“Once a Loser… Always a… Chance to Play Again!” – Anonymous*
In any game, the joy of competing, and chance to savor the sweet tears of your opponent after you win, always comes with the perilous risk that it may in fact be your own delicious tears on the post-game buffet table as you take a stinging loss at the hands of someone else who simply played better than you.
Here are a few helpful tips for dealing with hard losses:
1 – They didn’t get lucky. It wasn’t a die-roll or card draw that served as the harbinger of your undoing. They are clearly superior to you intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. That’s one possibility…. but fortunately, we live in a multiverse, where you may have lost for an infinite number of reasons and all of them are much less important than one simple fact: you can just play again and actually get better by learning from what happened last game!
2 – If you practice losing, you will only get better at losing. You don’t want to be the best loser so it’s not a thing you should be practicing at all. Instead, while you are losing, practice learning. You do want to become a better learner, and you do want to be better at the game you are playing. Start by noticing what the winning players are doing differently from what you are doing. Then take their ideas from them. Weaponize those ideas. Add your own ideas to your new arsenal of ideas. Daydream about the future when you will inevitably vanquish them!
3 – You are the inevitable eventual winner in the long term. With better focus, some learning, a lot of concentration and a truly insane amount of luck, you should be able to eke out a win eventually. Always remember their time winning is ephemeral, and remember the fact that they don’t even know what the word ephemeral means. Clearly anyone with a dictionary is better than they are (and you have access to a dictionary) so they have no reason to act smug about anything whatsoever.
4 – Smile. Keep your chin up. Look at all that delicious moisture in the corners of their eyes. That’s their future tears welling up slightly and begging to be harvested by you the next time you play together. Unless you live in the desert. Then you may need to make sure there is a humidifier in the room to get moisture out of them.
* It may never have occurred to you that you can write literally anything and then attribute it as a quote from “anonymous” while appearing to be worldly and wise. Anonymous is everyone and nobody all at once. Yes, even you can be considered anonymous, so if you said something and attribute it to anonymous, that attribution remains entirely true. This footer message proves you are capable of learning and thinking differently about something than you used to. It proves when you lose that you can instead learn how to win. Therefore, while you did lose… you are not a loser… and that’s one to grow on.