How To Be A Winners

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A Win Is a Win Is a Win!!!
             The trouble is that most of us have been conditioned to regard life as a race or contest in which there can be only a few winners, along with one or two runners up, while the rest of us remain sad and unlucky losers. In many ways this conditioning is the fault of the media whose constant focusing on the glamorous BIG winner persuades many of us that we will never be able to compete let alone win, and that our lot life is to sit enviously or the side lines. 

            This, of course, is nonsense and, if winning were con find to the small group whose triumphs receive national or international acclaim, life for most of us would be intolerable. The fact is that anyone can be a winner – The scale doesn’t matter all that much, and the schoolboy who finds a pound coin in his path probably feels more triumph than the multi-millionaire who wins a thousand pounds at the gambling tables.
           If we are going to be winners, we have to fight hard against this media inspired conviction that winners are rarities or that there can be “only one winner”. Watch the players in the next football match you see and you’ll have no difficulty in identifying at least eleven winners when the victorious team does its lap of honor, not to mention the winning manager, the wining trainer and the rest, together with their thousands of “victorious” fans.

            Nor does the match have to be a championship game; you only have to think back to your school day to remember the joy of being a member of the school team – or merely belonging to the winning school.

            People were experiencing triumph long before there was television or newspapers and long before winning became the apparent prerogative of the rich and famous. Primitive tribesmen, for example, who returned home from the hunt with enough meat to feed their families, were winners in a very real sense and their achievements were duly celebrated by the whole tribe.

            Today we call people who come home with the where withal to feed their families “breadwinners” and while, for some reason, a disparaging element has crept into the phrase – perhaps because breadwinners are not regarded as being particularly glamorous – they are winner and it’s perhaps time both they and their families recognized the fact.