Loser To Success Quotes

Winners are not afraid of losing. But losers are. Failure is part of the process of success. People who avoid failure also avoid success.

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.

Doing the tough things sets winners apart from losers.

What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives. Yet the message of the right is increasingly: It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault.

Be patient. Your skin took a while to deteriorate. Give it some time to reflect a calmer inner state. As one of my friends states on his Facebook profile: "The true Losers in Life, are not those who Try and Fail, but those who Fail to Try.

What a lousy earth! He wondered how many people were destitute that same night even in his own prosperous country, how many homes were shanties, how many husbands were drunk and wives socked, and how many children were bullied, abused, or abandoned. How many families hungered for food they could not afford to buy? How many hearts were broken? How many suicides would take place that same night, how many people would go insane? How many cockroaches and landlords would triumph? How many winners were losers, successes failures, and rich men poor men? How many wise guys were stupid? How many happy endings were unhappy endings? How many honest men were liars, brave men cowards, loyal men traitors, how many sainted men were corrupt, how many people in positions of trust had sold their souls to bodyguards, how many had never had souls? How many straight-and-narrow paths were crooked paths? How many best families were worst families and how many good people were bad people? When you added them all up and then subtracted, you might be left with only the children, and perhaps with Albert Einstein and an old violinist or sculptor somewhere.

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

H is for Habit, winners make a habit of doing the things losers don't want to do.

One of the problems when you become successful is that jealousy and envy inevitably follow. There are people—I categorize them as life’s losers—who get their sense of accomplishment and achievement from trying to stop others. As far as I’m concerned, if they had any real ability they wouldn’t be fighting me, they’d be doing something constructive themselves.

REMEMBER YOUR GREATNESS Before you were born, And were still too tiny for The human eye to see, You won the race for life From among 250 million competitors. And yet, How fast you have forgotten Your strength, When your very existence Is proof of your greatness. You were born a winner, A warrior, One who defied the odds By surviving the most gruesome Battle of them all. And now that you are a giant, Why do you even doubt victory Against smaller numbers, And wider margins? The only walls that exist, Are those you have placed in your mind. And whatever obstacles you conceive, Exist only because you have forgotten What you have already Achieved. Poetry by Suzy Kassem

We were always loyal to lost causes...Success for us is the death of the intellect and of the imagination. ~ Professor MacHugh

if you gone come in second, you're just the first loser!

You were born a winner, a warrior, one who defied the odds by surviving the most gruesome battle of them all - the race to the egg. And now that you are a giant, why do you even doubt victory against smaller numbers and wider margins? The only walls that exist are those you have placed in your mind. And whatever obstacles you conceive, exist only because you have forgotten what you have already achieved.

It takes a special kind of person to be a hater, but only a true loser will give the impression of being your friend while resenting every progress/success in your life.

In the game of life; Sometimes we win, Sometimes we loss, Either ways, we should always keep playing.

Be brave. Even if you're not, pretend to be. No one can tell the difference. Don't allow the phone to interrupt important moments. It's there for your convenience, not the callers. Don't be afraid to go out on a limb. That's where the fruit is. Don't burn bridges. You'll be surprised how many times you have to cross the same river. Don't forget, a person's greatest emotional need is to feel appreciated. Don't major in minor things. Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Helen Keller, Leonardo Da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein. Don't spread yourself too thin. Learn to say no politely and quickly. Don't use time or words carelessly. Neither can be retrieved. Don't waste time grieving over past mistakes Learn from them and move on. Every person needs to have their moment in the sun, when they raise their arms in victory, knowing that on this day, at his hour, they were at their very best. Get your priorities straight. No one ever said on his death bed, 'Gee, if I'd only spent more time at the office'. Give people a second chance, but not a third. Judge your success by the degree that you're enjoying peace, health and love. Learn to listen. Opportunity sometimes knocks very softly. Leave everything a little better than you found it. Live your life as an exclamation, not an explanation. Loosen up. Relax. Except for rare life and death matters, nothing is as important as it first seems. Never cut what can be untied. Never overestimate your power to change others. Never underestimate your power to change yourself. Remember that overnight success usually takes about fifteen years. Remember that winners do what losers don't want to do. Seek opportunity, not security. A boat in harbor is safe, but in time its bottom will rot out. Spend less time worrying who's right, more time deciding what's right. Stop blaming others. Take responsibility for every area of your life. Success is getting what you want. Happiness is liking what you get. The importance of winning is not what we get from it, but what we become because of it. When facing a difficult task, act as though it's impossible to fail.

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.

The reason I don’t care about the approval and acknowledgment of my batchmates and colleagues is that most of them are basically losers. They will latch on to anyone famous in their circles, who can help them get jobs or with their business. They derive their importance and identities through association. These very people will latch on to me for the same, once the time comes. In short, they are irrelevant flies to me, looking for a turd to sit on. Once I become a piece of turd, the flies will come. A turd doesn’t care about the flies.

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

You crave winning and fear losing instead of just doing. To succeed you must remove your self-imposed limitations.

Concentrate your time, your brains, and your advertising money on your successes. Back your winners, and abandon your losers.

You can perhaps, in a number of circumstances, tell yourself that you can't have more than you have until you do better than you're doing, but by all means steer clear of its reverse, the creed of defeat, in saying that you can't do better than you're doing until you can have more than you have.

Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit. This is a distinguishing feature between winners and losers. Anyone can have a bad performance, a bad workout, or a bad day at work. But when successful people fail, they rebound quickly. The breaking of a habit doesn’t matter if the reclaiming of it is fast. I think this principle is so important that I’ll stick to it even if I can’t do a habit as well or as completely as I would like. Too often, we fall into an all-or-nothing cycle with our habits. The problem is not slipping up; the problem is thinking that if you can’t do something perfectly, then you shouldn’t do it at all.

But human deciding what to eat without professional guidance - something they have been doing with notable success since coming down out of the trees - is seriously unprofitable if you're a food company, a definite career loser if you're nutritionist, and just plain boring if you're a newspaper editor or reporter.

Success sits on a mountain of mistakes

It's better to be an authentic loser than a false success, and to die alive than to live dead.

Obsessed with success and wealth and despising failure and poverty, our society is systematically dividing the population into winners and losers, using institutions like the courts to speed the process.

A winner knows how much he still has to learn, even when he is considered an expert by others. A loser wants to be considered an expert by others before he has learned enough to know how little he knows.

True success is the achievement of many failures

When you are successful every day, success loses its value.

Losers visualize the penalties of failure. Winners visualize the rewards of success.

Success is not as easy as winners make it look nor as hard as losers make it sound.

Goals are for losers. Your mind isn’t magic. It’s a moist computer you can program. The most important metric to track is your personal energy. Every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success. Happiness is health plus freedom. Luck can be managed, sort of. Conquer shyness by being a huge phony (in a good way). Fitness is the lever that moves the world. Simplicity transforms ordinary into amazing.

So when they win, it's their hard work And when they lose, it's their bad luck

Maybe I should let my faithful manservant answer the rest of your questions, since he seems to have all the answers." "I'm saving her time," Bodie replied. "She brings you a redhead, you'll give her grief. Look for women with class, Annabelle. That's most important. The sophisticated types who went to boarding schools and speak French. She has to be the real thing because he can spot a phony a mile away. And he likes them athletic." "Of course he does," she said dryly. "Athletic, domestic, gorgeous, brilliant, socially connected, and pathologically submissive. It'll be a snap." "You forgot hot." Heath smiled. "And defeatist thinking is for losers. If you want to be a success in this world, Annabelle, you need a positive attitude. Whatever the client wants, you get it for him. First rule of a successful business." "Uh-huh. What about career women?" "I don't see how that would work." "The kind of potential mate you're describing isn't going to be sitting around waiting for her prince to show up. She's heading a major corporation. In between those Victoria's Secret modeling gigs." He lifted an eyebrow. "Attitude, Annabelle. Attitude.

That's my school. I worked harder to get in than I did for anything else, ever. I went there because, coming out of it, I'd be able to be President. Or a lawyer. Rich, that's the point. Rich and successful. And look where it got me. One stupid year and here I am with not one, but two bracelets on my wrist, next to a shrink in a room adjacent to a hall where there's a guy named Human Being walking around. If I keep doing this for three more years, where will I be? I'll be a complete loser. And what If I keep on? What if I do okay, live with the depression, get into College, do College, go to Grad School, get the Job, get the Money, get Kids and a Wife and a Nice Car? What kind of crap will I be in then? I'll be completely crazy.

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

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

success is an enemy to the losers of the day

On athleticism, God knows no favor. It seems rather he is in the business of teaching winners how to lose and losers how to win.

Chico was a small-time hustler and big-time loser who liked to bet the ponies and hit women. He was more successful at the latter.

I believe...that to be very poor and very beautiful is most probably a moral failure more than an artistic success. Shakespeare would have done well in any generation because he would have refused to die in a corner; he would have taken the false gods and made them over; he would have taken the current formulae and forced them into something lesser men thought them incapable of. Alive today he would undoubtedly have written and directed motion pictures, plays, and God knows what. Instead of saying, "This medium is not good," he would have used it and made it good. If some people called some his work cheap (which some of it was), he wouldn't have cared a rap, because he would know that without some vulgarity there is no complete man. He would have hated refinement, as such, because it is always a withdrawal, and he was too tough to shrink from anything.

Steam coming off the planet, clouds of fleecy steam as boy and girl populations clash in religious riots, hot and whistling like a graveyard sodomist our little planet embraces its fragile yo-yo destiny, tuned in the secular mind like a dying engine. But some do not hear it this way, some flying successful moon-shot eyes do not see it this way. They do not hear the individual noises shhh,hiss, they hear the sound of the sounds together, they behold the interstices flashing up and down the cone of the flowering whirlwind.

People with inferiority intentions do not go after their dreams not because they can't go; but because their passion is not strong enough to turn the wheels of success...and there they go, becoming losers, defeated by their obstacles!

Be more curious than cautious. You can't win unless you try to win, but you'd always lose by trying not to lose!

A loser is one who has "given up on his dreams",so long as you are trying, you haven't lost yet!

Watch out for those who celebrate your success with bitterness in their hearts!  surely, they'll hail you for what you are, and hate you for what you have become.

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

The most successful men work smart, not hard

After adjusting the comparison of index funds to actively managed funds for survivorship bias, taxes, and loads, the dominance of index funds reaches insurmountable proportions. Once

the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives. Yet the message of the right is increasingly: It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault.

In most history, success is over-represented, for the victors out-write the losers. In the history of networks, the opposite often applies. Successful networks evade public attention; unsuccessful ones attract it, and it is their notoriety, rather than their achievement, that leads to their over-representation.

Investors are people with more money than time. Employees are people with more time than money. Entrepreneurs are simply the seductive go-betweens. Startups are business experiments performed with other people’s money. Marketing is like sex: only losers pay for it.” “Company culture is what goes without saying. There are no real rules, only laws. Success forgives all sins. People who leak to you, leak about you. Meritocracy is the propaganda we use to bless the charade. Greed and vanity are the twin engines of bourgeois society. Most managers are incompetent and maintain their jobs via inertia and politics. Lawsuits are merely expensive feints in a well-scripted conflict narrative between corporate entities. Capitalism is an amoral farce in which every player—investor, employee, entrepreneur, consumer—is complicit.

A successful trader must learn to be a good loser before he can start winning.

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

Winners play to win. Losers play to avoid defeat. Losing teaches you how to win; winning teaches you how not to lose.

Every user needs a loser, every winner is an intrusion.

Winners lose much more often than losers. So if you keep losing but you're still trying, keep it up! You're right on track.

Run the race of life with all perseverance and endurance.

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

One who doesn't recognise an opportunity is bigger loser than one who tries his hand at an opportunity.

Women would rather share a successful man than be saddled with a faithful loser, perfectly sums up Plate Theory vs. Monogamy-as-Goal mindsets.

Winners have justification, losers have an excuse.

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

If you want to be successful and happy in love, do not plead or beg, as beggars are losers; trigger her feelings for you instead - and be a winner.

I have written about what I call “the gravity of past success” in chess. Each victory pulls the victor down slightly and makes it harder to put in maximum effort to improve further. Meanwhile, the loser knows that he made a mistake, that something went wrong, and he will work hard to improve for next time. The happy winner often assumes he won simply because he is great. Typically, however, the winner is just the player who made the next-to-last mistake. It takes tremendous discipline to overcome this tendency and to learn lessons from a victory.

Be careful you don’t give up on what is yet to give you victory. Many people quit when they were yet to win. Successful people never quit and I believe no quitter had ever been successful too.

A true friend does not make you win by making you the winner to the detriment of the true winner. He makes sure that you become a loser, not because he likes the way you fail, but to enlighten you on how it feels to be treated that way and to demonstrate that love and respect are not exclusive.

In the technology sector failure is often a precondition to future successes, while prosperity can be the beginning of the end. If the rise and fall of BlackBerry teaches us anything it is that the race for innovation has no finish line, and that winners and losers can change places in an instant.

In fact, in the fixed mindset, adolescence is one big test. Am I smart or dumb? Am I good-looking or ugly? Am I cool or nerdy? Am I a winner or a loser? And in the fixed mindset, a loser is forever.

What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives. Yet the message of the right is increasingly: It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault. My

When you study success, you become a dreamer. When you study failure, you become a victor. When you study organisations, you become a mentor. When you study management, you become a leader. When you study nature, you become a scholar. When you study people, you become a counselor. When you study life, you become a thinker. When you study God, you become a philosopher. When you study magic, you become a sorcerer. When you study stars, you become an astronomer. When you study oracles, you become a seer. When you study visions, you become a diviner. When you study combat, you become a warrior. When you study war, you become a commander. When you study policy, you become a governor. When you study politics, you become a ruler. When you study nothing, you become a loser. When you study little, you become a loafer. When you study much, you become a winner. When you study all, you become a master.

The incomparable success of Marxism is due to the prospect it offers of fulfilling those dream-aspirations and dreams of vengeance which have been so deeply embedded in the human soul from time immemorial. It promises a Paradise on earth, a Land of Hearts' Desire full of happiness and enjoyment, and — sweeter still to the losers in life's game — humiliation of all who are stronger and better than the multitude.

The nine in our list are based on a longer list in Robert Leahy, Stephen Holland, and Lata McGinn’s book, Treatment Plans and Interventions for Depression and Anxiety Disorders. For more on CBT—how it works, and how to practice it—please see Appendix 1.) EMOTIONAL REASONING: Letting your feelings guide your interpretation of reality. “I feel depressed; therefore, my marriage is not working out.” CATASTROPHIZING: Focusing on the worst possible outcome and seeing it as most likely. “It would be terrible if I failed.” OVERGENERALIZING: Perceiving a global pattern of negatives on the basis of a single incident. “This generally happens to me. I seem to fail at a lot of things.” DICHOTOMOUS THINKING (also known variously as “black-and-white thinking,” “all-or-nothing thinking,” and “binary thinking”): Viewing events or people in all-or-nothing terms. “I get rejected by everyone,” or “It was a complete waste of time.” MIND READING: Assuming that you know what people think without having sufficient evidence of their thoughts. “He thinks I’m a loser.” LABELING: Assigning global negative traits to yourself or others (often in the service of dichotomous thinking). “I’m undesirable,” or “He’s a rotten person.” NEGATIVE FILTERING: You focus almost exclusively on the negatives and seldom notice the positives. “Look at all of the people who don’t like me.” DISCOUNTING POSITIVES: Claiming that the positive things you or others do are trivial, so that you can maintain a negative judgment. “That’s what wives are supposed to do—so it doesn’t count when she’s nice to me,” or “Those successes were easy, so they don’t matter.” BLAMING: Focusing on the other person as the source of your negative feelings; you refuse to take responsibility for changing yourself. “She’s to blame for the way I feel now,” or “My parents caused all my problems.”11

Write this on your mirror: sexually successful people masturbate. You are not jerking or buzzing off because you are a loser, because you can’t find anyone to play with, or because you are desperate to get your rocks off. You’re making love to yourself because you deserve pleasure, and playing with yourself makes you feel good.

Fascism’s success almost always depends on the cooperation of the “losers” during a time of economic and technological change. The lower-middle classes—the people who have just enough to fear losing it—are the electoral shock troops of fascism (Richard Hofstadter identified this “status anxiety” as the source of Progressivism’s quasi-fascist nature). Populist appeals to resentment against “fat cats,” “international bankers,” “economic royalists,” and so on are the stock-in-trade of fascist demagogues.

Here is where the rhetoric of modern conservatives (and I say this as one of them) fails to meet the real challenges of their biggest constituents. Instead of encouraging engagement, conservatives increasingly foment the kind of detachment that has sapped the ambition of so many of my peers. I have watched some friends blossom into successful adults and others fall victim to the worst of Middletown’s temptations—premature parenthood, drugs, incarceration. What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives. Yet the message of the right is increasingly: It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault. My

They're arguing for giving homework and tests to all young children, or separating them into winners and losers, because these tykes need to get used to such things -- as if exposure itself will inoculate them against the negative effects they would otherwise experience later. If we were interested in helping children to anticipate and deal with unpleasant experiences, it might make sense to discuss the details with them and perhaps guide them through role-playing exercises. But why would we subject kids to those experiences? After all, to teach children how to handle a fire emergency, we talk to them about the dangers of smoke inhalation and advise them where to go when the alarm sounds. We don't actually set them on fire. But the key point is this: From a developmental perspective, BGUTI [Better-Get-Used-To-It worldview] is flat-out wrong. People don't get better at coping with unhappiness because they were because they were deliberately made unhappy when they were young On the contrary, what best prepares children to deal with the challenges of the real world is to experience success and joy, to feel supported and respected, to receive loving guidance and unconditional care and the chance to have some say about what happens to them.

Losers read, winners skim.

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.

To become a better you, do not see the failure of your first attempts and declare yourself a loser.

You can be good at many things, but you can only be great at one thing, until you find that thing, you are an average loser.

Glenn had the good fortune of collapsing at his Steinway in the middle of the Goldberg Variations. [Wertheimer] claimed he'd been trying to collapse for years, without success.

You were not born a winner and you were not born a loser. You are what you make yourself to be.

Self-praise is for losers. Be a winner. Stand for something. Always have class, and be humble.

You were not born a winner and you were not born a loser. You are what you make yourself to be.” LOU HOLTZ, National Champion football coach

Goals are for winners - dreams are for losers.

Winners are not afraid of losing. But losers are. Failure is part of the process of success. People

And his success stemmed not from some determination to be a winner, but from the fact that he knew he was a loser, accepted it,

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

Thanks to his tax lawyers and accountants, and an assist from President Obama, Trump had essentially collected more than $90 million for failing.

An active manager must overcome the drag of about 3.25 percent in annual operating costs. If the fund manager is only to match the market’s historical 9 percent return, he or she must return 12.25 percent before all those costs. In other words, to do merely as well as the market, an active fund manager must be able to outperform the market return by over one-third or 34.1 percent!5

What's more, obsessing about winning is a loser's game: The most we can hope for is to create the best possible conditions for success, then let go of the outcome. The ride is a lot more fun that way.

He would pursue litigation with no regard to his chances of victory or the costs involved. When he lost, he would invent a phony enemy, or assign a phony motive to a real enemy, and reframe it as a victory.

Every Olympian wants to win a gold medal. Every candidate wants to get the job. And if successful and unsuccessful people share the same goals, then the goal cannot be what differentiates the winners from the losers.

separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives. Yet the message of the right is increasingly: It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault.

The winners in life think constantly in terms of I can, I will, and I am. Losers, on the other hand, concentrate their waking thoughts on what they should have or would have done, or what they can’t do.” – Dennis Waitley

He certainly appeared rich. That he had received the equivalent of a half billion dollars from his father, another half billion as a reality television star, and lost much of that money creating an illusion of success, never came up.

I feel successful 3–4 days a month. The other days I feel like I’m barely accomplishing the minimum or that I’m a loser. I have imposter syndrome so even when I get compliments they are difficult to take and I just feel like I’m a bigger fraud than before. I feel the worst when I get so paralyzed by fear that I end up huddled in bed and fall further and further behind. To make myself feel more successful I spend real time with my daughter every day, even if it’s just huddling under a blanket and watching Doctor Who reruns on TV. I also try to remind myself that people like Dorothy Parker and Hunter S. Thompson struggled as well, and that this struggle might make me stronger, if it doesn’t first destroy me.

Long-term success in the stock market has nothing to do with hope or luck. Winning stock traders have rules and a well-thought-out plan. Conversely, losers lack rules, or if they have rules, they don’t stick to them for very long; they deviate.

You get to a question of, is that what capitalism is supposed to do?” Schwartz asked. “There’s so many little ways that a company like this tells the next generation of entrepreneurs what success looks like. One way to ask this question is, in the system we have set up, do the people who were successful reflect the values we want? Should we care, or not care, if someone makes a lot of money exploiting the system?” Schwartz didn’t mind if Adam got rich; he wanted to get rich, too. “The reason I care is that if the most successful companies are the ones that just drive really hard, and play fast and loose with the truth,” Schwartz said, “then maybe the whole idea that capitalism is great, or even useful, is really challenging to uphold.

These equalizing mechanisms may derive from simple morality, or they may come from the practical understanding that losers, if they are unable to get out of the game of success to the successful, and if they have no hope of winning, could get frustrated enough to destroy the playing field.

The January 17, 1984 letter to his fellow USFL team owners did encapsulate what became Donald Trump’s three-step rhetorical style, a pattern so predictable and unique it could be branded “Trump Logic.” First, he confidently makes an assertion that often oversimplifies or ignores the truth of the matter. He builds upon that soft foundation with an act of clairvoyance, claiming to know what large groups of people fear, or at whom they laugh, as proof that his original assertion was true. Finally, he closes the deal by making clear that disagreeing with his un-facts or his psychic vision is prima facie evidence of stupidity.

The core principles of successful investing never change—and never will. In fact, when short-term data appear to be most challenging to core principles is exactly when those principles are most important and most needed. Sure the companies, markets, and economies come and go, but the core principles remain the same.

We’re creating a dystopia, where the mania of the state isn’t secrecy or censorship but unfairness. Obsessed with success and wealth and despising failure and poverty, our society is systematically dividing the population into winners and losers, using institutions like the courts to speed the process. Winners get rich and get off. Losers go broke and go to jail. It isn’t just that some clever crook on Wall Street can steal a billion dollars and never see the inside of a courtroom; it’s that, plus the fact that some black teenager a few miles away can go to jail just for standing on a street corner, that makes the whole picture complete.

know that being fixated on winning (or more likely, not losing) is counterproductive, especially when it causes you to lose control of your emotions. What’s more, obsessing about winning is a loser’s game: The most we can hope for is to create the best possible conditions for success, then let go of the outcome. The ride is a lot more fun that way.

True leaders pursue knowledge, not recognition; understanding, not titles; wisdom, not power; purpose, not riches; excellence, not success; opportunities, not obstacles; character, not fame; diligence, not entertainment; happiness, not money; dignity, not position; a career, not a job; influence, not popularity; performance, not acclaim; and pursue dreams, not tradition. True leaders are givers, not takers; builders, not destroyers; doers, not talkers; encouragers, not flatterers; lovers, not haters; warriors, not worriers; forgivers, not shamers; performers, not complainers; givers, not takers; achievers, not quitters; doers, not doubters; winners, not losers; performers, not manipulators; and are masters, not amatuers.

It wasn’t only the warning that kept us safe but our ability to keep that warning quiet. Like secret agents operating behind enemy lines, we couldn’t afford to get caught. And yet we risked it anyway. With voices hushed, we reached out to each other to offer our knowledge. We tried. Because we’d always wanted the best for each of our friends. We wanted her to dump that loser. We wanted her to stop worrying about losing five pounds. We wanted to tell her she looked great in that dress and that she should definitely buy it. We wanted her to crush the interview. We wanted her to text us when she got home. We wanted her to see what we saw: someone smart and brave and funny and worthy of love and success and peace. We wanted to kill whoever got in her way.

I’ve seen so many people with this one consuming goal of proving themselves—in the classroom, in their careers, and in their relationships. Every situation calls for a confirmation of their intelligence, personality, or character. Every situation is evaluated: Will I succeed or fail? Will I look smart or dumb? Will I be accepted or rejected? Will I feel like a winner or a loser?

Life on earth survives thanks to diversity, says Sekunda, because changing circumstances means today's winners can suddenly become tomorrow's losers. When the meteor hits, when the Green Revolution fails, when the bees unexpectedly die, the kind of anomalous diversity found in the Galapagos Islands—or in the technology of Japan—is exactly what will save us from the most dangerous failure of all: global success.

Never stop loving, never stop evolving, never stop existing, never give up, never resist to change never lie, never stop telling truth, never stop trusting, never stereotype, never judge, never cheat, never be manipulated, never be enslaved, never stop learning, never stop improving, never stop moving, never stop kicking, never stop innovating, never be shy, never conceal facts, never obstruct justice, never fight for no reason, never stop craving for knowledge, never stop keeping your head up, never stop shooting for stars, never sell yourself short, never give promises you can't keep, never stop complementing, never stop thanking, never stop appreciating life, never stop being grateful, never be dishonest, never be a loser, never stop working hard, never stop dreaming, never stop imagining, never forget your past, never think in the box, never be arrogant, never stop trying, and never stop...

I tried the obvious route of hourly jobs and community college, and it just never worked for me. I’d been told for so long that the path to success was paved with a series of boxes you checked off, starting with getting a degree and getting a job, and I kept trying and failing at these, it sometimes seemed that I was destined for a life in the loser lane. But I always suspected that I was destined for more, and that I was capable of, something bigger.

A thin line separates success from failure, the great companies from the ordinary ones. Below that line lies excuse making, blaming others, confusion, and an attitude of helplessness, while above that line we find a sense of reality, ownership, commitment, solutions to problems, and determined action. While losers languish Below The Line, preparing stories that explain why past efforts went awry, winners reside Above The Line, powered by commitment and hard work.

He wondered how many people were destitute that same night even in his own prosperous country, how many homes were shanties, how many husbands were drunk and wives socked, and how many children were bullied, abused or abandoned. How many families hungered for food they could not afford to buy? How many hearts were broken? How many suicides would take place that same night, how many people would go insane? How many cockroaches and landlords would triumph? How many winners were losers, successes failures, rich men poor men? How many wise guys were stupid? How many happy endings were unhappy endings? How many honest men were liars, brave men cowards, loyal men traitors, how many sainted men were corrupt, how many people in positions of trust had sold their souls to blackguards for petty cash, how many had never had souls? How many straight-and-narrow paths were crooked paths? How many best families were worst families and how many good people were bad people?

One insightful Hegelianism was that to push ideas efficiently it was necessary first to co-opt both political Left and political Right. Adversarial politics—competition—was a loser's game. By infiltrating all major media, by continual low-intensity propaganda, by massive changes in group orientations (accomplished through principles developed in the psychological-warfare bureaus of the military), and with the ability, using government intelligence agents and press contacts, to induce a succession of crises, they accomplished that astonishing feat.

if you look at the way humans are designed to learn, we learn by making mistakes. We learn to walk by falling down. If we never fell down, we would never walk. The same is true for learning to ride a bike. I still have scars on my knees, but today I can ride a bike without thinking. The same is true for getting rich. Unfortunately, the main reason most people are not rich is because they are terrified of losing. Winners are not afraid of losing. But losers are. Failure is part of the process of success. People who avoid failure also avoid success.

Every Olympian wants to win a gold medal. Every candidate wants to get the job. And if successful and unsuccessful people share the same goals, then the goal cannot be what differentiates the winners from the losers.22 It wasn’t the goal of winning the Tour de France that propelled the British cyclists to the top of the sport. Presumably, they had wanted to win the race every year before—just like every other professional team. The goal had always been there. It was only when they implemented a system of continuous small improvements that they achieved a different outcome.

This isn’t some libertarian mistrust of government policy, which is healthy in any democracy. This is deep skepticism of the very institutions of our society. And it’s becoming more and more mainstream. We can’t trust the evening news. We can’t trust our politicians. Our universities, the gateway to a better life, are rigged against us. We can’t get jobs. You can’t believe these things and participate meaningfully in society. Social psychologists have shown that group belief is a powerful motivator in performance. When groups perceive that it’s in their interest to work hard and achieve things, members of that group outperform other similarly situated individuals. It’s obvious why: If you believe that hard work pays off, then you work hard; if you think it’s hard to get ahead even when you try, then why try at all? Similarly, when people do fail, this mind-set allows them to look outward. I once ran into an old acquaintance at a Middletown bar who told me that he had recently quit his job because he was sick of waking up early. I later saw him complaining on Facebook about the “Obama economy” and how it had affected his life. I don’t doubt that the Obama economy has affected many, but this man is assuredly not among them. His status in life is directly attributable to the choices he’s made, and his life will improve only through better decisions. But for him to make better choices, he needs to live in an environment that forces him to ask tough questions about himself. There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day. Here is where the rhetoric of modern conservatives (and I say this as one of them) fails to meet the real challenges of their biggest constituents. Instead of encouraging engagement, conservatives increasingly foment the kind of detachment that has sapped the ambition of so many of my peers. I have watched some friends blossom into successful adults and others fall victim to the worst of Middletown’s temptations—premature parenthood, drugs, incarceration. What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives. Yet the message of the right is increasingly: It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault. My dad, for example, has never disparaged hard work, but he mistrusts some of the most obvious paths to upward mobility. When

Animals, including people, fight harder to prevent losses than to achieve gains. In the world of territorial animals, this principle explains the success of defenders. A biologist observed that “when a territory holder is challenged by a rival, the owner almost always wins the contest—usually within a matter of seconds.” In human affairs, the same simple rule explains much of what happens when institutions attempt to reform themselves, in “reorganizations” and “restructuring” of companies, and in efforts to rationalize a bureaucracy, simplify the tax code, or reduce medical costs. As initially conceived, plans for reform almost always produce many winners and some losers while achieving an overall improvement. If the affected parties have any political influence, however, potential losers will be more active and determined than potential winners; the outcome will be biased in their favor and inevitably more expensive and less effective than initially planned. Reforms commonly include grandfather clauses that protect current stake-holders—for example, when the existing workforce is reduced by attrition rather than by dismissals, or when cuts in salaries and benefits apply only to future workers. Loss aversion is a powerful conservative force that favors minimal changes from the status quo in the lives of both institutions and individuals.

It is then strange that on Bukowski’s tombstone, the epitaph reads: “Don’t try.” See, despite the book sales and the fame, Bukowski was a loser. He knew it. And his success stemmed not from some determination to be a winner, but from the fact that he knew he was a loser, accepted it, and then wrote honestly about it. He never tried to be anything other than what he was. The genius in Bukowski’s work was not in overcoming unbelievable odds or developing himself into a shining literary light. It was the opposite. It was his simple ability to be completely, unflinchingly honest with himself—especially the worst parts of himself—and to share his failings without hesitation or doubt.

Maybe you have even seen so-called “losers” who did not have much going for them according to the standards of society — no education, no career, and no future worth speaking of — yet somehow were successful with women. This sight is a common thorn in the eye of males who are much more successful in their careers than they are with women, and it is a scenario that parents with attractive daughters worry about, as they know it is not unlikely for their girl to end up with such a “failure” for a boyfriend. So why is this? This is because a male who has options among several females yet chooses one particular female to be with is paying her a great compliment, in fact, the greatest compliment.

I have often thought that Walter Mitty had it in him to be more than a hen-pecked loser. Instead of living it up as a flamboyant daredevil in his dreams, he could have chosen to be a responsible man in real life, going about his work with dignity, and people may just have treated him with respect. Did his failures in life lead him to seek solace in daydreams or did his wandering mind stand in the way of his potential success? One must have triggered the other, and then it would have been both working together. An empty life drives you to fantasies of fulfilment, which then form a deadly, vicious circle which can turn you into a cartoon, as it did poor Mitty. Or lead you to ruin like Madame Bovary.

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman The Four Pillars of Investing by William Bernstein The Little Book of Common Sense Investing by John Bogle The Little Book of Behavioral Investing by James Montier Stocks for the Long Run by Jeremy Siegel The Warren Buffett Portfolio by Robert Hagstrom Damn Right: Behind the Scenes with Berkshire Hathaway Billionaire Charlie Munger by Janet Lowe Investing: The Last Liberal Art by Robert Hagstrom Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing by Michael Mauboussin Devil Take the Hindmost by Edward Chancellor The Most Important Thing by Howard Marks All About Asset Allocation by Rick Ferri Winning the Loser's Game by Charles Ellis

Integrating the military and diplomatic track is essential for success. . . . Nixon and Kissinger encountered this problem, and were defeated by it; when they began negotiating with Hanoi in 1969 there were 550,000 American troops in Vietnam, but under domestic pressure, Nixon unilaterally drew down to about 135,000 while Kissinger negotiated for almost five years. By the time they cut the final deal in later 1973, the two men were like the losers in a strip poker game, naked. They had no chips—or clothes—left with which to bargain; the result was a communist takeover of our South Vietnamese ally less than two years later. Roughly the same thing happened to the Soviets in Afghanistan, without even the negotiating.

We've reached a point in human history where higher education no longer works. As a result of technology, higher education in its traditional college setting no longer works. It will never be effective or progressive enough to keep up with the growing needs of employers who look to college institutions for their future employees. I can appreciate the good intent the college system set out to achieve. For previous generations, the formula actually worked. Students enrolled into universities that were affordable, they gained marketable skills and they earned good jobs. Since there was a proven track record of success, parents instilled the value of college in their children thinking they would achieve the same success story they did, but unfortunately Wall Street was watching. Wall Street, the federal government and the college system ganged up and skyrocketed the cost of tuition to record highs. This was easy to do because not only did they have posters blanketing high schools showing kids what a loser they would be if they didn't go to college, they also had Mom and Dad at home telling them the same thing. This system - spending 4+ years pursuing a college education when the world is changing at the speed of light - no longer works and it's not fixable. We now have the biggest employer's market in human history, where employers have their pick of the litter, and because of this employees will get paid less and less and benefits will continue to erode.

How can sloths exist when they’re such losers?” As a zoologist and founder of the Sloth Appreciation Society I get asked this question a lot. Sometimes “losers” is further defined—“lazy,” “stupid” and “slow” being perennial favorites. And sometimes the query is paired with the rider—“I thought evolution was all about survival of the fittest”—delivered with an air of bemusement or, worse, a whiff of superior species smugness. Sloths are, in fact, one of natural selection’s quirkiest creations, and fabulously successful to boot. Skulking about the treetops barely quicker than a snail, and being covered in algae, infested with insects and defecating just once a week might not be your idea of aspirational living, but then you’re not trying to survive in the highly competitive

What if the interests of the self were expanded to the point of approximating a God’s eye view of humanity? Seeing all things under the aspect of eternity would make one objective toward oneself, accepting failure as on a par with success in the stupendous human drama of yes and no, positive and negative, push and pull. Personal failure would be as small a cause for concerns as playing a loser in a summer theater performance. How could one feel disappointed in one’s own defeat if one experienced the victor’s joy as also one’s own; if one’s competitor’s success was enjoyed vicariously? Instead of crying impossible, we should perhaps content ourselves with noting how different this would feel from life as it is usually lived, for reports of the greatest spiritual geniuses suggest they rose to something like this perspective

More specifically, this book will try to establish the following points. First, there are not two great liberal social and political systems but three. One is democracy—political liberalism—by which we decide who is entitled to use force; another is capitalism—economic liberalism—by which we decide how to allocate resources. The third is liberal science, by which we decide who is right. Second, the third system has been astoundingly successful, not merely as a producer of technology but also, far more important, as a peacemaker and builder of social bridges. Its great advantages as a social system for raising and settling differences of opinion are inherent, not incidental. However, its disadvantages—it causes pain and suffering, it creates legions of losers and outsiders, it is disorienting and unsettling, it allows and even thrives on prejudice and bias—are also inherent. And today it is once again under attack. Third, the attackers seek to undermine the two social rules which make liberal science possible. (I’ll outline them in the next chapter and elaborate them in the rest of the book.) For the system to function, people must try to follow those rules even if they would prefer not to. Unfortunately, many people are forgetting them, ignoring them, or carving out exemptions. That trend must be fought, because, fourth, the alternatives to liberal science lead straight to authoritarianism. And intellectual authoritarianism, although once the province of the religious and the political right in America, is now flourishing among the secular and the political left. Fifth, behind the new authoritarian push are three idealistic impulses: Fundamentalists want to protect the truth. Egalitarians want to help the oppressed and let in the excluded. Humanitarians want to stop verbal violence and the pain it causes. The three impulses are now working in concert. Sixth, fundamentalism, properly understood, is not about religion. It is about the inability to seriously entertain the possibility that one might be wrong. In individuals such fundamentalism is natural and, within reason, desirable. But when it becomes the foundation for an intellectual system, it is inherently a threat to freedom of thought. Seventh, there is no way to advance knowledge peacefully and productively by adhering to the principles advocated by egalitarians and humanitarians. Their principles are poisonous to liberal science and ultimately to peace and freedom. Eighth, no social principle in the world is more foolish and dangerous than the rapidly rising notion that hurtful words and ideas are a form of violence or torture (e.g., “harassment”) and that their perpetrators should be treated accordingly. That notion leads to the criminalization of criticism and the empowerment of authorities to regulate it. The new sensitivity is the old authoritarianism in disguise, and it is just as noxious.

America is a violence-loving country where people like John Wayne and even criminals like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Bonnie and Clyde are considered heroes and heroines. America is a country where the successful man is thought to be the rich man, where honesty, diligence, outstanding scholarship and artistic achievements that bring no financial reward are looked upon with indifference. America is a country where t's considered O.K. and even clever to break the law as long as you can get away with it. Richard Nixon wasn't disgraced here because he was dishonest. People had known he was crooked for a long time; he was disgraced because he got caught. Add those factors up and it's no wonder you got a lot of people who want money and material luxuries and are willing to use illegal means, including violence, t' get them. If they're caught, they're considered losers, but if they get away with it there'll be plenty of people in this country that'll praise 'em.

There is a third premise of the recovery movement that I do endorse enthusiastically: The patterns of problems in childhood that recur into adulthood are significant. They can be found by exploring your past, by looking into the corners of your childhood. Coming to grips with your childhood will not yield insight into how you became the adult you are: The causal links between childhood events and what you have now become are simply too weak. Coming to grips with your childhood will not make your adult problems go away: Working through the past does not seem to be any sort of cure for troubles. Coming to grips with your childhood will not make you feel any better for long, nor will it raise your self-esteem. Coming to grips with childhood is a different and special voyage. The sages urged us to know ourselves, and Plato warned us that the unexamined life is not worth living. Knowledge acquired on this voyage is about patterns, about the tapestry that we have woven. It is not knowledge about causes. Are there consistent mistakes we have made and still make? In the flush of victory, do I forget my friends—in the Little League and when I got that last big raise? (People have always told me I'm a good loser but a bad winner.) Do I usually succeed in one domain but fail in another? (I wish I could get along with the people I really love as well as I do with my employers.) Does a surprising emotion arise again and again? (I always pick fights with people I love right before they have to go away.) Does my body often betray me? (I get a lot of colds when big projects are due.) You probably want to know why you are a bad winner, why you get colds when others expect a lot of you, and why you react to abandonment with anger. You will not find out. As important and magnetic as the “why” questions are, they are questions that psychology cannot now answer. One of the two clearest findings of one hundred years of therapy is that satisfactory answers to the great “why” questions are not easily found; maybe in fifty years things will be different; maybe never. When purveyors of the evils of “toxic shame” tell you that they know it comes from parental abuse, don't believe them. No one knows any such thing. Be skeptical even of your own “Aha!” experiences: When you unearth the fury you felt that first kindergarten day, do not assume that you have found the source of your lifelong terror of abandonment. The causal links may be illusions, and humility is in order here. The other clearest finding of the whole therapeutic endeavor, however, is that change is within our grasp, almost routine, throughout adult life. So even if why we are what we are is a mystery, how to change ourselves is not. Mind the pattern. A pattern of mistakes is a call to change your life. The rest of the tapestry is not determined by what has been woven before. The weaver herself, blessed with knowledge and with freedom, can change—if not the material she must work with—the design of what comes next.

To live a better life, you really just have to get stuck into the failure, and the mess, and the confusion, and the hell of what's happening right now. You have to get more familiar with failure. You have to take failure to a show. You have to buy it a steak and kiss it on the mouth. That's how you heal. That's how you make better decisions in the future. So you have to apply for a boat load of jobs. And you have to get turned down for a boat load of jobs. You have to relapse in your recovery and you have to fall all the way back down again. We all do it and we all suffer and hate ourselves and declare ourselves fuck ups, and losers, and space wasters, and nonsense cobblers, and mistake squids, and we lie down on the floor and give up for awhile. And then sometime later, when the shame and the sadness have worn off a bit and we start to feel a bit peckish, we get up, dust off, and we go get 40 chicken nuggets and start the process all over again. And this time we know more. We know where the traps are and we know more of what we're up against. And we're tougher this time around.

Our great philosophers, our greatest poets, shrivel down to a single successful sentence, he said, I thought, that’s the truth, often we remember only a so-called philosophical hue, he said, I thought. We study a monumental work, for example Kant’s work, and in time it shrivels down to Kant’s little East Prussian head and to a thoroughly amorphous world of night and fog, which winds up in the same state of helplessness as all the others, he said, I thought. He wanted it to be a monumental world and only a single ridiculous detail is left, he said, I thought, that’s how it always is. Even Shakespeare shrivels down to something ridiculous for us in a clearheaded moment, he said, I thought. For a long time now the gods appear to us only in the heads on our beer steins, he said, I thought. Only a stupid person is amazed, he said, I thought. The so-called intellectual consumes himself in what he considers pathbreaking work and in the end has only succeeded in making himself ridiculous, whether he’s called Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, it doesn’t matter, even if he was Kleist or Voltaire we still see a pitiful being who has misused his head and finally driven himself into nonsense. Who’s been rolled over and passed over by history. We’ve locked up the great thinkers in our bookcases, from which they keep staring at us, sentenced to eternal ridicule, he said, I thought. Day and night I hear the chatter of the great thinkers we’ve locked up in our bookcases, these ridiculous intellectual giants as shrunken heads behind glass, he said, I thought. All these people have sinned against nature, he said, they’ve committed first-degree murders of the intellect, that’s why they’ve been punished and stuck in our bookcases for eternity. For they’re choking to death in our bookcases, that’s the truth. Our libraries are so to speak prisons where we’ve locked up our intellectual giants, naturally Kant has been put in solitary confinement, like Nietzsche, like Schopenhauer, like Pascal, like Voltaire, like Montaigne, all the real giants have been put in solitary confinement, all the others in mass confinement, but everyone for ever and ever, my friend, for all time and unto eternity, my friend, that’s the truth.

Wil shook his head. “He really had you hooked.” “What do you mean?” “You should have seen your energy field. It was flowing almost totally into his.” “I don’t understand.” “Think back to Sarah’s argument with the scientist at Viciente.… If you had witnessed one of them winning, convincing the other that he was correct, then you would have seen the loser’s energy flowing into the winner’s, leaving the loser feeling drained and weak and somewhat confused—the way the girl in the Peruvian family appeared and the way,” he smiled, “that you look now.” “You saw that happening to me?” I asked. “Yes,” he replied. “And it was extremely difficult for you to stop his control of you and to pull yourself away. I thought for a minute you weren’t going to do it.” “Jesus,” I said. “That guy must really be evil.” “Not really,” he said. “He’s probably only half aware of what he’s doing. He thinks he’s right to control the situation, and no doubt he learned a long time ago that he could control successfully by following a certain strategy. He first pretends to be your friend, then he finds something wrong with what you’re doing, in your case that you were in danger. In effect, he subtly undermines your confidence in your own path until you begin to identify with him. As soon as that happens, he has you.” Wil looked directly at me. “This is only one of many strategies people use to con others out of their energy.

Wil shook his head. “He really had you hooked.” “What do you mean?” “You should have seen your energy field. It was flowing almost totally into his.” “I don’t understand.” “Think back to Sarah’s argument with the scientist at Viciente.… If you had witnessed one of them winning, convincing the other that he was correct, then you would have seen the loser’s energy flowing into the winner’s, leaving the loser feeling drained and weak and somewhat confused—the way the girl in the Peruvian family appeared and the way,” he smiled, “that you look now.” “You saw that happening to me?” I asked. “Yes,” he replied. “And it was extremely difficult for you to stop his control of you and to pull yourself away. I thought for a minute you weren’t going to do it.” “Jesus,” I said. “That guy must really be evil.” “Not really,” he said. “He’s probably only half aware of what he’s doing. He thinks he’s right to control the situation, and no doubt he learned a long time ago that he could control successfully by following a certain strategy. He first pretends to be your friend, then he finds something wrong with what you’re doing, in your case that you were in danger. In effect, he subtly undermines your confidence in your own path until you begin to identify with him. As soon as that happens, he has you.” Wil looked directly at me. “This is only one of many strategies people use to con others out of their energy. You’ll learn about the remaining ways later, in the Sixth Insight.” I wasn’t listening; my thoughts were on Marjorie. I didn’t like leaving her there. “Do you think we should try to get Marjorie?” I asked. “Not now,” he said. “I don’t think she’s in any danger. We can drive out tomorrow, as we leave, and try to talk to her.” We were silent for a few minutes, then Wil asked: “Do you understand what I said about Jensen not realizing what he was doing? He’s no different from most people. He just does what makes him feel the strongest.” “No, I don’t think I understand.” Wil looked thoughtful. “All this is still unconscious in most people. All we know is that we feel weak and when we control others we feel better. What we don’t realize is that this sense of feeling better costs the other person. It is their energy that we have stolen. Most people go through their lives in a constant hunt for someone else’s energy.” He looked at me with a twinkle in his eye. “Although occasionally it works differently. We meet someone who at least for a little while will voluntarily send us their energy.

First came the flower girls, pretty little lasses in summery frocks, skipping down the aisle, tossing handfuls of petals and, in one case, the basket when it was empty. Next came the bridesmaids, Luna, strutting in her gown and heels, a challenging dare in her eyes that begged someone to make a remark about the girly getup she was forced to wear. Next came Reba and Zena, giggling and prancing, loving the attention. This time, Leo wasn’t thrown by Teena’s appearance, nor was he fooled. How could he have mistaken her for his Vex? While similar outwardly, Meena’s twin lacked the same confident grin, and the way she moved, with a delicate grace, did not resemble his bold woman at all. How unlike they seemed. Until Teena tripped, flailed her arms, and took out part of a row before she could recover! Yup, they were sisters all right. With a heavy sigh, and pink cheeks, Teena managed to walk the rest of the red carpet, high heels in hand— one of which seemed short a heel. With all the wedding party more or less safely arrived, there was only one person of import left. However, she didn’t walk alone. Despite his qualms, which Leo heard over the keg they’d shared the previous night, Peter appeared ready to give his daughter away. Ready, though, didn’t mean he looked happy about it. The seams of the suit his soon-to-be father-in-law wore strained, the rented tux not the best fit, but Leo doubted that was why he looked less than pleased. Leo figured there were two reasons for Peter’s grumpy countenance. The first was the fact that he had to give his little girl away. The second probably had to do with the snickers and the repetition of a certain rumor, “I hear he lost an arm-wrestling bet and had to wear a tie.” For those curious, Leo had won that wager, and thus did his new father-in-law wear the, “gods-damned-noose” around his neck. However, who cared about that sore loser when upon his arm rested a vision of beauty. Meena’s long hair tumbled in golden waves over her shoulders, the ends curled into fat ringlets that tickled her cleavage. At her temples, ivory combs swept the sides up and away, revealing the creamy line of her neck. The strapless gown made her appear as a goddess. The bust, tight and low cut, displayed her fantastic breasts so well that Leo found himself growling. He didn’t like the appreciative eyes in the crowd. Yet, at the same time, he felt a certain pride. His bride was beautiful, and it was only right she be admired. From her impressive breasts, the gown cinched in before flaring out. The filmy white fabric of the skirt billowed as she walked. He noted she wore flats. Reba’s suggestion so she wouldn’t get a heel stuck. Her gown didn’t quite touch the ground. Zena’s idea to ensure she wouldn’t trip on the hem. They’d taken all kinds of precautions to ensure her the smoothest chance of success. She might lack the feline grace of other ladies. She might have stumbled a time or two and been kept upright only by the smooth actions of her father, but dammit, in his eyes, she was the daintiest, most beautiful sight he’d ever seen. And she is mine.

The second aspect of the moral appeal of the inner-child movement is consolation. Life is full of setbacks. People we love reject us. We don't get the jobs we want. We get bad grades. Our children don't need us anymore. We drink too much. We have no money. We are mediocre. We lose. We get sick. When we fail, we look for consolation, one form of which is to see the setback as something other than failure-to interpret it in a way that does not hurt as much as failure hurts. Being a victim, blaming someone else, or even blaming the system is a powerful and increasingly widespread form of consolation. It softens many of life's blows. Such shifts of blame have a glorious past. Alcoholics Anonymous made the lives of millions of alcoholics more bearable by giving them the dignity of a “disease” to replace the ignominy of “failure,” “immorality,” or “evil.” Even more important was the civil rights movement. From the Civil War to the early 1950s, black people in America did badly-by every statistic. How did this get explained? “Stupid,” “lazy,” and “immoral” were the words shouted by demagogues or whispered by the white gentry. Nineteen fifty-four marks the year when these explanations began to lose their power. In Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court held that racial segregation in schools was illegal. People began to explain black failure as “inadequate education,” “discrimination,” and “unequal opportunity.” These new explanations are literally uplifting. In technical terms, the old explanations—stupidity and laziness—are personal, permanent, and pervasive. They lower self-esteem; they produce passivity, helplessness, and hopelessness. If you were black and you believed them, they were self-fulfilling. The new explanations—discrimination, bad schools, lean opportunities are impersonal, changeable, and less pervasive. They don't deflate self-esteem (in fact, they produce anger instead). They lead to action to change things. They give hope. The recovery movement enlarges on these precedents. Recovery gives you a whole series of new and more consoling explanations for setbacks. Personal troubles, you're told, do not result as feared from your own sloth, insensitivity, selfishness, dishonesty, self-indulgence, stupidity, or lust. No, they stem from the way you were mistreated as a child. You can blame your parents, your brother, your teachers, your minister, as well as your sex and race and age. These kinds of explanations make you feel better. They shift the blame to others, thereby raising self-esteem and feelings of self-worth. They lower guilt and shame. To experience this shift in perspective is like seeing shafts of sunlight slice through the clouds after endless cold, gray days. We have become victims, “survivors” of abuse, rather than “failures” and “losers.” This helps us get along better with others. We are now underdogs, trying to fight our way back from misfortune. In our gentle society, everyone roots for the underdog. No one dares speak ill of victims anymore. The usual wages of failure—contempt and pity—are transmuted into support and compassion. So the inner-child premises are deep in their appeal: They are democratic, they are consoling, they raise our self-esteem, and they gain us new friends. Small wonder so many people in pain espouse them.

It’s an interesting three-part response. First, we think the other party is confused. They’re misinformed and don’t know what they’re talking about. They have us mixed up with someone who truly does need to change, but we are not that person. Second, as it dawns on us that maybe the other party is not confused—maybe their information about our perceived shortcomings is accurate—we go into denial mode. The criticism does not apply to us, or else we wouldn’t be so successful. Finally, when all else fails, we attack the other party. We discredit the messenger. ‘Why is a smart guy like me,’ we think, ‘listening to a loser like you?

For a team to be successful, you need to adopt a ‘No Losers Policy.’ It’s very simple. When you and Marilyn finally get back together and she starts talking to you again, you need to stop trying to get her to see your point of view all the time.

He offered the graduates a blueprint for success: pick the right partner, one “who will see your potential of who you are tomorrow, and love that”; find a therapist; do something meaningful. “If it doesn’t have a purpose, why are you wasting your time?” he said. “Hang out at home and chill.” But doing something with meaning, he admitted, wasn’t enough. He offered a warning to the entrepreneurs in the room. “I’ll tell you another secret,” he said. “Your business has to make sense. If the business is not making sense, if you’re not profitable at the end—yes, there are a few companies, we hear about them, they lose a lot of money every month. Don’t build that.

In the markets, people tend to have difficulty actively (as opposed to passively, as in the case of the fruit dealer and bulb manufacturer) taking losses (i.e., accepting and controlling losses so that the business venture itself doesn’t become a loser). This is because all losses are treated as failure; in every other area of our lives, the word loss has negative connotations. People tend to regard the words loss, wrong, bad, and failure as the same, and win, right, good, and success as the same.

Loser is the Sance that Gives Triumph it's Savour..

TIME IS ARCHIMEDES’ LEVER in investing.    Archimedes is often quoted as saying, “Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I can move the earth.” In investing, that lever is time. (And the place to stand, of course, is a firm and realistic investment policy.)

Like the weather, the average long-term experience in investing is never surprising, but the short-term experience is always surprising.

Your why is what you’re good at; it’s what keeps you waking up mornings and working late into the night. It’s your motivation, your passion. Ideally, it creates a direct correlation between the effort you put into it and your wellbeing in life. If you haven’t found your why, you may be thinking that you’re a loser, unlucky, or just not as skilled as some of your peers. But that’s bull. A lack of success in your life doesn’t mean you don’t have what it takes. It’s far more likely that you just haven’t found your why. Find your why, and you’ll amaze yourself at how motivated and hard-working you become.

What’s more, obsessing about winning is a loser’s game: The most we can hope for is to create the best possible conditions for success, then let go of the outcome. The ride is a lot more fun that way.

It is then strange that on Bukowski’s tombstone, the epitaph reads: “Don’t try.” See, despite the book sales and the fame, Bukowski was a loser. He knew it. And his success stemmed not from some determination to be a winner, but from the fact that he knew he was a loser, accepted it, and then wrote honestly about it. He never tried to be anything other than what he was. The genius in Bukowski’s work was not in overcoming unbelievable odds or developing himself into a shining literary light. It was the opposite. It was his simple ability to be completely, unflinchingly honest with himself—especially the worst parts of himself—and to share his failings without hesitation or doubt. This is the real story of Bukowski’s success: his comfort with himself as a failure. Bukowski didn’t give a fuck about success. Even after his fame, he still showed up to poetry readings hammered and verbally abused people in his audience. He still exposed himself in public and tried to sleep with every woman he could find. Fame and success didn’t make him a better person. Nor was it by becoming a better person that he became famous and successful. Self-improvement and success often occur together. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the same thing.

It’s the same premise as reality shows. The most popular programs aren’t about geniuses and paragons of virtue, but instead about terrible parents, morons, people too fat to notice they’re pregnant, people willing to be filmed getting ass tucks, spoiled rich people, and other folks we can deem freaks. Why use the most advanced communications technology in history to teach people basic geography, or how World Bank structural adjustment lending works, when we can instead show people idiots drinking donkey semen for money? Your media experience is designed to nurture and protect your ego. So we show you the biggest losers we can find. It’s the underlying principle of almost every successful entertainment product we’ve had, from COPS to Freakshow to, literally, The Biggest Loser. We’re probably just a few years way from a show called What Would You Suck For a Dollar?

Winning the Loser’s Game,

The reason I care is that if the most successful companies are the ones that just drive really hard, and play fast and loose with the truth,” Schwartz said, “then maybe the whole idea that capitalism is great, or even useful, is really challenging to uphold.

MITI, far from being a uniquely brilliant leader of government/industrial partnership, has been wrong so often that the Japanese themselves will concede that much of their growth derives from industry's rejection of MITI’s guidance. MITI, incredibly, opposed the development of the very areas where Japan has been successful: cars, electronics and cameras. MITI has, moreover, poured vast funds into desperately wasteful projects. Thanks to MITI, Japan has a huge overcapacity in steel - no less than three times the national requirement. This, probably the most expensive mistake Japan ever made in peacetime, was a mistake of genius, because Japan has no natural resources: it has to import everything; the iron ore, the coal, the gas, the limestone and the oil to make its unwanted steel. Undaunted, MITI then invested in giant, loss-making (£400 million losses by 1992) 5th generation supercomputers at the precise moment that the market opened for the small personal computer; and MITI' s attempts at dominating the world's pharmaceutical and telecommunications industries have each failed. Nor is this just anecdote. In a meticulous study of MITI’s interventions into the Japanese economy between 1955 and 1990, Richard Beason of Alberta University and David Weinterin of Harvard showed that, across the 13 major sectors of the economy, surveying hundreds of different companies, Japan's bureaucrats almost invariably picked and supported the losers.

imagine a world, however, where coin tosses could not be repeated and there was no way of knowing weather a particular coin toss involved either a scrupulously fair coin, or one that was double-header, or double-tailed. this would represent a world that was more than just risky, it would be deeply uncertain. imagine that all decisions in this world were governed by this fundamentally uncertain coin tosses, on an entirely random basis. some people may do very well, where as others may fail very badly indeed. both the winners and the losers might then be tempted to form their own narratives to explain their successes and failures, the winners extolling their imaginary skills, the losers blaming the winners for their imaginary exploitation.

This is what is so terrifying about competition. Even if you’re not a loser, even if you’re someone who keeps on winning, if you are someone who has placed himself in competition, you will never have a moment’s peace. You don’t want to be a loser. And you always have to keep on winning if you don’t want to be a loser. You can’t trust other people. The reason so many people don’t really feel happy while they’re building up their success in the eyes of society is that they are living in competition. Because to them, the world is a perilous place that is overflowing with enemies.

The more successful you are . The lesser you hate and the more unsuccessful you are . The more you hate .That is why losers are the biggest haters. Our own failures and shortcomings lead us to envy and have jealousy. Jealousy makes us bitter, and Jealousy lead us to hate . Hate is heavy burden to carry. It weighs us down that we can't get far in life. We Lose focus, direction, purpose, and we lose ourselves. We end up channeling our resources, abilities, talent, education, experience, skills, emotions, and time in trying to break others rather than to build ourselves. Let go of hate and see how far you can go.

Your success—or anyone else’s—does not come at someone else’s expense. Other people don’t have to fail for you to succeed. Your winning doesn’t have to mean there are losers.

Rest tomorrow, or rest tomorrow? Winners and losers chose the same words, it's the difference in the meanings that makes the difference.

In a war between customers and the company, customers might lose the fight due to the difference of powers, but the company is the ultimate loser.

I have found that the one thing that seems to separate winners from losers more than anything else is that winners take action. They simply get up and do what has to be done.

Haha, same crap in different fancy words. You know nothing, you know shit… You've never felt what I feel. You have no experience with the pain. The morning pressure on the stomach, blaming yourself every single day in your mind for a mistake you made ten fucking years ago while you have to smile at others. Or having a crush on your boyfriend's best friend while never doing anything out of morality, but still feeling guilty. Comparing yourself with successful people who are your age and feeling like a complete loser. Dying for a piece of donut but hesitating to eat it to keep your fucking body in shape, just to feel desirable for some stupid guys waiting to fuck you and say goodbye the next day. Meanwhile, losing your mind every second because you left the best boyfriend on the planet for some bullshit reason and don’t have the courage to call him back and tell him sorry.

The idea of individuals being in control of their destinies gained significant popularity during the late 17th century and continued through the 18th century. The subsequent Industrial Revolution further reinforced these ideas by emphasizing self-made success and personal agency. They do motivate people to take matters into their own hands, but taken to the extreme, they have surely done more harm than good, because it divided the world into “winners” and “losers”, regardless of whether they deserved to be.

Instead of focusing on the winners, do the opposite – try to learn from the losers.

As Buffett later highlighted in a celebrated 1984 speech, one could even imagine a national coin-flipping contest of 225 million Americans, all of whom would wager a dollar on guessing the outcome. Each day the losers drop out, and the stakes would then build up for the following morning. After ten days there would be about 220,000 Americans who had correctly predicted ten flips in a row, making them over $1,000. “Now this group will probably start getting a little puffed up about this, human nature being what it is,” Buffett noted.5 “They may try to be modest, but at cocktail parties they will occasionally admit to attractive members of the opposite sex what their technique is, and what marvelous insights they bring to the field of flipping.” If the national coin-flipping championship continued, after another ten days 215 people would statistically have guessed twenty flips in a row, and turned $1 into more than $1 million. And still the net result would remain that $225 million would have been lost and $225 million would have been won. However, at this stage the successful coin flippers would really begin to buy into their own hype, Buffett predicted. “They will probably write books on ‘How I Turned a Dollar into a Million in Twenty Days Working Thirty Seconds a Morning,’ ” he joked.

Whenever someone talks about luck, “positive thinkers” are quick to pounce on them and say only losers talk about luck, winners are self-made. For too long, people have been made to feel like losers, often for no fault of their own and very often, people have also been made to feel like winners, as if it were their actions alone, and their effort, knowledge, persistence, perseverance etc. that made them so successful. This fake narrative completely discounts the one thing that perhaps plays the absolute biggest role in where one ends up in life – Luck and Randomness. If you are alive today, it is luck. If you are not disabled, it is luck. If you are intelligent, it is luck. You may again say that only failures talk about luck, but I openly admit that ALL my “wins” have a significant element of luck too and so do yours.

As the period over which returns are measured is lengthened, the short-term volatility in returns caused by fluctuating changes in the discount rate becomes less and less important and the expected dividend stream or interest payments, which are much more stable, become more and more important.

Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that’s what you are seeking. You stand above the rat race and the pecking order, not outside of it, if you do so by choice. Quitting a high-paying position, if it is your decision, will seem a better payoff than the utility of the money involved (this may seem crazy, but I’ve tried it and it works). This is the first step toward the stoic’s throwing a four-letter word at fate. You have far more control over your life if you decide on your criterion by yourself. Mother Nature has given us some defense mechanisms: as in Aesop’s fable, one of these is our ability to consider that the grapes we cannot (or did not) reach are sour. But an aggressively stoic prior disdain and rejection of the grapes is even more rewarding. Be aggressive; be the one to resign, if you have the guts. It is more difficult to be a loser in a game you set up yourself. In Black Swan terms, this means that you are exposed to the improbable only if you let it control you. You always control what you do; so make this your end.

That kind of success is for losers,” he said. “I aspire to something more. To be base and ubiquitous. You can’t plan for that. You can only dream of it.

Inequality is calling a winner and a loser equal. They did not sacrifice the same amount to earn their title.

Winners and losers have the same goal. They just have different processes.

While the winners are out working, the losers are planning, thinking, analyzing, and stuck in indecision.

And yet as a coach, I know that being fixated on winning (or more likely, not losing) is counterproductive, especially when it causes you to lose control of your emotions. What’s more, obsessing about winning is a loser’s game: The most we can hope for is to create the best possible conditions for success, then let go of the outcome. The ride is a lot more fun that way.

A sad fact in life is that you cannot have winners without losers, no matter what you do, it's up to you to make out which one you are.

Even if you are a loser today, it doesn’t mean that you cannot change yourself

Winners lose much more often than losers. So if you keep losing but you're still trying, keep it up! You're right on track. - Matthew Keith Groves     Life

This is also where breakthroughs happen. Take it from fitness expert, Tony Horton: Failure and success are siamese twins; they don’t exist without each other. There’s no way around it. The problem with the word “failure” is that it connotes that you’re a loser—and losers don’t succeed or get the girl (or guy or pie or pot of gold or whatever it is you wanna get). As a result, many people would rather play it safe, not take chances, not explore, and never, ever stick their neck out and actually try. Most people don’t realize that failure is the key to joy, happiness, and growth. If you’re afraid to fail, then you’ll never expose yourself to opportunities for success. On the other hand, if you view failure as awesome, then you’ll be open to trying things—and falling on your face, screwing up, making mistakes, and blowing it once in a while. Sucking at something every once in a while is how you achieve greatness in the long run.[27]

you have always a choice between being a winner or a loser in your life.

Losers are broken winners.

Losers wait for luck; winners make their own.

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.

This has the added negative effect of giving them the illusion of confidence. It is a hard lesson to accept, but the success of many people is due to luck, not knowledge. If a thousand people try a thousand different methods and one of them hits the jackpot, it is an illusion to think the winner necessarily had more knowledge or skill than the losers. If two psychics pick opposite winners in an athletic contest, one of them may appear to have more knowledge that the other, but the appearance is an illusion.

the stories of the supremely successful entrepreneurs obscure the forgotten millions of losers and nincompoops. The fabulous successes seem like proof of the power of passionate belief in oneself, our American faith in faith.

She was surprised because she was Emily, and she did not share Jonathan's frank assessment of coworkers as losers, whiners, bozos, sharks. No, she imagined people were rational and courteous, as she was, and when they proved otherwise, she assumed that she could influence them to become that way. Dangerous thinking. When she was truthful, she expected to hear the truth. Reasonable, she expected reasonable behavior in return. She was young, inventive, fantastically successful. She trusted in the world, believing in poetic justice- that good ideas blossomed and bore fruit, while dangerous schemes were meant to wither on the vine. She had passions and petty jealousies like everybody else, but she was possessed of a serene rationality. At three, she had listened while her mother sang "Greensleeves" in the dark, and she'd asked: "Why are you singing 'Greensleeves' when my nightgown is blue?" Then Gillian had changed the song to "Bluesleeves," and Emily had drifted off. Those songs were over now, Gillian long gone. Despite this loss- because of it- Emily was still that girl, seeking consonance and symmetry, logic, light.

Someday they would rise and fall in the world the sermon presaged, where berry picking was a higher crime than bankruptcy. If a man could fail simply by not succeeding or not striving, then ambition was not an opportunity but an obligation. Following the casket to the grave, stooping here and there to collect petals that wafted from it, the children buried more than the odd little man they had seen in the woods or on the street. Part of the American Dream of success went asunder: the part that gave them any choice in the matter.

A century ago, in his 1905 classic work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber argued that striving for success is a compulsory virtue, even a sacred duty in American culture. "The capitalistic economy of the present day is an immense cosmos into which the individual is born, and which presents itself to him, at least as an individual, as an unalterable order of things in which he must live," Weber explained. "It forces the individual, in so far as he is involved in the system of market relationships, to conform to capitalistic rules of action." These rules include the rational pursuit of profit, the perpetual increase of capital as an end in itself, the development of an acquisitive personality, and the belief that ceaseless work is a necessity of life.7

We do this because a century and a half ago we embraced business as the dominant model for our outer and inner lives. Ours is an ideology of achieved identity; obligatory striving is its method, and failure and success are its outcomes. We reckon our incomes once a year but audit ourselves daily, by standards of long-forgotten origin. Who thinks of the old counting house when we "take stock" of how we "spend" our lives, take "credit" for our gains, or try not to end up "third rate" or "good for nothing"? Someday, we hope, "the bottom line" will show that we "amount to something." By this kind of talk we "balance" our whole lives, not just our accounts. Willy Loman speaks this way. Choosing suicide to launch his sons with insurance money, he asks, "Does it take more guts to stand here the rest of my life ringing up a zero?" He insists that a man is not a piece of fruit to be eaten and the peel discarded, but he does not see that a man is not a cash register.'°

If these civilizing potentials were to be generalized, then the homeotechnological era would be distinguished by the fact that in it spaces of leeway for errancy become narrower while spaces of leeway for gratification and positive association grow. Advanced biotechnology and nootechnology groom a refined, cooperative subject who plays with himself, who is formed in association with complex texts and hyper-complex contexts. Here emerges the matrix of a humanism after humanism. Domination must tend in the direction of ceasing because, as crudeness, it makes itself impossible. In the interconnected, inter-intelligently condensed world masters and violators only still have chances for success that last little more than a moment, while cooperators, promoters, and enrichers—at least in their contexts—find more numerous, more adequate, more sustainable connections. After the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century a more extensive dissolution of the remnants of domination looms for the twenty-first or twenty-second—no one will believe that this can happen without intense conflicts. One cannot rule out the possibility that reactionary domination will once again band together with the mass ressentiments of losers to form a new mode of fascism. The ingredients for this are above all present in the mass culture of the United States of America. But like their rise, the foundering of such reactions is foreseeable.

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

Dare to face your competition, because running from it is associated with losers.

The lawsuit was also a major distraction to Evan, Bobby, and Snapchat, during a time when they needed to focus more than ever. Finally, they reached a settlement. Reggie would receive $ 157.5 million and sign a gag order to never speak about Snapchat, the founding, or the lawsuit. Snapchat would acknowledge Reggie’s contributions to the company. Like Facebook’s multiple lawsuits with the Winklevoss twins and Eduardo Saverin, it’s difficult to neatly arrange the characters into winner and loser columns. Reggie Brown likely could not have built Snapchat into the multibillion-dollar company it is today. But he did not simply toss an idea out there for anyone to take—he recruited Evan, the best person he knew for the task, to join him and start the company. So what is fair for each side to receive? Snapchat’s valuation soared so high and so quickly during the lawsuit that it was hard for each side to wrap their heads around it, let alone arbitrate what each side deserved. This question isn’t going away. The Social Network, featuring courtroom scene after courtroom scene of friends hurling accusations at each other through expensive lawyers, spurred scores of young college students to pursue startups. Evan’s massive success with Snapchat has only increased the startup fervor on Stanford’s campus. And Reggie’s lawyers’ firm, Lee Tran & Liang, has become the hot law firm for ousted startup cofounders to sue young tech companies.

When you learn the rules and the vocabulary of investing and begin to build your asset column, I think you’ll find that it’s as fun a game as you’ve ever played. Sometimes you win and sometimes you learn. But have fun. Most people never win because they’re more afraid of losing. That is why I found school so silly. In school we learn that mistakes are bad, and we are punished for making them. Yet if you look at the way humans are designed to learn, we learn by making mistakes. We learn to walk by falling down. If we never fell down, we would never walk. The same is true for learning to ride a bike. I still have scars on my knees, but today I can ride a bike without thinking. The same is true for getting rich. Unfortunately, the main reason most people are not rich is because they are terrified of losing. Winners are not afraid of losing. But losers are. Failure is part of the process of success. People who avoid failure also avoid success.

And his success stemmed not from some determination to be a winner, but from the fact that he knew he was a loser, accepted it, and then wrote honestly about it.

As everybody else, I also feared failure, and I also persisted in a certain direction because I did not want to quit. Today, however, I understand that failure is not only necessary but desirable. The best lessons of life will never be told by those who forget them or for those that wish not to remember them, for both the winner and the loser do not wish to remember their setbacks, their darkest moments. In both cases, they wish to forget their darkest moment. And yet, without those very dark and painful moments, they would have never realize either that they are in the dark or that they want the light. Only through failure can you conquer truthfulness, honor and success. As a matter of fact, only through darkness will you truly know the light. Everyone is within the same path. Some simply realize that there is only one way to go, and before the others do that.

You can only achieve what you put your mind into. Now decide, you want to be a loser or you want to conquer the world.

When you associate with great people, dreamers, high achievers, inventors, entrepreneurs; you soon become like them. Conversely, when you walk with losers, liars, cheaters, or crooks; you transform into one.

As everybody else, I also feared failure, and I also persisted in a certain direction because I did not want to quit. Today, however, I understand that failure is not only necessary but desirable. The best lessons in life will never be told by those who forget them or by those that wish not to remember them, for both the winner and the loser do not wish to remember their setbacks, their darkest moments. In both cases, they wish to forget their darkest moments. And yet, without those very dark and painful moments, they would have never realize either that they are in the dark or that they want the light. Only through failure can one conquer truthfulness, honor and success. As a matter of fact, only through darkness will you truly know the light. Everyone is in the same path. Some people simply realize that there is only one way to go, and before others do that.

Unfortunately the main reason most people are not rich is because they are terrified of losing. Winners are not afraid of losing. But losers are. Failure is part of the process of success. People who avoid failure also avoid success.

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.

We’re creating a dystopia, where the mania of the state isn’t secrecy or censorship but unfairness. Obsessed with success and wealth and despising failure and poverty, our society is systematically dividing the population into winners and losers, using institutions like the courts to speed the process. Winners get rich and get off. Losers go broke and go to jail. It isn’t just that some clever crook on Wall Street can steal a billion dollars and never see the inside of a courtroom; it’s that, plus the fact that some black teenager a few miles away can go to jail just for standing on a street corner, that makes the whole picture complete.

Persistence is the difference that separates winners and losers. It is the difference between success and failure. Successful people fail and keep persisting. Unsuccessful people fail once and give up. It is well said that “we fall down, but we get back up again.” Failure is not falling down, it’s staying down.

The truth is that life, if viewed as a card game, deals good hands, bad hands, and average hands. And whichever hand you receive, you must play! You can win with any hand, and you can lose with any hand. It’s totally up to you how you play the game! Life is filled with champions who drew extremely poor hands and losers who drew terrific hands. In life, you will never be dealt a hand that, with God’s help, cannot be turned into a winning one. Success is for you and for anyone willing to take the initiative and pay the price.

We’re not saying not to hold regular team meetings and require attendance. We are saying, understand the unintended consequences of doing so, and be aware of the value of that meeting for each person. Weigh those factors against your perceived value of the meeting for all, and then decide whether you’re going to insist on attendance.