Success: Win Less to Win More
Three ways we harm ourselves with winning
Our desire to win is killing our relationships.
Imagine this scene - you come home one evening and find your partner has prepared a sumptuous meal to enjoy.
You're presented with an array of dishes. Some favorites and some that you've never tried before. You're flattered and excited to enjoy the meal. You take your first bite and taste the flavors and textures.
Your partner eagerly watches as you enjoy your first bites. You look over, with a smile nonetheless and respond,
"It's a bit overcooked. It could use more salt."
If you're attentive, you might catch the enthusiasm drain away from your partner's face.
It's the last thing they wanted to hear.
As we move through life, we gain expertise, we experience successes, we know our stuff. We win. Winning feels good. And it feels good to know we can win. Winning is a reward for our hard work.
As we win more, our confidence increases as well. This fuels a positive loop of more confidence towards more winning.
However, the danger with this cycle is that we begin to want to win too much. And we want it to be known we’re winning.
In the case of the dinner example, while we might think we're offering helpful suggestions to our partner's cooking, what we're actually doing is demonstrating our superior taste and bestowing our expertise. We're winning.
Winning all the time is harmful. We start to harm our relationships around us - in life and in work. We begin to alienate those around us. At best, people begin to distance themselves from us. At worst, we can upset, deflate, or send those we care about into other negative states.
We shouldn’t stop winning. It’s not to settle for second best. Or to not embrace competitiveness.
It’s to know when it’s unnecessary to win.
Leadership coach Marshall Goldsmith outlines this concept in his book "What got you here won't get you there." I found the concepts very relatable to both work and life. Here are my interpretations of some ways we try to win too much.
We want to be right, too much
With experience and skills, we know we're right a lot of the times. But this fails when we insist on being right when the situation or outcome is irrelevant.
For example, you and your partner are choosing a movie to watch. You disagree on what you should watch. But your partner's enthusiasm for their choice leads you to acquiesce. You watch the movie your partner selected. Unfortunately, the movie turns out to be a dud. It's nowhere near as exciting as thought and ends up being a bore. At this point we might turn to our partner and smugly state,
"If only you listened to me, we wouldn’t be in this situation.."
At that moment, we're proclaiming our rightness. We’re winning. Yet, at that moment whether our movie choice would've been better is irrelevant. Our partner does not need nor benefit from opinion of their inferior selection and our superior taste.
Our ‘win,’ comes at the cost of our partner feeling worse about the unenjoyable movie. Which has direct effects to us. Overall, we’re worse off.
We flex at every opportunity
Our skills and knowledge are not needed nor desired all the time.
The dinner example captured this idea, where we shared our exquisite knowledge of taste. We can also think of a work situation. A junior employee may come to you with a new idea their excited about. We, however, have een this before and can foresee challenges. We inform our employee about all the ways the idea won’t work or how it could be better. We bestow advice. We feel good about your ability to be wise and knowing. We’re winning.
However, demonstrating our fantastic knowledge is not what’s needed in the moment. As an expert, our abilities may be better needed to support and encourage others. We can certainly help seek what’s right as well.
But there’s a difference with seeking what’s right and insisting what’s right.
We pass judgment
When we pass judgment on something, we imply we know better. We want others to accept our thinking. We want to win. Our judgement is not always needed nor wanted.
A friend was telling me about the career of her friend back in her hometown. Her friend works at a stable job, with moderate pay, but without much prestige or opportunity for scope of income growth. He doesn’t seem unhappy, yet my friend laments,
“Poor guy. He’s not going anywhere in life.”
My friend was passing judgment on her friend’s career situation. She knows life is tough and has a perspective to success. She knows better than her friend. She’s winning.
Judging others on our perspectives is harmful to others and to us. For others, nobody likes the feeling of being evaluated, pitied, or otherwise felt inferior. Especially if we don’t have full context of the situation. When we judge, we turn others away from us. For us, the more we judge, the more become we become constant critics. We expend precious energy wondering why the world doesn’t see things the way we do. We’re more likely to be upset when things aren’t as we think should be.
How can we do better?
The good news is that we got to this point because we’ve won a lot. Hooray for us!
But to help us avoid winning unnecessarily, here are some tactics to keep in mind:
The biggest winners don't demonstrate winning
Often times, we win more because we want to demonstrate our ability to win. Our successes build our reputations. So the more we win, the better our reputation.
At some point though, there is no further benefit to demonstrate we can win. Rather, at this point we can enjoy the quiet confidence of being a winner. We can pull back from the innate desire to win and to show others we’re winning. Arguably, the more mindful we are about our wins, the more we are actually perceived as winners.
Focus on others
When we want to win, we bring the focus to us. We want others to recognize our winning.
Instead, when we interact with others, we can do two things:
1) Respect the other person. Understand that the other person brings unique values and perspectives. Listen with curiosity to understand. There is no need to pass judgment or demonstrate abilities if not asked.
2) Support the other person. Approach the interaction with intention to let the other person shine. This likely means helping them win, not us. Paradoxically, the more we help others win, the more we win in their eyes anyways.
Double-check gut reactions
With a habit of winning ingrained in us, it’s too easy to switch into auto-response mode. We seek to be right, we flex our expertise, we judge.
Instead, we’re better off to pause, and think whether our gut reaction response is useful in the situation. We can think - What would be best for the situation? Are we really helping or just winning?
When we’re aware that we don’t need to always win, we can start to understand when our winning nature is harmful.
Win less to win more
The hypothetical dinner story at the beginning wasn’t hypothetical. A partner had crafted a wonderful meal as a celebration for us. She had prepared a multi-course meal with some favorites and some unique dishes. In my efforts to “guide” and “help improve” her cooking, I offered my critique to do better.
I didn’t know it at the time, but looking back I realized the blunder of my comments. I wanted to win. She was seeking enjoyment in a loving meal prepared. She wanted us to win.
And that might be the lesson I took away from the experience.
If we can pull ourselves back from winning - when we see the futility to be right too much, to flex constantly, to pass judgments unnecessarily;
If we can help others win more - through respect and support;
We all win more.
Thanks for the insights — I also have strong tendencies to want to be right all the time. “Winning unnecessarily” is a great way to express what we shouldn’t be doing.