Both Directions Lie A Little

When you're winning, you're not as good as you think you are. And when you're losing, you're not as bad as you think you are.

I heard these words on a podcast some time ago.

In between both moments, i.e winning and losing, you're in a waiting state of pushing yourself further towards potentially winning and pulling away from potential loss. It's a bit of a contradiction that you can do something while waiting for an outcome that's not entirely within your control.

Most of the waiting games I play are pretty much wanting for something to happen now, since there's no gap to fill between the wanting and the having. But then that thing not happening yet can be a cause for so much noise.

29-minute exploration

A trivial case that I experienced just yesterday was having breakfast. I had to wait for two other people who were wrapping up from doing something seemingly important. I could've gone to do something else and come back again when they were ready, but I decided against that to just sit it out, which totalled about 29 minutes. I spent them mostly in my head, thinking about the geography of Asia, the north and south poles, and different time zones, etc.

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Something worth mentioning is about how waiting forces a kind of involuntary presence that we resist by default but deep down might need to reclaim. It’s the only time the "doing self" is forced to take a backseat and allow the world to simply happen without active interference.

As I've not always done, the instinct is usually to fill the gap, move, do something that at least resembles progress. But the 29 minutes that looked like nothing were quietly enormous. The mind, when freed from urgency, goes somewhere wide. That's not nothing.

Discipline or just momentum?

It is also worth asking if one is as disciplined as they think when they're doing the work or as lost as they think when nothing's moving?

Personally, there are layers of illusions with my perceptions of competence and progress. When the gears are turning, I credit my character with all the glory of progress and when grind comes to a halt, most of the blame falls beyond the character and into the soul. It sometimes takes nothing more than a coin flip to be entirely on a different frequency of self-assurance.

Noticeably, this tendency to exaggerate outcomes as participants that played a role in shaping them is part and parcel with how we measure ourselves, that is a habit of taking credit and deflecting cost.

This is something I've become more aware of recently. Losing is not as bad when I remove the frills of loss from the identity I've wrapped around the outcome. Say a missed deadline is just a missed deadline, not a verdict on my capacity.

It's harder to do for winning too. The thrill is too loud to think clearly through. The noise of losing at least announces itself. Winning's noise sounds like clarity, a false kind.


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