Don’t focus on winning. Focus on destroying every excuse—both internal and external—to not do your absolute best. That requires way more effort and way more concentration than conquering the opposition.
Also, as far as I can tell, this approach will give you the best chance of winning.
Musings, Volume 1, available on Amazon Kindle: Musings, Volume 1
I get that. I’ve won before, but spent time afterward wondering if I could win again and, to some degree, wondering how I won in the first place. I guess you can build confidence in yourself with wins like that, but I would say the confidence built by understanding how you won and why you won is much more “stable”.
I think the concept of “winning” is over-rated. Don’t get me wrong. It is fun to play games in which the prospect of beating your opponent gives an adrenalin rush. But, for the wise individual, life, more broadly, is about finding the path by which we can thrive and increase the chances that others – including those we might consider our enemies – can thrive.
The idea that we should destroy “every excuse—both internal and external—to not do [our] absolute best” implies that we know what our “absolute best” would be. Some battle their way to their goal and then discover it was all meaningless. The path to understanding what has value and what doesn’t is sometimes an undisciplined one, because discipline is predicated on the idea that we already know. In a more limited sense, though, it makes sense to focus tightly when we have found a particular goal worth achieving, until such time as we have achieved it and need to open up to find some sense of where to go next.
I think winning in the sense of a singular game is overrated. But when life is viewed as a series of a games—or one giant “meta-game”—then the idea of winning makes perfect sense. It allows you to lose a small game or adjust course so you can focus on the meta-game, and that, in the long-term, gives rise to stuff like ethics and discipline and balance all that good stuff.
Kent Wayne 
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