Whether it’s on the content creation side, how much bad content gets created out there, especially written. And if we’re talking about supplements, how many companies are just bad at the supplement game, they make bad products.

They market them poorly. They just don’t know what they’re doing. And if that sounds arrogant or boastful to you, I understand, but I don’t think it is at all. I think saying that it’s not that I’m so good. It’s that the people I’m playing against are really bad is it. Much [00:06:00] less arrogant than just saying, Oh, it’s, I’ve been able to do all these things.

My team and I, we’ve been able to do all these things because we’re just fucking amazing. That’s not what I’m saying at all. Again, I think we’re good, but we’re just playing against a bunch of people that are not very good. Now, if we were to try to level up and play against Some bigger, more established companies, if we were trying to go up against beach body, different story, beach bodies, very good.

It would be much harder to compete against them than to compete against the people that were competing against other bloggers other book writers, other smaller bloggers. Supplement companies. I know Beachbody is not a supplement company per se, but they do. I think they have Shakeology, which I’m sure they sell a lot of.

But anyways, you get my point. So getting back on track here, I think that extraordinary diligence, just the willingness to work really fucking hard is a key. Type of weapon in itself. It challenges would be opponents to an arms race of sorts and saves [00:07:00] you from having to deal with the riffraff that couldn’t even hope to keep up that willingness to outwork.

It just demands. Respect for the weak willed. It’s intimidating and it’s even discouraging to face. It instills a haunting dread that no matter how hard someone is going to work to try to beat you, it’s just not going to be enough. Somehow they figure you’re just going to figure out how to get ahead.

This is something that you will see in a lot of the greatest generals in history. A lot of these guys were known for their almost superhuman ability to just outwork their enemies. For example, one of my favorites and just one of my favorite characters in history, Alexander the great was renowned for his unequal dedication to his conquests.

Once he locked his sights in on that next milestone, whether it’s a city to subdue or siege or a region to [00:08:00] assimilate, he spent Every waking minute in action, making it and he refused to believe that anything was impossible. In his own words, he believed that the most slavish thing was to luxuriate, and the most royal thing to do was to labor.

Hey, quickly, before we carry on, if you are liking my podcast, would you please help spread the word about it? Because no amount of marketing or advertising gimmicks can match the power of word of mouth. So if you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who might enjoy it as well, please do tell them about it.

It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, definitely tag me so I can say, Thank you. Thank you. You can find me on Instagram at Muscle for Life Fitness, Twitter at Muscle for Life, and Facebook at Muscle for Life Fitness. [00:09:00] One of the other all time greats, Napoleon, also embraced this type of tireless work ethic.

For example, to prepare for his first major military conquest, he disappeared into his office for several days with massive maps of Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. And he spread these maps out from wall to wall in his office on the floor. And then on his desk. We’re piles and piles of reconnaissance reports and in boxes were stacked hundreds and hundreds of note cards with possible moves that the Austrians might make in response to the maneuvers that he was planning.

So what he did is he ran through every permutation of attack and counter attack that he could imagine. And he used this exhaustive analysis to build campaigns that were so finely calibrated that he was able to. Uncannily and ultimately accurately predict the exact towns where final battles would take place and even the [00:10:00] diplomatic concessions that would be granted to him as a result.

The moral of these stories is that a lot of the mystique That’s enjoyed by winners is really nothing more than long hours of hard work. You may not have seen all that work, but that’s what went into it. And that’s a power that really any one of us can immediately embrace and wield in our lives. So the second principle of skilled losing is if you’re going to go down, then go down fighting.

Now sometimes It does just become clear that victory is no longer possible. And once you reach that point, once you know that defeat is inevitable, it’s almost always better to go down swinging. That is it’s almost always better to do everything you can to deprive your opponents of an easy, painless victory.

Now this has several distinct advantages over just. Crumpling into a [00:11:00] ball, going into the fetal position and just taking your beating it helps you lose on a high note. It rallies you for the next fight, and it can actually inflict more damage than the winner expects, tainting their success with Pyrrhic overtones.

Robert Green. He spoke about this concept in his fantastic book, which I recommend, and it is the 33 strategies of war. Here’s what he said. Quote, at the Battle of the Alamo in 1836, every last American fighting the Mexican army died, but they died heroically, refusing to surrender. The battle became a rallying cry.

Remember the Alamo. And an inspired American force under Sam Houston finally defeated the Mexicans for good. You do not have to experience physical martyrdom, but a display of heroism and energy makes defeat into a moral victory that will soon enough be remembered. Translate into a concrete one, planting the seeds of future victory in present defeat is strategic [00:12:00] brilliance of the highest order.

Now fortunately for most of us, we are not fighting actual wars, so losing a battle doesn’t mean losing our lives. But. It can mean losing our self respect, losing our will to press on, and by going down fighting, by staying on track and seeing the losing battle through to a proper end, we can maintain our dignity, our momentum, and our morale.

And that can make all the difference in what we ultimately learn from losing and where we go from there. Which brings me to point number three, and that is learn from your losses. So in defeat, the habitual loser does anything but carefully and objectively analyze it. He places blame elsewhere. He revises the facts or he just blocks it from his memory.

He also finds even the smallest failures, incredibly demotivating because going back to the first point we talked [00:13:00] about, he’s just looking for the free ride. He’s hoping it’s going to come easily. He’s hoping that it won’t cost all that much sweat time or tears. And that’s the person that we do not want to be.

The reality is Defeats can be remarkably instructive if we are willing to take personal responsibility for our failures. When we lose, if we assume that it’s because we were beaten, that we just weren’t good enough, then we can try to find out why and how we could have done better. We can let ourselves down.

Our struggles and mistakes point the way here. We can take a page from the book of top tier professional sports players, because many of them rigorously and scientifically analyze every aspect of their games to pinpoint weaknesses that they can strengthen through diligent, deliberate thinking. Practice military history is also replete with examples of how patient stubborn analysis of defeats can create breakthroughs that turn the tables.[00:14:00] 

For example, after several catastrophic defeats, the Romans realized that they just couldn’t beat Hannibal in large scale set piece battles. So instead what they did is they devised an attritional strategy of scorched earth tactics and guerrilla warfare. And slowly but surely they ground his men material down until he was just no longer a threat to Rome.

So the point here is that winners know that defeats don’t have to remain tragedies. They can be incredibly instructive and often show the way to future successes. Hey there, it is Mike again. I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting and helpful, and if you did and don’t mind doing me a favor and want to help me make this the most popular health and fitness podcast on the internet, then please leave a quick review of it on iTunes or wherever you’re listening from.

This not only convinces people that they should check the show out, it also increases its search visibility, which [00:15:00] And thus helps more people find their way to me and learn how to build their best bodies ever too. And of course, if you want to be notified when the next episode goes live, then just subscribe to the podcast and you won’t miss out on any of the new goodies.

Lastly, if you didn’t like something about the show, then definitely shoot me an email at mike at musclefullife. com and share your thoughts on how you think it could be better. I read everything myself and I’m always looking for constructive feedback. So please do reach out. All right, that’s it. Thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon.

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