What is defeat anyway?

One definition we don’t often see is “to be frustrated or thwarted”. Yes it can also mean to fail but I think fail is so concrete. Do we ever really fail? I don’t think so. I think we learn lots from what are perceived as failures. Therefore, how can we fail if we learn? But we certainly can be frustrated.

I also believe we mess ourselves up by thinking of winning and losing, failing or succeeding. Nothing is ever that black or white. We, ourselves, have imposed the idea of what winning is. I have never been first to cross the finish line in any race, especially the one that means the most to me, Vol State. But I have only “failed” once and that was the first year when I didn’t meet the cutoff times and got pulled. So, just because I didn’t cross the finish line first, does that mean I was defeated? No, it just means I didn’t cross the finish line first.

I think that’s what this quote is trying to tell us. It’s all a matter of interpretation and perspective. Technically I’ve encountered defeat in all of my races, every single one. But I’ve never been defeated because I didn’t use the defeat as either a measure of my success or as a determination of my worth. I just accepted the defeats and decided what I wanted to and needed to do for the next time.

I don’t like the phrase “don’t give up” either because there are always circumstances where it is important to give up. So we need to get away from all the allegedly motivational words and find full sentences that mean something to us individually. We’re way too quick to just hop on the bandwagon of someone else’s creation. I prefer personalization. And I prefer to personalize my defeats so that I don’t feel defeated!

Keep learning and applying what you learned. You may apply it to some other endeavor but knowledge doesn’t do a lot of good if you don’t use it somewhere.