Dear President-Elect Trump:
A few days ago I told you the story of one of my brothers, speeding through the 4th of July Parade in our small town, trying to “win” the parade. He did win the parade, at least in his three-year-old mind. But his mind had created a fiction—the fiction that the parade was a race. Being a race, he naturally had to win it.
Winning—being the best—gives us status. It sets us apart from all the others in the race. We may not call the non-winners, losers. But, they’re certainly not the winner. And in the designating a winner, there is necessarily its opposite.
Even among winning teams in basketball, we designate sub-categories of winners. The high point player is always the focus. He or she is the winning winner. Everyone else on the team is not quite as much of a winner.
Far too many of us approach life in the same way—as a zero-sum game. In everything, there is a winner and a loser. We won or lost, an argument. We negotiated a better deal than the other side—we won, they lost. We could fill pages of examples of winning or losing in life.
I know that perspective well. It is a perspective that I have spent most of my life cultivating.
But I cultivated a fiction. And having cultivated it, I eventually believed it.
But it was a fiction. And ironically, spending a life trying to win at everything, we eventually find out that in seeking to win, we lose.
What do we lose? We lose the joy of seeing others succeed, of finding satisfaction in the accomplishment of others. We lose the richness that exists in life of just being.
We lose out in the joys of life because we’re so focused on winning. We lose the ability to love, because inherent in the need to win is the need to put ourselves above our competition. Once we have placed ourselves above anyone, we have lost the ability to love another.
The greatest thing you can do for your presidency, the nation, and the world is to abandon the fiction that life is about winning or losing.
Replace that fiction with reality: That life is not winning or losing, but about loving and serving. The relevant statistic in life is not the number of points we score, but the number of assists we give.
Far too many of us come to life’s end before we realize that we’ve been counting the measure of our life using the wrong statistic.
More on this tomorrow,
David O. Leavitt
