How to Be a Good Loser

failure and when failure doesn't feel so good. This week on game Plan, we're talking about losing. I'm Rebecca Greenfield, a reporter at Bloomberger. I cover the workplace, and I am Sam Grobart, a writer at Bloomberg business Week magazine. So for anyone who's been following Silicon Valley or I used to cover technology a lot more closely, and I think you did. To Sam, we heard so much talk about the benefits of failure. Oh, you have to fail, You're not a real person if you haven't failed, was

the sort of mantra out of Silicon Valley. It was a place where failure is embraced, It's lauded. It makes you into a smarter, better entrepreneur, better person. Yeah, and it was on a small scale, so when you're building your products, move fast, big things. As I mentioned before, that refers to coding and building things. But then on a larger scale, as a startup founder, you're supposed to have a failing company. Then that's because most startups do

fail absolutely. What is it something like some overwhelming percentage, And so it becomes sort of a mark of experience that you've failed. If you haven't failed, I think people may look a bit askance at you because you haven't been truly tested by failure. But of course there is something to all this talk of losing and failure when it pertains to Silicon Valley, which is that they can

afford to fail. Yeah. So there was a great up ed by Kate Loss in The New York Times about people who have the privilege to fail, where she points the example of Bradford shell Hammer who founded fab dot com, which had a spectacular failure. They got a ton of funding and you know, it was a big failure. He lost a ton of people, lost their jobs, they lost a ton of money. And then Bradford went to start another company and he got funding. Right, So failure but

without real consequence, at least not for the founder. All the people who lost their jobs might feel a little differently. I'm sure would take issue with that. But that's the problem with the Silicon Valley philosophy of failure. It's not actual failure, it's academic failure. Right. And she brings up the point that Silicon Valley and its investors pick the people it allows to even fail, that people of color

and women don't even get funding. They fail way earlier on, and that's not seen really as a mark of success. That's seen as your idea isn't even good enough to get some funding exactly. So what we want to talk about today, I think, is more about what it means to lose and what can we take from it. What I mean, you have to be able to take something from it, otherwise you'll just be caught in some terrible cycle of disappointment and doubt. Yeah. I feel that way

a little bit these days. I felt that way my entire life. Come on, well, you and I were trying to rack our brains for times we'd failed. Not that we haven't failed, no, but we have. I don't think anything really haunts us, right. I think starting a company and losing all the money and losing people's jobs is something that will be a mark on your your life story for a while, more than yes, not writing a good story in our case, or doing poorly on a presentation,

or losing a big sale, or exactly micro failures. And the truth is, you know, failure is a function of risk. And I think we were talking a little bit about this earlier. I think we're both comparatively risk averse, yes, which I think people would say, you need to risk

things to do great things. But this notion of risk, if you want to now turn it towards recent current events in the form of the presidential election, and you were saying earlier that to some degree, this notion of the election of Donald Trump is that risk taking impulse

among the American people. Let's try this. We've never done this before, yea, what wasn't working before, So we need to try something new, and even if it breaks everything that came before, it that inherently something good will come out of that. Yes, although millions upon millions of voters might disagree with that, right, and they're dealing with their own feelings of failure. And losing themselves too, and trying to figure out how to deal with that in a

way that is hopefully as productive as possible. Well, and right now you're seeing sort of two different expressions of that dealing with failure, aren't you, Because you have some people who are saying, if you allow yourself with the Democratic Party, let's say, people saying, Okay, we've clearly made some serious mistakes here. We weren't seeing things that we should have been seeing. How should we look for this in the future, what kinds of candidates are going to

appeal to the right group of people? And then you have the other group, which right now is trying to initiate recounts of votes. Now that's not to say that is in a valid pursuit, but you could make the argument that one group is sort of going, okay, like what should I learn from this, and the other one's going like, no, no, you know, like, it wasn't a mistake. We got all the votes, We got more votes, go

back and count them again. Yeah, one group is admitting failure and loss and trying to deal with it, and the other hasn't quite gotten there, and barring a revelation about vote talies in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio. They're going to have to come around to that same point of view that already some people are grappling with, right, And then it's like, okay, what do you do? How do

you deal with it? And I think for a lot of us, like you and I, you don't deal with failure in such a large scale generally, right, So we don't really know how to deal with it. But fortunately our guest does and we have with us, Sam Wineman. He has a book coming out December twenty. It's called When It Losing, How our biggest setbacks lead to our greatest gains? And he's going to tell us how to lose better. Thanks for coming and talking to us, sam

My Pleasures, thanks for having me. So I guess we can start with a simple question, how can our biggest setbacks lead to our greatest gains? The simplest way is that losing is a window into our weaknesses and it forces us to address whatever area is improvement we need. Whereas when we win, we sort of gloss over the things that we need to work on, but losing sort of brings that stuff front and center. So the first

thing it does is it. I call it the ultimate truth serum, which is that it makes you deal head on with flaws, weaknesses, you know, various areas of improvement, and more times than not, it's the one thing you're gonna have to correct to win next time. Sam, quick question here, what if you say, don't have any flaws or then I had the same questions? Right, Yes, Well you're you're very fortunate and this might not be the book for you. Well, I wish you all the very best. Um,

I do want to ask you a question. In your book, you talk a little bit about the sort of two minds that that encounter failure and the different reactions they have. Can you tell us a little bit about that. Well, there's there's a famous sort of distinction that was made not by me, but by Stanford psychology professor named Carol Dweck,

and she calls it growth mindsets and fixed mindsets. A growth mindset is someone who accepts failures and challenges and wants to tackle and wants to improve, realizes that everything is a bit of a process and that there's grounds to be made over the course of whatever you're doing. The fixed mindset is of the belief that you have acceptabilities. This is who you are. You're born with them more or less, and when you fail or you lose, it

is a sort of statement about who you are. And so the healthier way is to have a growth mindset, and everything you do, whether it's sports or business or relationships, is to kind of have this belief that anything we endeavor to do is part of a process, and when there are setbacks of some sort, you embrace the challenges that are there and hopefully build upon it. The fixed one sounds a little bit like Calvinists, like you were

born this way and this has happened because you're wicked now. Confession, h that was a really bad religion joke by all of us. Um So on reading that, I related definitely to the fixed mindset, which I guess is bad. But then thinking back, I think immediately most of us must have that fixed mindset where you fail at something, and immediately, of course they're going to take it as some sort

of character flaw. Of course, I mean, at first of all, I think it's important to note that no one is all one thing or you know, all the other, and we all have fixed mindset tendencies within and you know, some days we're fighting it more than others, and I'm definitely an example of that. So when you and anything you do, when you lose, if I'm you know, a lot of this has to do with sports, and I lose an a tennis match, my inclination say I suck

on the worst, right. So it's just part of our nature to think of it as some sort of commentary on our set of abilities. And so when you do take a step back, that's when you take a larger look and say, well, actually, no, I can you know, I can get better, I can build upon this, and you're able to certainly see that there are ways to improve in whatever you're doing. You are an editor at

Golf Digest, you have been a sports reporter. It would seem that you know professional athletes who are playing at the highest level of their games still encounter a significant amount of failure. I mean, nobody goes effectively, you know, with a perfect season. I mean teams might, but even individuals screw up here and there. Do you find in your experience that athletes have sort of a better way of handling the inevitable failure game to game that's going

to happen. Yes and no, which is I realized an evasive answer. First of all, I think that one of the points I make in the book is that sports, as small a microcosm as it is, is a great training ground for dealing with failure because everyone deals with it in an athletic context from a young age. You're going to have failures, are losing, and you have to learn how to deal with it and address whatever is go on. So and that at that standpoint, every athlete

has confronted it. But when you talk about the highest level of sports, professional athletes, these are guys who are often told how great they are, they're the best, and have huge egos, and with ego comes the complications of not wanting to have anything that counters their ego. So when you're you know, ex. Professional basketball player, and you're told how wonderful you are and you have an off night, there can be a temptation to blame that or look

elsewhere beyond within and looking at their mistakes. So there are some there are a lot of fixed mindset tendencies within professional athletes. So your book is a lot about sports, and you said you started writing it because of a sports incident with your son. But we are show about our lives at work. So I have to ask, how do you think that this plays out in the day to day lives of people at work or in business.

I think it plays at a hundred different ways. I think one of the big things is that when we're at work, of course they're we're going to have various setbacks. So you people lose their jobs, or people you lose out an account, or you have some sort of you know,

you don't get the promotion you wanted. Again, there's this whole tendency to first look at as a commentary on you, on your worth, and in some cases it is sometimes you need to have that moment of truth where he says, I didn't get the job because I didn't have skills X, Y, and Z, and I need to develop those skills, and I wasn't the right guy. Or I botched the presentation at work, and I did because I wasn't prepared, And those are all sort of failures that you can learn from.

I do think the other part I talked about is it sometimes there are failures and there are losses, and without getting too much on the weeds on this, sometimes the losses outside your control. Sometimes things happen. Sometimes the company downsizes and they eliminate jobs, and people who are perfectly good at their jobs have these quote unquote setbacks. There's the moment you have to have where you realize

was it me or was it something else? And sort of the starting point with all of this is this sort of moment of honesty, which is what was it? Was it me? And if it was me, what did I do? What can I do better? How can I learn from this and move on? But another way to kind of soften the blow is maybe it wasn't me. Maybe it was something that it was just outside of my control, And there is some solace to be taken

in that as well. You've already identified a few of these, but I was wondering if you could tell us, do you have a playbook of sorts when encountering a failure of your own that you sort of remember to think about it this way, take these steps, something practical that people can be adopt ive. Been forced to sort of think about that recently. Yeah, No, so I do think

that sort of inventory. I hate to use all these sort of self help buzz words, but there is a little bit of a sort of inventory of what happened and being honest with yourself, wasn't me with something I did? How did this all play out? What were you get all the facts on the table? Is someone said to me.

So that's the first part. And then you kind of do this analysis of what happened and you sift through the things that are we're not your fault and that you can sort of insulate yourself from and say that was just something outside my control. But then there's all these areas that I can work on. And I think that the next part is a looking at what you can improve upon, where our skills that you needed to be developed, or things that you needed to prepare better

or whatnot. And then there's also just sort of fortifying yourself for the next endeavor that you're going into and

using that into whatever it is. And also I think another part of this is when you do that at and you've had a failure, a loss of some sort, is taking some strength from that, which is, you know, I had this thing happened to me, whatever it was, you know, I allowed myself to be bummed out about it, but you know from that came small victories from it that I can point to, whatever they are I mean I'm talking real generalities here, but um, you know, there's

probably some things that you did go well, and then I think that's important identify those things as well so you can build on those. Up happens when the power and potential of every employee and leader in your workforce is released, and corn Ferry can get you there by aligning your people to your strategy, attracting, developing, engaging, and

rewarding them to reach new heights. With corn Ferry, you get a partner who truly understands people, leadership and the new landscape of work, a partner who knows how to take your business up. Learn more at corn Ferry dot com slash up. You alluded to something recently that happened that you had to deal with a loss. We're talking about November eight. Well, I thought you said that you've had to deal with that recently, So I do think a good example is how people look at the election.

You know, regardless of your politics, but certainly for the people who ended up on the side where the outcome did not go, they wanted it to go. Even though only one person ran for president loss, there's a lot of people who had a lot of invest a lot invested in that election, and it was a loss for them, man exactly. And so but there's this sort of feeling of devastation and and uh someone hopelessness. And in my own small way, I've tried to look at it, what

did I miss about this? You know, what did I what did I not see that other people see? I have no intention of running for political office, but at least in helping me myself cope with the new dynamic of this country is trying to understand what I miss what people are saying that I don't see how I can possibly learn from it and grow from it. And then I think that's like on my small personal level, but if you look at the Democratic Party, you know they're they're gonna have it to do a huge sort

of inventory. I talked about about what they missed, what they're doing wrong, where they've missed the mark, and how they can sort of take this and and build on it. That process that you describe, and particularly on the personal level, you've already identified the sort of the ego of the

professional athlete. Let's say, are some professional athletes who immediately might blame others, come up with excuses, other reasons on the other side of that spectrum is perhaps the kind of person who almost unduly puts blame on themselves, and so you have to make sure you're sort of in between those two. And you know, I've definitely been in this situation and people have said to me, look at the facts, you know, did you do that? And I'll be like, no, I didn't have anything to do with that.

Then that wasn't you. You shouldn't feel badly about that part of it, you know, let that go. And getting back for a minute, I know this is a little bit circular, but back to the election. We now have a president elect for whom losing, oh what could be worse? But he never has lost in his own mind, and if he's lost, it's not his fault. I mean, you know, not to get into, but there's definitely this talk about ego.

You know, when people people of great ego, when they lose, are unwilling to look at their own role in that loss um And the opposite of that is people of humility will identify their role in any of these things. And so I'm a big believer again politics aside that a huge way to cope with losing is this humility of kind of identifying what you can do, what you could have done better, but also not just piling on

yourself for the sake of just beating yourself up. I mean, at some point you do have to make that distinction

of and it wasn't me. Actually, that was something that was outside my control, and I did the best I could for X, Y, and Z. So it's a very tricky balance, and I hopefully articulated uh and sort of how to make the distinction in the book in terms of being honest with yourself and I identifying the areas that where it is you and where it's not you, and hopefully um building off of both again to be the one to say we have to bring it back to work. You also have a chapter on Silicon Valot

and their obsession with failure. Well, they love losing over Oh you lose all the way to the bank, and you seem to be on the side of that. Well, I think it's been proven that a lot of the great successes in Silicon Valley and just innovation in general are the byproduct of some sort of failure. I mean, Twitter started as another company that sort of didn't go anywhere, and then uh, they iterated, and they came up with this other idea that happened to be Now there are

another company that might but it's just part. It's very much ingrained in the culture there that you iterate and you constantly are throwing things against the wall, and you accept the idea that some are not going to a

lot are not gonna work. There's the you've heard the buzzword pivot, you know, being able to pivot is a huge part of Silicon Valley, which is, um, you have an idea and it doesn't work and doesn't make a lot of sense, but that one percent is something that maybe we can work with, So let's see what we can do with that. And it's a very nimble culture out there, and it's all based on the idea that a lot of the things you're gonna do are not

gonna work, and there's no shame in that. Bringing it back to sports, and I'm really not a sports person, but I often do think about the idea that an amazing hitter in baseball is still going to strike two out of three times or more. And that's significant. So there's a lot more losing there than winning. But the

right winds can make a big thing. I mean, that's a sort of analogy I make in that chapter, which is this whole idea of sort of a micro failure, which is that you know everyone's gonna have micro failures. But in baseball, like you said, I mean, the best baseball hitters are unsuccessful two thirds of the time. And so rather than look at those occasions as you know, a commentary on how inept they are, they look at

it that's just kind of part of the deal. And it's gonna obviously, you know, your your value has proven over a much wider sample size than you know that one at bad. And so it's the same thing with ideas in the in the tech world, which is you're going to try a lot of things and most of them are not gonna work, but there's gonna be something that you're gonn to be able to build on from there. I often have this conversation with my brother and I would like to get your guys two cents on it.

I think a similar thing should be applied to people in creative fields, where you should not judge someone based on every single creative thing that they do, but like they're going to put out a lot of bad things and if they have one or two really great things, then they deserve our praise. And yet there is that sort of notion of your only as good as your last article movie, I say, what have you? And that certainly prevails around here. It's really hard to do a

good thing, for sure a lot. Yeah, Well, I look at me, you know, writers, I mean, you know you're handing that first draft and make this allusion to it is like you're handing that first draftic, this is great, I'm turning it, and then it gets handed back to you, and then you handed it again, and it's also has

red ink all over it. So it just that's part of the deal, is any The creative process is filled with all these little failures along the way, which hopefully feeds something large, Like going back to that whole idea

of growth mindsets and fixed mindsets. If you turn in the first draft and as any right ink on it, you look at yourself as a terrible writer, as a failure, if you have a fixed mindset, whereas you realize this is sort of part of this process of making it better and embracing that a whole idea, And I think also,

I mean, maybe this is cynical. But when you're responsible for producing, you know, whatever it is you do, um, if there's a large volume of it, then you have to accept that some things are going to be done frankly, to be done right and not to be terrible right, but like they might have you may not spend that much time on it. It's satisfied the goal of whatever

it was that you were attempting to achieve. And that's okay as long as you are also keeping your eye on higher value output targets that you really want to put a lot of time and effort into. And if you know you have let's say, over the course of a year, you know three or four six of those, well that can be totally a worthwhile, you know, use of your time. If you also have fifty other things, fine.

It goes at the idea of like you know, all innovation or great greatness is somewhat tied to risk, right, and so with risk comes to very strong potential that you're gonna come out of this looking stupid, and so you have to be willing to do that to to

produce something great. I mean, it's escaping me now, but I'm sure we could probably rattle off twenty you know Oscar winning film directors who produced some real duds along the way, and because they were trying, they were trying to do something unique or great and it missed the mark for whatever reason. But then they came back and

produced something exceptional. I'm standing of the writers and musicians and etcetera, etcetera, and that there was probably value in the mistake that informed their later successful and they picked something out of it and said, ah, now I know

what you mean. There's a psychologist who I really enjoyed talking to, this guy named fran Parisola, who's a big believer in the not this but that sort of philosophy, which is, in order to have the great the greatness whatever you're producing, you have to go through the not

this part. You know, you have to sort of eliminate all the bad ideas and the bad things you do in his time, he's talking about, you know, it doesn't matter what it is like if you're in, if you're a CEO, you're gonna produce all these bad ideas, but it's going to help you identify the one idea that's really it's really worth something. Great clich is that Thomas Edison, uh you know, I have not failed. I've just found ten thousand ways that don't work. That's kind of the

mentality you need to have. So I'm taking away from this is that the biggest losers are people who don't try at all. Exactly, That's exactly there it is, you know what nice way to put it. Well, thank you so much for coming in talking to us. This is a really interesting conversation. Thank you for having me. So did that make you feel any better about all the times you've been a big loser, Sam, Well, you know the one or two times that that's happened, But I

know you never lose. Um, Yeah, no it did. I thought that there was some helpful practical You have to basically divorce yourself from the emotion of failure, and that was what I took away from the conversation is that you have to really get very sort of analytical and just look at the situation for what it is and what it was, and tried from that to understand what you could have done better the next time. Basically you have to be a robot, yes, with no emotions in

that circumstance. Maybe. So, Yeah, it's really hard. As I said when we were talking to him, I did relate to the kids who when they fail, they see it as a personal failing and just are like, no, that sounded kind of familiar. But yeah, I think what else are you supposed to do? I mean, in the phase of a lass or a failure, you have to move on. Otherwise forget it. You may as well just go to bed and never emerge from your bedroom ever again. Um. But yeah, I mean you have to accept your reality

is changing. You had one reality before the failure, you have a new reality after the failure. So, since we've been talking about losing, Becca, you are from the great city of Buffalo, New York. Yes, a city that so I am told has a number of losing sports teams, namely the Buffalo Bills. So after the Cubs broke their curse, there were a lot of articles in newspapers arguing what the next worst sports team was in Buffalo top the list in multiple different places. And our teams always lose.

I am used to losing. I'm used to rooting for teams that lose, and I don't. I don't feel better for it. I feel like it's really worn me down. But yeah, the Bills famously lost four Super Bowls in a row when I was a young lass, and the Savers when I became a hockey fan, lost unjustly in the Stanley Cup Finals. Have either of those teams ever gone on to actually win their respective championship? No? No, no,

still still not winning. Okay, Yeah, so Buffalo is a city of sports losers, right, So I'm just saying that I'm primed to lose a lot like the teams I root for tend to lose. I'm sorry if I've rooted for your team because it's just probably Yeah, I'm not sure that it's character building, but maybe now I should see it that way, right, Maybe you've learned something from it. Yeah, So for the losing team like me, And now it's

time for half big takes, half fake takes. For this week's half thought out opinions, I'm going to pose a question to both of us. How far is too far for personal hygiene at work? Sam Well Becca? I would say that the height of my personal hygiene or depth, depending on how you look at it, has been to shave my face at work. Maybe I didn't shave my face in the morning and then discover that there's some

reason I'm going to need to be clean shaven. So I do have a drawer full of like shaving cream and after shave and razor blades all that stuff, but I always make sure to do all of that in one of the handicap stalls, which has its own sink, so nobody is seeing me actually do this. I'm going to say, that's way too far, okay, And okay, kudos to you for using the handicap stall for your shaving meats. I mean I use it to everybody uses the handicap stall,

come on, but yeah, I'm opposite. I go pretty far out of my way to not do any personal hygia network and I don't know what, but I've put on makeup once in the handicap stall for a day. Okay, but yeah, I've seen people brush their teeth, and I've seen people put makeup on, and I've seen even changing into workout clothing. I just it's too much of my human self for my coworkers to see. I once worked at an office that was brilliant in that it had showers,

but they were with their own changing room. Okay, yeah, so you just like open the door and you went inside and like that was it. Nobody ever saw you again until you came out. And during that time, if you had showered and put new clothes on and put on makeup or whatever, it was your own private bathroom, Okay, I would do that. Yes, And this has been half big takes, half baked takes. Thank you for listening to

game Plan. If you want to find me on Twitter, I'm at rs Greenfield and i am at Sam Grobart. Our show today was produced by Liz Smith and Magnus Hendrickson, and the head of Bloomberg Podcasts is Alec McCabe. And if you like us, please head on over to iTunes and rate, subscribe, and review and I'll see you next week. Thanks for listening. Get the most from your people and send your business soaring with corn Ferry. From executive search

to talent strategy, leadership development, rewards and succession planning. Corn Ferry knows up is more than a direction your future. Learn more at corn ferry dot com. Slash up losing sports teams, namely the Buffalo Bills so after the Chicago baseball team after the Cubs got rid of their curse,