Explaining Losses

Winning and losing is implicit in the nature of competition. There must be a scorecard, a results tally. Someone must win, someone must lose. However, should the losing party attempt to explain their loss—something that I continuously find rather puzzling, and which usually comes in the form of excuse making or blaming—their explanation, at bottom, usually amounts to: “If only you hadn't won, I would have!” Indeed... a most astute observation.

I often wonder why people feel the need to explain their losses to those around them. Take a card game, Euchre, for instance. When a person wins a trick, you will often find that one of the losers will say something like: "If you didn't have that King, I would have won it!" Or, if the situation is such that whomever wins the trick wins the game: "If you didn't have that King, we would have won the game!" Now, I can't for the life of me think of a more uninteresting thing to say. Again, "If only you hadn't won, I would have!" Great. What an exceedingly riveting observation. Why don't we sit here for another 20 minutes hashing out all the ways you could have won—"if only things had happened differently"?

Why do people do stuff like that? Is it because they're embarrassed they lost? Is it because they want the winners to know that they (the winning party) just barely eek'd out a victory, and that they (the losing party) are not so very bad after all? No doubt I will encounter the said situation again at some point in the future. And when I do, perhaps I can cross examine a few people and figure out just what is going on in their minds when they say such things.

Everyone?

I've mentioned Dale Carnegie a couple times on this blog (here and here). Recently I came across the following quote attributed to him: “Everyone is your superior in some way.” I'm pretty sure this quote comes from How To Win Friends and Influence People, though it wasn't directly cited.

“Everyone is your superior in some way.” Here we have a proposition that may lead some to scoff. But the scoffers haven't thought carefully enough about it. It's easy to jest when you don't bother to think. To be sure, this quote isn't intended to be a flat-out bearer of truth, akin to something like 2 + 2 = 4 (though a case could probably be made in support of it). Rather, it is intended as a kind of “principle of human relations.”

Consider the person who flatly believes that they are superior to others. How are they likely to treat others when their behavior is predicated on the belief that they are a superior kind of human being? Contrast such a person with the opposite: he or she who approaches others with the understanding that everyone they encounter is, in some way, their superior. How are they likely to interact with others? Which person would you rather associate with? The point here isn't to “bow down” to everyone you interact with because they are better than you in some unknown or mysterious way. It is simply a psychological tool that can be used to help avoid arrogance and snobbishness, both of which are rather unlikable traits.

To state the same idea differently (my apologies to the anti-philosophy crowd), think of it this way: If the proposition that A) everyone is my superior in some way, is true, then it is equally true that B) I am superior to everyone in some way. The truth of one entails the truth of the other. But again, consider the difference in my potential outlook and behavior when I act on the basis of A instead of B. Both A and B are equally valid, yet they produce mutually exclusive outlooks and dispositions. The one I choose to focus on, and thereby think in terms of, affects my behavioral disposition, particularly in how I view myself and those around me, and will no doubt flow over into my daily interactions with others.