This blog is posted in conjunction with our Don’t Be A Loser! podcast, just released.

We are told that we should want to be winners, but what is a winner?

It is not something that can be measured in terms of wealth and titles. The United Kingdom has recently seen dozens of disgraced politicians and bankers sent into premature retirement. Most of them have lavish pensions, and those with public honours usually retain them, so in terms of money and status they ought to be winners – but they still look like a bunch of losers.

On the other hand, a little girl both of whose legs are amputated might seem like a tragic figure – until you learn that she is doing a charity run with artificial legs to raise money for disabled servicemen...

Lydia Cross has winner written all over her.    

So being a winner or a loser is not about what happens to us. It is about how we respond to what happens.

We all suffer setbacks in this life, winners and losers alike. Indeed, winners may suffer more setbacks because they attempt more. So a man is not a loser because he fails. What makes a man a winner or a loser is how he reacts to that failure – especially when it is the ruin of plans he made himself and in which he had confidence.

It is the mark of the loser to look for someone else to blame for his failure, whether it be God or the Devil, the banks or the government, or some minority group – “the Jews”, “the immigrants”, “the freemasons”. Racists and conspiracy theorists are therefore losers by definition.

The winner, by contrast, takes responsibility for his failure. He reflects on it. He asks himself – ruthlessly – what he did wrong. He resolves not to do it again. As a result, he is less likely to do the same in future – and more likely to find success as a direct consequence of his failure. He is actually a stronger man for having failed. That is why he is a winner.

He is easy to knock down but hard to keep down. Every defeat brings him closer to victory.

The biographies of those who are generally called “great men” – the Napoleons, the Churchills, and the like – reveal that they usually experienced more failures than successes. What made them great was that they did not wallow in their failures, looking for excuses. Instead, they tried again – not stupidly repeating what they did before, but learning from their mistakes.

Indeed, it is only when people encounter adversity that we find out whether they are winners or losers. Churchill’s greatness was established not when he became a Nobel Laureate and a Knight of the Garter in the 1950s but in the 1930s when he persisted in telling the truth at the price of exclusion and abuse and apparent failure.

At the risk of cliché, whether you are a winner or a loser is a not a matter of external success or failure but of mental attitude. Winners are those who see themselves as winners.

This does not mean the self-delusion of those who blind themselves to all reality, who refuse to admit it when they have failed, but the acceptance of responsibility for failure and the resolution to do better in future. Those who take responsibility may lose a thousand times but still win in the end.