Defeat reveals and breaks bad habits, releasing your
energies for a fresh start with better habits.
Defeat supplants vanity and arrogance with humility,
paving the way for more harmonious relationships.
Defeat causes you to take inventory of your assets and
liabilities, both physical and spiritual.
Defeat strengthens your willpower by providing it
with a challenge to greater effort.
Bodybuilders know that it isn’t enough just to jerk the barbell up; it has to be returned to its original position twice as slowly as it was raised. This principle is known as resistance training; it requires more control and effort than the showy work of actually lifting the weight.
Defeat can be your resistance training. Every time you return to where you started, do it deliberately, concentrating on the process, so that you train yourself to make even stronger and more powerful progress the next time.
Your Attitude Toward Defeat
Again and again I’ve stressed that your attitude toward defeat is crucial to mastering it. You can see it only as a loss or as a chance for gain.
The negative attitude toward defeat is effectively summarized by Shakespeare in Julius Caesar when the murderer Brutus says:
There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
These are the words of a doomed man, a man who seals his doom by failing to recognize that there is never just one chance, never just one tide that leads on to fortune.
The positive attitude is very different. Consider this poem by Walter Malone, entitled “Opportunity”:
They do me wrong who say I come no more,
When once I knock and fail to find you in;
For every day I stand outside your door,
And bid you wake and rise, to fight and win.
Wail not for precious chances passed away;
Weep not for golden ages on the wane;
Each night I burn the records of the day;
At sunrise every soul is born again.
Laugh like a boy at splendors that have sped,
To vanished joys be blind and deaf and dumb;
My judgments seal the dead past with its dead,
But never bind a moment yet to come.
Malone’s vision of defeat is the one you will prefer when you have discovered that every defeat carries the seed of an equivalent benefit. Remember, “At sunrise every soul is born again.” That rebirth is the opportunity to put defeat behind you.
Fear, self-limitation, and the acceptance of your defeat as final will cause you to be “bound in shallows and in miseries” as Shakespeare suggests. But these things can be overcome by applied faith, a positive mental attitude, and a definite major purpose.
If you accept defeat as an inspiration to try again with renewed confidence and determination, attaining success will be only a matter of time. The secret to this is your positive mental attitude.
Remember, a positive mental attitude attracts success. You need that attraction most when coping with defeat. Redouble your efforts to maintain and build your PMA when adversity strikes, and use your applied faith in yourself and your purpose to put your PMA into action. That is the fundamental lesson in learning from adversity and defeat.
Source: Learning from Adversity & Defeat by Napoleon Hill