winning

What does it mean to win?  Are you winning right now?  At what?   

Or, are you losing right now? How does that feel?

Winning means different things to different people.  A lot of it depends on culture, age, background, profession, and ... well, your personal view 



Defining winning in sports is easy.  As John Madden said  (or was it Vince Lombardi?)  'winning is everything'.  There's not a single sports team out there that doesn't want to win.  Rare, are teams that require maintaining their ethics, morality, kindness, etc over winning at all costs.  I can think of a few like the Chicago Bulls perhaps?  I can also think of the other extreme like the Baltimore Ravens or Dallas Cowboys or Oakland Raiders at certain points in their history that could care less about their teams members' off-field records like accomplices to murder, weapons & drug charges, domestic abuse, etc.  

If winning is everything, we are doomed. 

The movie 'Chariots of Fire' did a great job of illustrating the folly of winning at all costs.  
The gist of the movie was that the second place person had a WAY better life in trying to become a winner than the first place winner had - since he had reached his peak early in life ... well, at least that was my take away.





Winning is valuable when it is accomplished in the right way. 

This is the really the point I want to make here.  Perhaps in sports, winning in the wrong way is OK with some fans (like yesterday's LA Rams win because of a totally missed interference call that the league uncharacteristically apologized for)

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Maslow's hierarchy can be applied to the concept of winning.  The higher up you go in the hierarchy, the more elusive the concept of winning becomes.

Winning at the base of Maslow's hierarchy means having food and shelter.  That's pretty straight forward.  If you're not hungry and you're comfortable, you've won at these two essentials.  On top of Maslow's hierarchy is self-actualization, at which point it's very difficult to gauge if you're winning or not.  The best example would be an aspiring artist:  Does an artist's commercial success define 'winning'?  Hardly. 

There used to be a cliche 'the person with the most toys wins'.  This has fallen out of favor - i think the phrase was most popular in the 1980's.  Nowadays, perhaps 'the most contented person wins' would be closer. 

I think we've evolved away from the whole concept of 'winning is everything' except for a few fringe elements.