How we lose can define us

How important is it to be a good loser?

The year I was a senior in college, the band Steely Dan released its song “Deacon Blues.” A lyric from it has always stuck with me: “They got a name for the winners in the world. I want a name when I lose.” Walter Becker and Donald Fagen followed those lines with: “They call Alabama the Crimson Tide,” to make their point about how winners (in this case, the University of Alabama’s powerhouse football team) got a name. But then in an effort to provide a name to the loser narrating the song: “Call me Deacon Blues.”

It may not be a happy message, but the song gave a name to the losers of the world if we wanted to use it: Deacon Blues.

Losing, however, is not always a dire experience. Sure, approaching challenges with a desire to win can be a good practice. But even DJ Khaled, who sang, “All I do is win,” has had his occasional high-profile run-ins with losing. (You can look it up.)

From an early age, how we behave when we lose can help define our character. We learn it’s not OK to walk off the field of a baseball game if the opposing team is beating us by a dozen runs. We learn that it’s not OK to quit a competitive board game when it becomes clear we are going to be decimated. We learn not to walk away from the corn hole toss when our opponent’s bean bags seem magnetized to go in the hole while ours always fall short.

When we agree to a game, we agree to the rules of that game and there’s a sense of grace and honor to stick with that game even when we lose. There is no honor in trying to change the rules of the game halfway through or crying foul every time an opponent comes out ahead. There is no valor in claiming that you couldn’t possibly have lost a baseball game since your team scored more runs than it ever had scored in a game before, even if such parsing ignores that fact that the opposing team won because he scored even more runs than your team.

Sure, winning is great. It’s a blast to the ego to come out on top. But part of the understanding of competition is that not everyone is going to win.

Learning to accept our losses graciously, to congratulate our opponents on their victory this time, and then to go off and perhaps work hard to try to win the next time; these are some of the marks of an honest competitor.

And when we lose, as each of us will at something sometime, it’s not because the outcome was rigged. Sometimes we just lose, and then we move on. Call yourself Deacon Blues if it helps, but the right thing is to show some honor in defeat.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of "The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice," is a senior lecturer in public policy, emeritus, at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues. 

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @jseglin

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