Either You Win Or You Learn

Brian Johnson with Heroic has a saying that, if you take it to heart, will radically accelerate your growth and progress: “Either you win or you learn, and learning is winning, so either you win or you win.” 

And what’s most surprising is that given how transformational this idea is, most people are unwilling to do it.

When you win, it’s cause for celebration and you feel really good about yourself. But when you don’t, and you fall short of the expectations you have for yourself, it hurts. Motivated to preserve your own self-image, it’s easy to ignore, avoid, and deflect the situation and move on. It’s easier to feel bad for yourself than it is to be honest with yourself and own up to the fact that you didn’t meet expectations.

But failure is the most fertile, valuable, information rich feedback we could ever get. It tells us clearly what didn’t work about our attempt so that we can fine-tune our approach. It’s only by reflecting on the mistake or shortcoming that you can see the lesson within it, and with that lesson become more prepared to succeed the next time.

That itself is a win. If you aren’t going to get the result you want the first time, then logically the next best thing is to get the feedback you need that will maximize the likelihood you’ll get the result the next time. 

I used to be horrible at receiving feedback. I would take it very critically and reflex to defend myself rather than hear the guidance others had to offer me. When it came to my own evaluation of my performance, I allowed myself to feel entitled that I should have gotten what I wanted, and that what happened was unfair. And unsurprisingly it only led to more disappointment and more deflection.

That is until I started using my Self Improvement Scorecard for feedback. Basically every evening I fill out my Scorecard to honestly report on how I did throughout the day. For the areas where I didn’t reach my standards or goals for the day, I reflect on why. And time after time, analyzing my performance in my Self Improvement Scorecard, I grew my growth mindset and receiving feedback became more natural to me. So much so that now I genuinely embrace failure as feedback, and take bigger and bolder action in ways I only imagined!

If you want to accelerate your improvement, check out my Self Improvement Scorecard and  learn how to install it for yourself. And it's by getting that feedback consistently for yourself, you’ll realize there are only two options - Either you win or you learn!