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How Winning Leads to Unhappiness (1/3)

By Marco Gutierrez —

This time I want to do a three-part series of posts. There's much I want to cover with this topic, and I don't want to make a very long article. I'll first introduce the problem/situation, then I'll give a summary of the content I want to reference most (a movie) and finally, I'll go over my thoughts on the most interesting observations and teachings I could find on the topic.

Back at the university, I remember a professor once telling the class about the importance of being and not having. His biggest concern was having graduates focus too much on obtaining the university title. "Being a good engineer is what's important, not having an engineering degree", he taught us. Though nobody in class would admit to just wanting the degree, a considerable amount of students certainly acted like so. And as Jordan Peterson points out...

The existentialists believe that actions spoke louder than words. And that if you were interested in belief ... it was better for you to look at how someone acted than what they said.

So we could say that their true belief system was that of having and not being. I love finding observations like this, ways of thinking that are diametrically wrong. Today, I want to bring forth something that seems absurd on the surface, but that (I'm convinced) is true in the grand scheme of things: "A winner is not someone who wins". Instead, being a winner is an attitude, an approach to life, not a state. In other words, winning and winners are two things that sometimes overlap.

A Venn diagram of winners and winning

Not only that but trying to win for the sake of having (instead of being) inevitably leads to unhappiness. Early this week I came across a video titled "I feel like I failed at life". The creator goes over how frustrating his experience has been trying to make a living as a YouTuber. Despite putting in the time and effort after work, his videos haven't had a lot of views. Even more frustrating has been that he's produced videos for other people (being paid for it) which have had a good amount of success. But when he's tried to do the same type of video, he gets very few views. A bit ironically, it would seem that this video of his performed pretty well.

Now that I've been making my own videos, I can only sympathize with this video creator. Though I'm not frustrated about my situation, my videos get even fewer views than the numbers he complains about. This only makes me reflect... if it came to a point where I knew that nobody would watch my videos, would I still be doing them?

That's a tough question, but more often than not I feel in my gut that I would still do them, even if just for me to watch. And that is already enough. I'm mostly doing them for the experience and because I find it enjoyable, not to win anything in particular (money, fame, views, a job, etc.). Anything else that comes after, would be amazing.

Situations like this make me recall a great movie called Surf's Up. This movie is a hidden gem that teaches us about the importance of doing things for the sake of themselves, not just to win; the topic I want to cover now. The movie does a fantastic job setting up the plot; the motivations of each character are relatable to the point where you could see yourself making the same choices as them. And it's a great movie for the kids, even if they can't get the message just yet. I highly recommend you watch it. For the sake of narrative, I'll give a summary of it, so be warned of spoilers in the next post.

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Have a great week ahead!