Behind Every Win Is a Stack of Losses

I love to gamble. I love slot machines, and I love placing sports bets. What's funny about a gambler, though, is that they don't tell you the losses. The old adage is that a gambler only tells you when they win.

"I won $5,000 in Las Vegas!" said the gambler. "How much did you lose?" "Oh, way more than $5,000..." But the gambler didn't lead with the losses. They led with the win. Who wants to announce they lost $20K when they can announce they won $5K?

The exact same thing happens in our careers, and it's a problem. Everyone wants to announce the big win. "My business is a success!" Great — how many businesses did you fail at before this one? "I got promoted!" Outstanding — didn't you grind in your previous role for seven years? "I'm working my dream job!" Cool — how many rejections did you get before you found this one?

Maybe we need to normalize the conversation around success and failure. When we read the headline, our minds usually go to a place of positivity first, and we forget all of the struggles that went into that situation. We then start to compare ourselves to the individual, and we second-guess our own journey.

The losses, the challenges, the struggles, the problems, the stress, the anxiety, the failures — these are all where the real magic happens. Without these moments, we are never able to actually learn the path to success.

The win is usually the smallest part of the story. It's the headline, sure, but it's never the whole article. The losses sit underneath it like the foundation of a house, completely invisible unless someone decides to pull up the floorboards.

And because no one talks about the floorboards, we walk around thinking our own mess is some kind of personal failure instead of the tuition everyone pays. We forget that confidence is usually just the byproduct of surviving the stuff that almost broke us.

If we were more honest about that, we'd probably give ourselves a lot more credit. We'd stop comparing our behind-the-scenes to someone else's highlight reel. We'd recognize that losing isn't proof you're off track — it's proof you're actually in the game.