Sam Weinman

But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good Wolfe thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Sam Wineman, Golf Digests digital editor. He previously covered professional golf as well as the NHL for Ganet newspapers. His first book is called Win at Losing, How our

biggest setbacks can lead to our greatest gains. If you value the content we put out each week, then we need your help. As the show has grown, so have our expenses and time commitment. Go to one you feed dot net slash Support and make a monthly donation. Our goal is to get to five of our listeners supporting the show. Please be part of the five percent that make a contribution and allow us to keep putting out these interviews and ideas. We really need your help to

make the show sustainable and long lasting. Again, that's one you Feed dot net slash Support. Thank you in advance for your help. And here's the interview with Sam Wineman. Hi, Sam, welcome to the show. I'm happy to have you on. Your book is called Win at Losing, How our biggest setbacks can lead to our greatest gains. And there's a few themes that run through this show week after week, year after year. But one of them is definitely becoming better because of the things that happened to us in

life that are challenging. So this book, when I saw it, was right up our alley. But before we get into it, let me start, like we always do, with a parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed

and hatred and fear. The grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Sure, I think it speaks to the fact that we are all given to cycles that we fall into, and we have kind of you've heard of,

you know, negative cycles are vicious cycles. So when you hear about feeding the sort of the bad wolf, I think of giving way to negative thoughts and insecurity and jealousy and all of those things that we want to avoid. And I feel like, in the same way confidence success but gets more confidence in success. And so, you know, sometimes we have to force ourselves to to break out

of those cycles. And I'm I will occasionally get into these downward cycles where I'm second guessing myself or not being positive, and I have to remind myself that sometimes you have to force yourself to, you know, to use your metaphor, feed the good wolf of me and try to call on the things that bring out the best in me. And usually when I do that, then I find a way to sort of move in a more

positive direction. Excellent. So your book very simply say, My argument is we end up learning more from our failures than we do from our successes, and that we're better served listening to those who have lost constructively than those who have simply won. Yeah, in my mind, it's that whole idea that of people can associate with the concept of failure and disappointment and you know, have had to grapple with the idea of how you rebound from that.

And so if that is your guide post and that's how that's what you're looking for, that's a much more realistic example than someone who's just floated through life, because that's not something we can relate to. And so the whole premise of the book is looking at people who have had leaders or significant losses and have in some form or another found a way to persist in and

overcome them. Yeah, I mean, it does seem if we are going to lose and fail, which is pretty inevitable for most of us, it'd be helpful to know how to do it better and that you know everything we learned from it. And I certainly know for me my failures have been, you know, some of the best parts of my life. Not at the moment, but you know, to your point, they have they have really turned me

into the person I am. You sort of got on this idea a little bit because you've got sons who were playing sports and you were watching them wrestling with losing.

And my son is a little older now, Um he's not in in organized sports like he was when he was younger, but I remember those days so well, Like, how do you strike that balance of like, well, yeah, I love your competitive spirit and I want you to go do that, but at the same time, you know, the world really hasn't ended because they're a great basketball game didn't go in your favor, right. It's exactly the dilemma that I faced as well, which is you want your kids to care like we want our kids to

when they take on an activity. We want them to be invested, and so sometimes when they're invested, that means they're disappointed with the outcome. So knowing that and knowing that we also don't want them to be sort of losers or to be utterly disheartened when things don't go

their way or give up. That's a very difficult balance and and you know, in my case it was very much the crux of the genesis of his book was recognizing that dilemma and my kids and realizing that what an important lesson these guys need to know, and we all need to know about how to lose, you know, how to find positives and losing, and so you know, in some ways, you know, I've said, I've said to write the book before my kids, which is partially true,

but it's also just because the concept was ent in my head because of what I was dealing with them. You mentioned that sports are kind of a window into everything else, so that what we ourselves can learn and what our children can learn is in sports can be a way of looking at other things in life and

learning to succeed and lose gracefully in all aspects of life. Right, and to your earlier point, like I said, it's because kids happen to care about sports, and my kids happen to care about sports, and so again, if the if it's something you care about and doesn't have to be sports, but in my world it is, and my kids world it is. If it's something that you're invested in, you're worried about the outcome and it doesn't go your way, that's a great training ground for dealing with other kinds

of disappointments. And just so happens that when you're you know, nine eleven, those are the things that really matter to you. You know, as you get older, sometimes it still remains a real focal point, but sometimes those things dissipated over time. It becomes you know, relationships or your career or whatever

the other endeavors that you're invested in. And so I you know, like I said, I've sort of unapologetically have said that sports take on an outside importance of my life because of my career and because of my boy's interests, and because of my own feudal athletic endeavors. And so it was just a great place to start for this book. One of the distinctions that you make is between losing

and failure. Can you tell me what the difference is there as it was explained to me, because I struggle with the difference for a while as well, and sometimes I still fall into this trap where I use the two words interchangeably. Is that losing is an event, it's a fact, it's something that happens. When you lose, there's no real room for interpretation. It's carved in stone, whereas failure is very much an interpretation, and it's often a

sort of indicting um commentary on something you did. So you can lose a basketball game and that just happens to be what happened. But if you're a failure in a basketball gamage because you felt short of executing or you short of doing what you wanted to do. And so part of what I talked about in the book is when we confront these episodes, is trying to identify is it a loss or is it a failure? Because sometimes when it's just a loss, there's some sauce to

be taken, the fact that, Okay, this just happened. This wasn't necessarily something that I did wrong. It's just something that that u was an event that happened in my life. And that's an important it's an important distinction to make because when we talk about losing, really what we're trying to get at is what we can you know, what we can gain from it. And sometimes we can gain from it is to not beat yourself up and not you know, obsessed over something that might have just been

outside of your control. You use Greg Norman, the golfer, as an example of this, and you know, he famously lost multiple Masters tournaments, and and one of them was a case where someone else, you know, basically chipped in from off the green right into the hole and beat him. And then the other one was where he basic collapsed and played terribly. And we're sort of saying, hey, the first one was a loss. I mean, somebody just made a miracle shot and you know, what are you gonna

do with that? Whereas the second time it was more of a failure because he really did sort of implode in that round of golf. And that being an example, the eight seven Masters against Larry Mis was exactly that guy chips in make his miraculous shot. What are you gonna do with that? What are you gonna You're not going to really plumb the depths of your soul to understand what you can learn about yourself once it's just something that happened that you can't really comprehend or can't

really unwrap um. Whereas when you fail as he did, and I six Masters when a six shot lead and you shot seventy for six and played terribly and did all these things wrong. There's a lot of growth and learning opportunities in that episode because you can point to, Okay, I did this wrong, I did that wrong. I wasn't preparing this way. I had the wrong mindset from the start. All things that you can now look at and hopefully

study and benefit from. And like a lot of things, that sometimes is probably a little of both, you know, you talk about striking that balance between recognizing what you could have done differently and not being too hard on yourself at the same time, about facing the truth of what it is you're getting the facts out there and learning, but also not turning it into you know, self immolation at the same time. Sure, I heard an interview Bruce

Springsteen recently. Can I swear on this or no? Yeah, anyway, I heard this interview with with Bruce Baste recently, and he talked about the difference between being hard on yourself and beating the ship out of yourself, and the senses that you know, it's good to be hard on yourself. It's going to be self critical and analyze yourself for areas that you can be better and expect more from yourself.

Those are good things, but beating your ship on yourself it's just kind of uh, punishing yourself for things that go wrong, and there's not a lot of constructive to come out of that. And so we're just essentially what we're talking about, we're looking for ways to do it in constructive way, not just to you know, self flagellate, if that's the right phrase. Yep. So much of that also, I think is tone. It's our internal tone, like how

are we talking to ourselves? I agree with you about that, sort of like I think, you know, I I am. I don't know if i'd use the word hard on myself, but I hold myself to a certain level of accountability and different things, and yet when I don't live up to that, I I recognize that, but I try to. You know, that idea of sort of talking to yourself as if you would like a really good friend always seems like a great way for me to think of it, because I wouldn't let a really good friend off the

hook either if they wanted to be accountable. But I also wouldn't be like you jackass. You know you you know, I mean I would, I would do it in a in a decent way, absolutely, And so that's a really

difficult balance. And you know, I would also argue that as bad as you know, being unduly hard on yourself or or sort of just punishing yourself for things, the worst alternative is consistently letting yourself off the hook, because nothing good comes from No growth comes from that, you know, no learning opportunities come for those moments when we do mess up and we do fail in some form or another, and we refuse to look at our role in that.

I agree, that's the sort of blame everybody else, you know, all the time. But I agree, if I have to err on the side, I tend to agree with you. I think it just depends who you are and what your personality is. You know, there was a time in my life where I think I let myself off the hook on everything, and so now I I've kind of gone to the other side a little bit to try and balance it out. And I know other people who are just so hard on themselves all the time. It's like, Okay,

take take it easy. It does speak to you the kind of core message of your show, which is the bad wolf in the sense that when you're blaming others and never looking for your own role in it, you go down to this negative cycle. It's never your fault, it's always someone else's fault. That's a really vicious cycle to go because you're never able getting yourself out of it. It's always things that are happening to you. It's the

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night at eleven pm Friday, May five. So I look forward to working with you. I've worked with a lot of great people. It's been a lot of fun. I think we've done a lot of good and I'm looking forward to the next round of it. So when you feed dot Net slash Coaching program, and here's the rest of the interview with Sam Wineman. In the book, you talk about shifting the emphasis away from a concrete result, so did I win, did I lose? And more towards

an ongoing process. And we've had a couple of guests on the show where we have talked about that, and that ties to what we were just saying, because if you're always the victim, then there's nothing you can do right. And if it's always if it's always outside of your control. There's nowhere for you to work. So tell me a little bit more about that. Less focusing on the goal

and more focusing on the process. To be clear, I think you can be focused on a long term goal like I, you know, I want to be the greatest baseball player in the world, provided that you're recognizing the way to get there is through a process of doing the little things every day and focusing on that every day. Because when you set these sort of grandiose goals without have an understanding of the sort of small steps along the way, it's overwhelming. You know, you don't really know

how to handle it. But if we focus on a process, we focus on I'm going to take you know, endless batting practice every day, and I'm going to eat right and I'm gonna study video. And if I do all the things and I can check all those things off my list, I know I'm successful in sticking to that process. I've been successful in that regard and hopefully it leads me to this larger goal, which is, you know, getting better at my chosen field. And so it's it's appropriate

for anything. You know, when when your kids talk about they want to get straight a's in school. Great, but that starts with your first homework and just studying on Monday night and to to night. So the more we can be honor that process and being faithful to that process um not only will allow us to feel successful along the way, but also it's just a much more

productive way of going after our goals. It takes I think some of the hurdles we're going to face along the way and put them in perspective a little bit.

You know, Ira Glass, if This American Life famously talks about the talent gap, you know, you start doing something and the stuff that you start putting out is really just not as good as like what you may be here, and there's just this period of time where you just kind of have to work your way through that and and being focused on a process um allows you to get there. And and it also, as I'm saying it, it ties very closely to the next area that I

was going to take things. And you quote Carol Dweck in your book, you know, the fixed and the growth mindset, And we had Carol on but I think there's a lot of similarity between focusing on the process and having a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset, because essentially, the growth mindset is a recognition that everything is a process and that as you go about your life and you face challenges and you stumble and you learn from them,

you are basically partaking in this larger process of learning and growing. Whereas if you have a fixed mindset, the tendency is to you think, I have this goal and if I fall short of that goal, then I am a failure. And you know, and you look at these things as a definition of yourself, and you don't you don't have as much investment in in process, and so it's just it's this whole idea that if you have a more appliable outlook toward whatever your endeavor, then you're

able to roll with setbacks a lot easier. Yeah, I mean, I think that makes such a huge difference, that fixed and growth mindset. It's such a simple concept and yet so incredibly powerful. It really can be the difference between losing well and losing poorly and letting that really stop you. I'm guilty of always going back to SPORTSMENI fars, but

this case I think it's appropriate. Like my youngest son played in the hockey tournament this weekend and we played a team that we lost to pretty badly the first time round. So then we played in the second games. We knew pretty much right away that we're in for a tough game, and we said, let's just make sure that we play as hard as we can and and give them as tough a game as we possibly could,

and really stick together and work hard. And we set you know, that was the kind of the process goal that we were setting was really imply ourselves as best we can, and even if we lose, you know, we can still feel more successful. And we did. We and we lost by two goals, but we played um as well as we could play, and rather than feel like failures, we felt successful. You just lead me to the most

perfect transitions. It's just like one thing after the other, because that leads us right to counter factual thinking, right, or tell us about that and how that kind of applies to the example you just gave. Counterfectual thinking. Is this whole idea of focusing on what could have been as opposed to what is. It doesn't always have to be negative, it can be positive, but it's a it's

a dangerous chapter fall into. So to use the example, I just gave if we played that team and we went in and we lost, and all we focused on was the fact that, oh my gosh, we could have won this tournament. We had to play this team though that was much better than us, and it's not fair because they were better and they're a different team, and um, you know, we I much prefer to have come away with a trophy. We didn't get a trophy. I'm so disappointed.

That's sort of negative counter factual thinking. Whereas, um, the other way of using counterfectual thinking in a positive way is thinking, well, we could have played to see we could have been humiliating, but the second time around, we really applied ourselves and we really showed a better outcome. And rather than have this this humiliating end to our season, we actually showed some real growth. And so I choose

to focus on that. So the famous example, again another sportsman for it, but it's a good one, is the whole idea of medalists in Olympics. So, which is, studies have been shown that people who win bronze medals tend to be happier on the podium than people who win silver. And the thinking is is that the people who win bronze medals, are happy to have won any medal at all. They have contemplated the fact that they almost didn't win a medal, they would have gone on empty hand, and

they got this great bronze medal. There happy, whereas the silver analysis thing, oh my gosh, I could have won gold. I didn't win gold. How disappointing that I fell short, and I choose to focus on that. So that's like the great example of counter effectual thinking on both both a positive standpoint and a negative standpoint. It's so much perspective, right, It's just what what perspective are you going to take on what happened? And you know, it's sort of back

to that idea of losing versus failing. There's a fact, you know, there's a fact. The fact is I got the bronze medal, or the fact is I got the silver medal. But boy, everything that comes after that is so open to interpretation and and so open for us to tell ourselves stories that are useful, versus telling ourselves stories that are destructive. Right, And the phrase it's often used I use in the book a lot of framing.

It's how we frame things. Any picture in our lives, we can choose to look at one way or the other. And so the whole point of the book is to frame things in a constructive way, not just sugarcoating it like there's something useful to pull from it, but it's also palatable, like you you can live with that outlook.

In the book, you reference Dan Jensen, the famous speed skater, and boy, there's a whole lot of lessons in his stories, but I really just want to focus on, you know, a line in there that you had that he said, which was, there's no doubt I got more out of losing.

Losing is what teaches you who you are. Yeah, And in his case, he's living proof of that, is that his whole story and his whole place in life was shaped by the earlier failures or say earlier losses he had um along the way, and he had to reach down into sounds over state it reached down into his soul to find out what he was made when he went through these losses. And so the point of that is basically that we do a lot more inward thinking

when we lose than when we win. When we win, we're just happy, We're just want to kind of roll with it and not really give much thought to to why. But when we lose, there's a lot of soul searching or we're looking for feedback in that so that we can understand why. And so in his case, you know, he lost in the eighty four Olympics and the e d Olympics and n Olympics, and he fell in his

first race in ninety four Olympics. So you know, constantly through that process he's asking himself, why why did I do this? What happened? What was I doing wrong? You know, all of all of these questions he's asking himself. We're hugely influential and led him to a place where he

finally did win his final Olympic race. And you know, again that's just from a speech skating standpoint of kind of how we got to become a better speech gater, but also as a person, he just learned more about himself as a person as character because of how he went through these losses and how he dealt with them. Losing or failing is not fun, but boy, there are a lot of lessons if you do it the right way. You know, there's compassion can come out of it for

other people. I mean, there's just so many different things. And You've got a line in the book also that I love because we had christ To Tippett on the show does a show on being and she has a line that basically it's exactly what you said. You said that you know, people don't find success in spite of their past, but because of it. And I love that idea that it's we tend to think often of you know, Okay, well I overcame all these bad things and I was

able to succeed. Whereas I love that idea that it's those bad things often that allow us to succeed. They are the reason that we become successful. Our previous failures and tough times are what lead to the good times

and the successes. We wouldn't be there without them. They are the fuel that we're drawing on in some form or another, you know, whether it's in business, all the things, all the missteps you make along the way helped to inform your decisions that lead to the better product or the success and and becoming you know, a better person. You tend to think about all the things you did wrong that you regret doing that helps inform the way

you want to be. And so it's this whole idea that that as painful as these episodes are, they are the basically the blueprint for how we want to be. And there's a sports psychologist that I talked to you it's not in a book for another story I'm doing, and he says he's a big believer in not this

but that. And basically the idea is that in order to understand, uh, what works, so that you need to go through the not this part, you need to understand the things you don't want to do to help get to you do a better understanding of the things that you do want to do. Another term that you used in the book that I really like, and I think it's interesting, which is post traumatic growth. Right, we all know about post traumatic stress um, but but what's post

traumatic growth? Because I think it ties to what we just said, Yeah, postatic growth, because you use the word traumatic. We're talking about serious things. And you know, like you said, we've heard so much about post traumatic stress is sort of let you go through these debilitating episodes in our lives and for for obvious reasons and justifiable reasons, they

leave a heavy toll on you. But there are also occasions when you go through these episodes and you are able to look and see that you survived it, and there is great strength to go from that, And there's great strength to go through something and realize that you made it where you are brought to a higher place

as a result of it. I guess the Dan Jason story would fall into that category because in his case, he was dealing with the death of his sister and that was a really powerful point moment in his life, and so that was a traumatic episode and from that he emerged from it and grew from it. But you know, I wouldn't put Greg Norman is the Masters in the

same in the same category. But but but certainly there are plenty of plenty of examples of people who go through these horrible experiences and because they persisted through them and survived and came to a better understanding of themselves, they are able to feel stronger and not just feel stronger, they are stronger and they grow from the experience. Yeah, and I think understanding what causes that, you know, post traumatic growth versus post traumatic stresses, is such a fascinating

thing and there's no clear cut answers there. But it certainly is one of those things you look at who comes out of difficult situations better off and who doesn't. And I think there's so many factors in that. Sure, we talk about resilience, a lot of this, A lot of this is what we're talking about resilience, And there's there have been studies about how resilience is not something that you're just born with that you know, one person

has that one person doesn't. There are ways to foster resilience and all of us and there's you know, it can be factors as as simple as you know, the way to take care your body, the way you take care of your mind, your cognitive health, your spirituality, your moral compass, these are all things that sort of contribute to the ability to be resilient when we're faced with adversity.

And again, going back to the premise of your show, I would say, somewhere you feed the good wolf, and you the more, the better chance you have with being resil Yeah, exactly. There's another term that you use in the book that some of the sports psychologists use called

cognitive restructuring. Can you share a little bit about that. Yeah, I mean that's basically this whole framing concept that we're talking about which is that when we look at an event in our life, we have the ability to frame it in a way and potentially alter the way we look at it to make it more palatable and useful. And so it's I you've used the phrase mental gymnastics before to describe it, which makes it seem like we're

trying to distort reality. It's not that at all. It's just looking at an event and trying to put it

through a more constructive prison. So to use Dan Jasen as an example, um, you know, he had this traumatic episode in which his sister died on the morning of his race, and then he fell in his subsequent races, the two races it fell, and he first spent several years after that trying to come to terms of that why that happened and what did he do wrong, and beating himself up for falling, and through the process of cognitive restructuring with the help of a sports psychologist, he

realized that actually he was sort of paying tribute to his sister. That the healthier way to look at it was that he was not letting himself win those races because it would have felt wrong to win so close after her death, and so through that process of looking at an event and sort of um reframing how we thought about it, he was able to find greater peace.

And that was a great example of cognitive restructuring. Yeah, and I think what's so fascinating about that is that there isn't necessarily a truth there, you know, it's so much an interpretation. And and that's an example of choosing to interpret something in a positive way. You know, who knows what the objective truth is. I don't know that there is one, And I think we can get hung up on that sometimes, you know, where it's difficult for us to reframe things because we think we're you know,

we think something's true. And there certainly are facts and things that are true, and I'm never an advocate for ignoring those things, but so much of this really is about interpretation. I think in the book, the sports psychologist says, context and mindset are pretty much everything. Yeah, well exactly. Maybe someone losing their job and in the days and week after losing their job, they're devastating. I think this

is horrible. I'm never going to get past it. And then months passed and they get a new job, and they started a new career and leading down the road. They now look back at that event of losing their job and they instead of saying those devastaings actually was the best thing that we're happening. Right, Well, that's that's that's cognitive restructuring. That's looking at an event and now sort of again lucky to use or twist, but it's able to um you have you know, you're able to

shape it in a way where you look at it differently. Yep. That you know ties back to the framing and so many of the things we've talked about, you know, the growth and fixed mindset. You've got a growth mindset. You're much more inclined to be able to restructure things in a way that makes sense and that is helpful versus you know, the fixed mindset does sort of limit your

choices for cognitive restructuring. Right, You've kind of you've kind of limited what things you're gonna believe are true, right because you're much you see things in a much more black and white. Wait, I lost my job. I'm a failure. You know, I'm obviously not good enough and this is a horrible thing. Whereas this is an opportunity and I'm going to learn from this all those things that a growth mindsets are able to do. Yeah, exactly, Well, Sam,

thanks so much for coming on. I mean this has been a classic conversation for kind of what we do on this show. It touches so many of the important things. And I really loved the book. I loved all the examples that are in there. I thought they were really well done and it was. It was a real pleasure reading it. We'll have links to where people can go to your web page, you can buy your book, all that stuff in our show notes. Thanks so much for coming on. I really enjoyed talking with you. Oh it's

my pleasure. I appreciate you having me. All right, take here, Okay, great fighte. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One you Feed podcast. Head over to one you Feed dot net slash support