In our last +1, we talked about Maurice Ashley and the extraordinary (Heroic!) sacrifices and risks his mom made to help create a better life for him and his brother and sister.
As you may recall, when he was two years old, Maurice’s mom left Jamaica to try to create a better life for her family in America. It took her TEN years to gain citizenship and reunite her family.
(As I said before, that’s incredibly humbling and inspiring.)
As it turns out, as Maurice says: “Her sacrifice, made with good intentions and a willingness to endure supreme struggle, paid off beyond her wildest imagination.”
Maurice became the first African American Chess Grandmaster in history while his brother and sister became kickboxing and boxing champions. All three were inducted into their respective domain’s Hall of Fame.
Heroic Families unite!!!
Today I want to explore some more wisdom from Maurice’s great new book: Move by Move: Life Lessons On and Off the Chessboard.
Let’s talk about LOSING.
More specifically, let’s open our copies of Maurice’s book to the chapter called: “Losing (Because You Will)” in which he tells us…
“No one likes to lose. Yet how we handle our losses is one of the most powerful measures of our eventual success. Those who react badly after a loss, who pout, kick, scream, and throw things, generally get no benefit from the experience. The great champions often look at losing as a way to gain precious competitive insights so they can raise their game to new levels. Losing, much more so than winning, can be a catapult launching your game to new heights.”
He continues by saying: “The late, great Kobe Bryant was once asked, ‘What does losing feel like to you?’ His reply: ‘It’s exciting . . . because it means you have different ways to get better. There’s certain weaknesses that were exposed that you need to shore up. . . . It sucks to lose, but at the same time the answers are there if you just look at them.’”
First: As we’ve now discussed many times, developing a healthy relationship to failure / losing / mistakes is the #1 thing I’m MOST excited about with Emerson and his approach to Chess Grandmastery.
We’ve talked about that enough lately (see the +1 from a couple days ago and this +1 on How to Go NEXT LEVEL).
So…
Today we’re going to focus on Kobe Bryant’s truly Heroic response to losing.
In sum…
Kobe says…
It SUCKS!!
And...
It’s EXCITING!
That is PRECISELY the response we want to have to “losing” in the various games of life.
Know this…
We WILL lose.
That’s inevitable.
The question is: How can you use your most significant “loss” to “catapult launching your game to new heights”?
Seriously…
How can you?
Think of a time you “lost” recently.
Got it?
Yes. It sucks.
It’s supposed to be painful.
Perfect.
Now…
Recognize the fact that we ALL lose, Common Humanity 101 style.
Now…
What, SPECIFICALLY, can you learn from that failure?
And…
Most importantly…
What, SPECIFICALLY, is ONE thing you will DO to use that failure as fuel for your antifragile growth?
Get on that.
It’s time to catapult our game to the next, next level.
TODAY.
💩 ⛽ 🚀
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