Every Second Counts
"She was right, and I knew it. I apologized, and gave some thought to winning and losing, and how to handle each. When you win, you donât examine it very much, except to congratulate yourself. You can easily, and wrongly, assume it has something to do with your rare qualities as a person. But winning only measures how hard youâve worked and how physically talented you are; it doesnât particularly define you beyond those characteristics.
Losing, on the other hand, really does say something about who you are. Among the things it measures are: do you blame others, or do you own the loss? Do you analyze your failure, or just complain about bad luck? If youâre willing to examine failure, and to look not just at your outward physical performance, but your internal workings, too, losing can be valuable. How you behave in those moments can perhaps be more self-defining than winning could ever be. Sometimes losing shows you for who you really are."
- from Every Second Counts, Lance Armstrong.