Loser Mentality Quotes

Success in life is not for those who run fast, but for those who keep running and always on the move.

Every single person is a fool, insane, a failure, or a bad person to at least ten people.

You don't need to work hard to earn an empire; there is an army of slaves to do it for you.

An entrepreneur is a man who knows he can fail, but he does not accept to fail before he actually fails, and when he fails he learns from his errors and moves on.

Magic always happens when you direct your inner powers to the object you want to change.

Does it make sense to boycott ourselves? Does it hold water to boycott the fluid course of our life? Is it consistent to commit self-sabotage by destroying wittingly our corporeal and mental structure? Those are the questions thousands of people may ask as they are confronted with the schizophrenic dilemma on the point of smoking, boozing, doping, sexual transgressing or environmental polluting. Many seem to be aware of their problem. Many have decided to stop from tomorrow on. But when tomorrow and after tomorrow come many tend to let slip their vow and their self-sabotage goes on to rule their life. Their dissonant behavior transforms them into social losers or hopeless patsies and depresses them into the class of forlorn pariahs. They realize, as such, that self-handicapping makes no sense, but are not able to protect themselves from themselves since they haven’t got the muscle to live down the spell of addiction. Thousands of people may feel having set the bar too high and recognize they are are failing to find the right angle and are missing sufficient insight to steer their life. If, however, they decide to give it a try they should be aware that the road may be very bumpy and that they have to be prepared for disappointments and regressions, that they might have to deal with very slowly crescent improvements, that they shouldn’t take themselves for a ride and that they could only possibly succeed by focusing painfully on the path to breaking free from the hornet's nest they have got themselves into.

Never seek to please anyone. Seek to evolve thyself.

Let the sun go down on you like King Harold at the battle of Hastings — fighting gloriously. Maybe a loser but what a loser! Greater in defeat than the conqueror. Certainly not a coward that rusted out lurking in his tent.

Success sits on a mountain of mistakes

The best winners are the worst losers.

For people with a winner mentality, there’s a positive waiting for you no matter the outcome. For those with a loser mentality, if there’s a negative outcome anywhere along the way, you perceive that you’ve lost. That’s why I always say winning and losing isn’t an event; it’s a mind-set.

You see, people in the depressive position are often stigmatised as ‘failures' or ‘losers'. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. If these people are in the depressive position, it is most probably because they have tried too hard or taken on too much, so hard and so much that they have made themselves ‘ill with depression'. In other words, if these people are in the depressive position, it is because their world was simply not good enough for them. They wanted more, they wanted better, and they wanted different, not just for themselves, but for all those around them. So if they are failures or losers, this is only because they set the bar far too high. They could have swept everything under the carpet and pretended, as many people do, that all is for the best in the best of possible worlds. But unlike many people, they had the honesty and the strength to admit that something was amiss, that something was not quite right. So rather than being failures or losers, they are just the opposite: they are ambitious, they are truthful, and they are courageous. And that is precisely why they got ‘ill'. To make them believe that they are suffering from some chemical imbalance in the brain and that their recovery depends solely or even mostly on popping pills is to do them a great disfavour: it is to deny them the precious opportunity not only to identify and address important life problems, but also to develop a deeper and more refined appreciation of themselves and of the world around them—and therefore to deny them the opportunity to fulfil their highest potential as human beings.

Think you're a slave and you'll find a master; think you're a master and slaves will find you

I intend to achieve my goals during my lifetime, but if I fail, I will not rest even in the afterlife

If success is a miracle then you must be the miracle worker

In my opinion, “excuses” is a mental illness, and people with this serious illness are all losers without exception.

Narcissistic Supply You get discarded as supply for one of two reason: They find you too outspoken about their abuse. They prefer someone that will keep stroking their ego and remain their silent doormat. Or, they found new narcissistic supply. Either way, you can count on the fact that they planned your devaluation phase and smear campaign in advance, so they could get one more ego stroke with your reaction. Narcissists are angry, spiteful takers that don't have empathy, remorse or conscience. They are incapable of unconditional love. Love to them is giving only when it serves them. They gaslight their victims by minimizing the trauma they have caused by blaming others or stating you are too sensitive. They never feel responsible or will admit to what they did to you. They have disordered thinking that is concerned with their needs and ego. It is not uncommon for them to hack their targets, in order to gain information about them. They enjoy mind games and control. This is their dopamine high. The sooner you distance yourself the healthier you will become. Narcissism can't be cured or prayed away. It is a mental disorder that turns the victims of its abuse into mental patients because it causes so much psychological manipulation.

The most successful men work smart, not hard

Don't fear mistakes, they are your stepping stone to success

The greater the obstacles, the greater the victory.

Show me a good loser, and I'll show you a loser.

Winners make the effort while losers make excuses.

You don't have to finish today, what is important is that you finish. But remember today might be the last day of your life.

The road to your success is not a highway. You have to create it as you go

Failure is an opportunity to learn again

Run the race of life with all perseverance and endurance.

Sometimes i's not about the win, it's about the experience.

It is sheer madness sometimes, but often, madness is needed to separate the winners from the losers.

Table 3–1. Definitions of Cognitive Distortions 1. ALL-OR-NOTHING THINKING: You see things in black-and-white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure. 2. OVERGENERALIZATION: You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat. 3. MENTAL FILTER: You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that colors the entire beaker of water. 4. DISQUALIFYING THE POSITIVE: You reject positive experiences by insisting they “don’t count” for some reason or other. In this way you can maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences. 5. JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS: You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion. a. Mind reading. You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you, and you don’t bother to check this out. b. The Fortune Teller Error. You anticipate that things will turn out badly, and you feel convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact. 6. MAGNIFICATION (CATASTROPHIZING) OR MINIMIZATION: You exaggerate the importance of things (such as your goof-up or someone else’s achievement), or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or the other fellow’s imperfections). This is also called the “binocular trick.” 7. EMOTIONAL REASONING: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: “I feel it, therefore it must be true.” 8. SHOULD STATEMENTS: You try to motivate yourself with shoulds and shouldn’ts, as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. “Musts” and “oughts” are also offenders. The emotional consequence is guilt. When you direct should statements toward others, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment. 9. LABELING AND MISLABELING: This is an extreme form of overgeneralization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself: “I’m a loser.” When someone else’s behavior rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him: “He’s a goddam louse.” Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded. 10. PERSONALIZATION: You see yourself as me cause of some negative external event which in fact you were not primarily responsible for.

If you want to be extremely important in people's lives, give them extremely good services they can't find anywhere else

An entrepreneur is not deterred by his lack of perfection, he knows no one else is

The price of winning is dedication and the price of dedication is concentration. To get any of the two you have to accept to toil for both.

Somewhere along the line, I figured out that the more I made people laugh, the less of a loser I would appear to be.

We are strengthening by different experiences in life; Sad times, happy moments. Poverty, riches. Failure, success. Troubles, good times. Losing, winning.

Winning isn't as sweet if you don't see an enemy cry. But remember, losers wail loud no matter what.

My wakeup call wasn’t some light switch of empowerment. From as early as preschool I feared that if I didn’t grow up to be the pretty princess men fawned over, I was a failure. That mentality was my disease. It got me raped. It made me feel dirty and devalued because my cherry wasn’t popped on a bed of rose petals. It fueled an adolescence juggling starvation and vomiting until my throat bled out and my stomach acid burned through the plumbing. It made me snort coke, smoke meth, and routinely gulp down narcotic petri dishes in hopes of obtaining hallucinogenic intimacy with junkie boyfriends. But most of all, it made me waste my youth chasing, obsessing over, fighting for, worshipping, clinging to, and crying over one after another loser. At some point, I just quit giving a fuck.

THE SINGLE WOMAN, far from being a creature to be pitied and patronized, is emerging as the newest glamour girl of our times . . . She is engaging because she lives by her wits. She supports herself. She has had to sharpen her personality and mental resources to a glitter in order to survive in a competitive world and the sharpening looks good. Economically, she is a dream. She is not a parasite, a dependent, a scrounger, a sponger or a bum. She is a giver, not a taker, a winner and not a loser.

Why would anyone with half a brain pledge undying loyalty to the party of John McCain or John Kerry, to name the two most recent losers in presidential elections? Only a madman or a mental defective would take a punch for Nancy Pelosi or John Boehner.

As one refugee, Amila, from Gradačac, commented 20 years later: “The most important part of being a refugee is being a good loser; it’s the only way to survive this. You learn to lose your nationality, your home to strangers with bigger guns, your father to mental illness, one aunt to genocide, and another to nationalism and ignorance. You learn to lose your kids, friends, dreams, neighbours, loves, diplomas, careers, photo albums, home movies, schools, museums, histories, landmarks, limbs, teeth, eyesight, sense of safety, sanity, and your sense of belonging in the world”.

1. ALL-OR-NOTHING THINKING: You see things in black-and-white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure. 2. OVERGENERALIZATION: You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat. 3. MENTAL FILTER: You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that colors the entire beaker of water. 4. DISQUALIFYING THE POSITIVE: You reject positive experiences by insisting they “don’t count” for some reason or other. In this way you can maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences. 5. JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS: You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion. a. Mind reading. You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you, and you don’t bother to check this out. b. The Fortune Teller Error. You anticipate that things will turn out badly, and you feel convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact. 6. MAGNIFICATION (CATASTROPHIZING) OR MINIMIZATION: You exaggerate the importance of things (such as your goof-up or someone else’s achievement), or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or the other fellow’s imperfections). This is also called the “binocular trick.” 7. EMOTIONAL REASONING: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: “I feel it, therefore it must be true.” 8. SHOULD STATEMENTS: You try to motivate yourself with shoulds and shouldn’ts, as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. “Musts” and “oughts” are also offenders. The emotional consequence is guilt. When you direct should statements toward others, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment. 9. LABELING AND MISLABELING: This is an extreme form of overgeneralization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself: “I’m a loser.” When someone else’s behavior rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him: “He’s a goddam louse.” Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded. 10. PERSONALIZATION: You see yourself as me cause of some negative external event which in fact you were not primarily responsible for.

The most visible feature of self-oriented perfectionism is this hypercompetitive streak fused to a sense of never being good enough. Hypercompetitiveness reflects a paradox because people high in self-oriented perfectionism can recoil from competition due to fear of failure and fear of losing other people's approval. Socially-prescribed perfectionism makes for a hugely pressured life, spent at the whim of everyone else's opinions, trying desperately to be somebody else, somebody perfect. Perfectionism lurks beneath the surface of mental distress. Someone who scores high on perfectionism also scores high on anxiety. The ill-effects of self-oriented perfectionism correlate with anxiety and it predicts increases in depression over time. There are links between other-oriented perfectionism and higher vindictiveness, a grandiose desire for admiration and hostility toward others, as well as lower altruism, compliance with social norms and trust. People with high levels of socially-prescribed perfectionism typically report elevated loneliness, worry about the future, need for approval, poor-quality relationships, rumination and brooding, fears of revealing imperfections to others, self-harm, worse physical health, lower life satisfaction and chronically low self-esteem. Perfectionism makes people extremely insecure, self-conscious and vulnerable to even the smallest hassles. Perfection is man's ultimate illusion. It simply doesn't exist in the universe. If you are a perfectionist, you are guaranteed to be a loser in whatever you do. Socially-prescribed perfectionism has an astonishingly strong link with burnout. What I don't have - or how perfectionism grows in the soil of our manufactured discontent. No matter what the advertisement says, you will go on with your imperfect existence whether you make that purchase or not. And that existence is - can only ever be - enough. Make a promise to be kind to yourself, taking ownership of your imperfections, recognizing your shared humanity and understanding that no matter how hard your culture works to teach you otherwise, no one is perfect and everyone has an imperfect life. Socially-prescribed perfectionism is the emblem of consumer culture. Research shows that roaming outside, especially in new places, contributes to enhanced well-being. Other benefits of getting out there in nature include improved attention, lower stress, better mood, reduced risk of psychiatric disorders and even upticks in empathy and cooperation. Perfection is not necessary to live an active and fulfilling life.

At the clinic, they fed us pills like they were biscuits. Those pills made the tongue loose in my head, my left arm numb from the elbow down. Sometimes the world would smoulder at the edges. Patients came and went, people from every kind of background but all with one thing in common: no longer capable of contributing to society, they needed to be kept out of sight: losers, loners, dreamers, freaks; God forbid they ever make it onto a TV screen.

Beneath the grandiose behavior of every narcissist lies the pit of fragile self-esteem. What if, deep down, the person whom Trump trusts least is himself? The humiliation of being widely exposed as a “loser,” unable to bully through the actions he promised during the campaign, could drive him to prove he is, after all, a “killer.” In only the first four months of his presidency, he teed up for starting a war in three places, Syria, Afghanistan, and North Korea. It is up to Congress, backed up by the public, to restrain him.

The men were thorough sportsmen, loving horse-racing, foot-racing, and gambling. They were graceful winners, and good losers in games of chance. And they were firm believers in luck, and in the medicine conferred in dreams. Men often starved, and even tortured themselves, in preparation for desired medicine-dreams. Then, weakened both physically and mentally by enervating sweat-baths and fatigue, they slipped away alone to some dangerous spot, usually a high mountain-peak, a sheer cliff or a well-worn buffalo-trail that might be traveled at any hour by a vast herd of buffalo; and here, without food, or water, they spent four days and nights (if necessary) trying to dream, appealing to invisible “helpers,” crying aloud to the winds until utter exhaustion brought them sleep, or unconsciousness—and perhaps a medicine-dream. If lucky, some animal or bird appeared to the dreamer, offering counsel and help, nearly always prescribing rules which if followed would lead the dreamer to success in war. Thereafter the bird or animal appearing in the medicine-dream was the dreamer’s medicine. He believed that all the power, the cunning, and the instinctive wisdom, possessed by the appearing bird or animal would forever afterward be his own in time of need. And always thereafter the dreamer carried with him some part of such bird or animal. It was his lucky-piece, a talisman, and he would undertake nothing without it upon his person.

In the 20th century, egalitarianism has been used principally as the political formula or ideological rationalization by which one, emerging elite has sought to displace from political, economic, and culture power another elite, and in not only rationalizing but also disguising the dominance of the new elite…. Egalitarianism played a central role in the progressivist ideological challenge, and the main form it assumed in the early 20th century was that of “environmentalism” – not in the contemporary sense of concern for ecology but in the sense that human beings are perceived as the products of their social and historical environment rather than of their innate mental and physical natures. Indeed, the ideological function of progressivism is de-legitimizing bourgeois society was accomplished by its identification of the society itself as the “environment” to be altered through social management.

But hipsters of the nineties added one more psychosomatic layer to the conundrum: There was, in real time, an awareness that the whole idea of criticizing people for selling out was ridiculous, even as it was actively happening. It was understood to be a teenage mentality that ignored the realities of adulthood. It punished innovation and ambition, and it was so infused with hypocrisy that the thesis barely hung together. It was a loser’s game and everybody knew it. But it was a loser’s game you still had to play. Perceiving the concept as preposterous did not make it any less pervasive.

Oskar: That warm-belly feeling floods through me again, the same one that got to me in the arcade when Lane called me a loser and somehow made me feel accepted. I make a mental note to ask one of the doctors at the hospital if this heat in my gut is normal, because mushy, emotional warmth isn’t something I’ve ever had to deal with before. Maybe it’s stomach cancer or something.

The research seemed to reveal that the depressed individual sees himself as a “loser,” as an inadequate person doomed to frustration, deprivation, humiliation, and failure. Further experiments showed a marked difference between the depressed person’s self-evaluation, expectations, the aspirations on the one hand and his actual achievements—often very striking—on the other. My conclusion was that depression must involve a disturbance in thinking: the depressed person thinks in idiosyncratic and negative ways about himself, his environment, and his future. The pessimistic mental set affects his mood, his motivation, and his relationships with others, and leads to the full spectrum of psychological and physical symptoms typical of depression.

Only fools expect everything to go the way they want. Expecting to be disappointed does not mean being passive or a defeated loser. Expecting to be disappointed is a way of mentally and emotionally preparing yourself to be ready for surprises that you may not want. By being emotionally prepared, you can be calm and dignified when things do not go your way. When you are calm, you think better

Expect to be disappointed. Rich dad often said, "Only fools expect everything to go the way they want. Expecting to be disappointed does not mean being passive or a defeated loser. Expecting to be disappointed is a way of mentally and emotionally preparing yourself to be ready for surprises that you may not want. By being emotionally prepared, you can be calm and dignified when things do not go your way. When you are calm, you think better." Over the years, I have met many people with great new business ideas. Their excitement lasts about a month, and then disappointment begins to wear them down. Soon their excitement is diminished, and all you hear them say is, "That was a good idea, but it didn't work." It's not the idea that didn't work. It was disappointment that worked harder. They allowed their impatience to turn into disappointment, and then they allowed the disappointment to defeat them. Many times this impatience is because they did not receive immediate financial reward. Business owners and investors may wait years to see cash flow from a business or investment, but they go into it with the knowledge that success may take time. They also know that when success is achieved, the financial reward will be well worth the wait.

He who want to be great must first be a servant.

bad. I don’t write this to shame anyone who has lamented to me how they might end up in the nuthouse and just how fucked up it would be to go to the same place I went. Gee, thanks for letting me know what a loser you think I am. Or to shame the person who was so rude to me to try to cut me down at a pitching event. Although she should feel a little ashamed. I write it more to get people thinking and to start a conversation about the way people really view mental illness rather than the PC things they think they’re supposed to. We cannot start actually addressing people’s true feelings about mental health if we’re in denial about them. People often can say they’re okay about mental health and that they’re totally understanding about all the issues, but if someone said to them that they might have depression, their reaction is often akin to being accused of being a racist. Part

Being a good loser helps build character, provides valuable lessons, and helps you become mentally prepared for your next challenge.

In the race of life, sometimes we win, sometimes we lose. We must never be afraid of losing. There is a chance for winning when we press-on to reach the end of the race.

The pursuit of our dreams is not without any difficulty. Those who triumph have learn’t to overcome the difficulty.

Nobody with any level of savvy or gumption, it is argued, would try to raise a family on fast-food wages. These jobs are for teenagers; they’re not careers. In other words, why should we care what adult fry cooks get paid? They’re losers. Blaming the worker, questioning their work ethic or mental fitness, deflects attention from troubling economic trends that have been observable for 30 years now, affecting many workers in occupations requiring far more skills than burger-flipping.

Keep running; keep dreaming, keep alive the flame of hope; defeat and despair will not catch up with you

The best way to lose a game is to assume that it is over, when it isn't, yet. The second best way is to assume that no fight is left within us, but to guarantee a loss is to mentally enter the game as a loser.

Mental accounting is how we trick ourselves into believing that we are doing better than we actually are. Just like the two out of three gamblers in Las Vegas, we tend to remember our brilliant investments and forget our what-were-we-thinking ones. That’s because remembering our winners gives us pleasure and forgetting our losers stops the pain.

In 1998, the avant-garde publisher Semiotext(e) issued Airless Spaces, a collection of Firestone’s stories set in and out of mental hospitals, a life she herself had lived for many of the silent years following the publication of The Dialectic of Sex. Like Piercy’s Connie Ramos, Firestone’s characters are desperate inside the hospital and destitute when out. Years of medication and institutional routine have left one unable to read, write or “care about anything, and love was forgotten”: She was lucid, yes, at what price. She sometimes recognized on the faces of others joy and ambition and other emotions she could recall having had once, long ago. But her life was ruined, and she had no salvage plan. Who is “she” in this story? Airless Spaces contains 51 vignettes, divided into headings such as “Hospitals,” “Losers,” “Obituaries,” and “Suicides I Have Known.” So recognizably autobiographical are elements of these that their status as fiction becomes suspect. (One rather vindictive obituary is for an actual feminist, dead at 50, who had helped to overthrow the founding principles of a woman’s group that Firestone started in the East Village, the coup that finally provoked her withdrawal from the women’s movement.) These romans - à – clef reinforce the question still directed at Firestone’s project: is their author’s self-described “madness” the fate reserved for those who would contest sexual difference?

Losers are full of excuses. Winners just don't have time for them; they just make things happen while others are trying to figure it out.

Here’s an example from the test Marty and his students developed to distinguish optimists from pessimists: Imagine: You can’t get all the work done that others expect of you. Now imagine one major cause for this event. What leaps to mind? After you read that hypothetical scenario, you write down your response, and then, after you’re offered more scenarios, your responses are rated for how temporary (versus permanent) and how specific (versus pervasive) they are. If you’re a pessimist, you might say, I screw up everything. Or: I’m a loser. These explanations are all permanent; there’s not much you can do to change them. They’re also pervasive; they’re likely to influence lots of life situations, not just your job performance. Permanent and pervasive explanations for adversity turn minor complications into major catastrophes. They make it seem logical to give up. If, on the other hand, you’re an optimist, you might say, I mismanaged my time. Or: I didn’t work efficiently because of distractions. These explanations are all temporary and specific; their “fixability” motivates you to start clearing them away as problems. Using this test, Marty confirmed that, compared to optimists, pessimists are more likely to suffer from depression and anxiety. What’s more, optimists fare better in domains not directly related to mental health. For instance, optimistic undergraduates tend to earn higher grades and are less likely to drop out of school. Optimistic young adults stay healthier throughout middle age and, ultimately, live longer than pessimists. Optimists are more satisfied with their marriages. A one-year field study of MetLife insurance agents found that optimists are twice as likely to stay in their jobs, and that they sell about 25 percent more insurance than their pessimistic colleagues. Likewise, studies of salespeople in telecommunications, real estate, office products, car sales, banking, and other industries have shown that optimists outsell pessimists by 20 to 40 percent.

While some investments fail quickly, this one failed slowly—and that can be far more damaging to an investment portfolio because these slow losers suck up an enormous amount of your mental energy over an extended period of time.

American society places tremendous importance upon egocentric behavior. Americans are encouraged to set ourselves apart from the group. Whereas in some societies it is an aberration to go against the whole, Americans celebrate the individual over the group. Public schools teach American grade school children that they are the captains of their destiny. American schools and society inculcate schoolchildren to measure their level of success in terms of individual accomplishments. A winner versus loser mentality prevails in American culture. Winners are the recipients of life’s economic awards. We are taught that possessing financial wherewithal will assist us attain exalted social status. Social status in turn allows select people to wield the power of influence. The silent audience consists of the economically deprived, the societal castaways whom we are taught to shun for lacking the temperament to succeed. A strong sense of self not only helps a person survive, but American society keeps score of a person’s economic victories and defeats. Americans measure the intrinsic value of our lives and recognize other people’s status principally in terms of each person’s relative economic resources.

Loss, at first it naturally brings the pain, the restlessness, the feeling of being trapped; we struggle, try harder, but our mind stops thinking about the reason of loss, it just signals our body to go for the win, we keep running, mentally exhausted, physically drained but still no win; we try harder & harder but keep doing similar work which earlier decorated us with success, eventually it becomes a ritual triggering the euphoria of a absolute surrender, we get used to the loss. Every day the ritual is followed, but we get used to the loss like we get used to the unanswered prayers, we stop thinking about the win, although bad feelings grip us from time to time but it passes very quickly, And just as losers justify their loss, we become addicted to a thought process which only blames other people and situation for our loss.

If you want to be a winner, act like one.

It is possible to be in the Way of Excellence and still lose. Think about this for a moment. Would you rather experience playing, competing and performing at your all-time best in the Zone and lose, or play awful, get lucky and win? When put in this perspective, the definition of winning and losing is not clear. In other words, it is possible to lose and still perform like a winner, just as it is possible to win and play like a loser.

If I identify with anything, it’s being an American, which is why I despise how badly we’ve splintered as a country. The divisions between us aren’t new, but the ways we deal with them are. We’ve lost the social norm of civility. I suspect what’s changed is the attitude that we’re all in this together. Now it’s a me-against-you mentality, and we’ve turned into a country of aggressively poor losers and bombastic, graceless winners.

I found myself burning up, mentally. Fucking weakling, I told myself, fucking loser. I started to spiral, not just hating myself, but hating myself for hating myself.