LeBron James is putting on a showcase for the ages. In his final Olympic run at age 39, he is still the best player in a young man’s sport. He’s also a winner. His recent Nike commercial narrates his thoughts on winning:
Being a winner is a curse.
It doesn’t matter how much you’ve won before.You’re not a winner until you win again.
And again.
And again.
Nothing is enough,
No one understands.And you never want it to stop.
Winning is not for everyone.
Winning doesn’t make you a winner
I used to relate to this.
From 2010 to 2020, I worked tirelessly for every single win.
There was no experiment too small or redesign too big—to be counted and viewed as a meaningful contribution, in my case, for greatness.
On the journey, my team and I accomplished amazing things. Each felt like a big win, an amazing win. Some even felt like our championship.
I sent out the celebratory email. My colleagues cheered.
Then I went home. I was separated from the field of victory through time and space, and the high quickly faded.
I didn’t transform into a better parent or a better partner; the childhood memories of rejection didn’t quiet.
Nothing changed. And the only lesson I took away was that my win simply wasn’t big enough. I later discovered this is a common trap, that has even ensnared the leading scorer in NBA history. In Finite and Infinite Games, James Carse writes, “The more we are recognized as winners, the more we know ourselves to be losers. … Winners, especially celebrated winners, must prove repeatedly they are winners.”1
Or, as Olu from EARTHGANG says succinctly, “You post your wins, you gotta repeat ’em again and again.”
The win column is a table of information, that is all.
Today, I’m as passionate about my work as ever. But that mindset feels foreign to me.
Wins don’t taste like victory, and losses don’t taste like defeat.
I work just as hard, but now building in time for recovery as it’s critical for high performance.
When I heard the commercial, I reflected—have I lost my drive? My ambition?
What surfaced is that I no longer view winning as an obsession, but I simply treat wins and losses as information. But not even the most important information from the game.
Wins come from practice.
There is a saying, “Practice makes perfect,” but that’s not true. Vince Lombardi, the most acclaimed coach in American Football history, highlights the difference: “Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect.”
This is the source of my drive.
Winning to me is when my in-game performance matches my in-practice performance.
When I was younger, I used to write and record hip-hop music. At the time, I could freestyle with ease—coming up with analogies and clever rhymes about seemingly anything on the spot.
I can’t do that anymore.
What happened?
I stopped practicing. When I was younger, it wasn’t that some magic visited me when I was on stage or in a crowd and let me make up rhymes on the spot; it was actually the opposite. I was always writing rhymes. I was always turning events into songs, making observations, and writing them down.
Now, I don’t.
There was never a time when I freestyled at a level beyond my talent. The better I became as a writer (practice), the better I became at freestyling (the game).
Wins come from practice.
You play as you practice.
There is no such thing as a forever victory, dominance over competition in perpetuity where victory is never in doubt. This may seem true for a time, but talent, strategy, and the game itself always adapt. For example, half of the most valuable companies in the world (S&P 500) ceased operating in the twenty years—from 2000 to 2020.
Victory can not be long sustained because victory only counts against worthy competition, master players, those who “know what moves are to be made,” against other master players.
The Confident Mind has a test for knowing when you’ve achieved this level of mastery—”if you can perform the sport or skills consistently in practice.” Let me say it a different way: Your level of mastery first begins with being able to achieve it in practice—not sometimes, not on a good day, but consistently.
I’m not a masterful basketball player despite that one game where I made every shot and caught the outlet pass on the run that sealed the game. That star moment was best described as an exception to my everyday performance between me and the basket.
But even this in-practice mastery isn’t enough to ‘win’ the game because competition and the field of play always get a vote. Other prepared, masterful players are executing strategies to win, and naturally, they will win on occasion. The risk of defeat is what makes the game worth playing.
This matters because undeserved wins don’t sit well.
When we talk about these victories, we acknowledge the blind luck involved, or we dissociate simply to convince ourselves that the win was well-earned. You see this with kids; anyone with children knows that children gloat differently when they know they don’t deserve the win, either cause you to let them win or chance. They talk about your mistakes, not their performance. Their stories are almost like—”can you believe my luck?” And almost certainly, they won’t want to play again.
The same is true for adults. If you beat a Grandmaster in a Chess match, when you tell the story, it will sound more like a tale of blind luck and divine intervention, not so much as a chess match. But when it’s deserved, as when a prepared scrappy underdog defeats a highly ranked opponent, they experience the fullness of victory. They practiced and prepared for this moment, which came through in the game.
And that is the one variable we each control: Did you perform to the best of your ability? Or, put another way, did you perform as you practiced?
It’s practice, deliberate practice, and not the game where we flirt with the edge of our ability, where we push our limits. It’s the game where we activate them. Certainly, invention and novelty come through in the game; we may put together skills that we never activated in that specific chain of actions. But the core and base skills that form the link come together no better than we practice them. Someone who doesn’t practice dribbling doesn’t suddenly become Anthony Edwards when the game is on.
So practice loose.
Practice, in this sense, isn’t the rote, rigid, and miserable practice that may come to mind. Peak performance is flow, so this type of practice is all about finding flow.
If you don’t want to perform rigidly, you must learn to play loose.
You need to find flow to play in practice.
If your in-game performance matches your in-practice performance, you’ve won.
I measure my wins by the days and moments when I perform in the game at the level I practice. Where I run the big meeting, using the techniques I’ve practiced. When I analyze data sets using techniques I’ve read about.
If I play as I practice and that results in a good outcome, I note the small ways my performance didn’t quite match my practice; there is always something, and I go to work to improve.
If I play as I practice, but it results in a less-than-desirable outcome, I pay attention to why. There are two ways this can happen, losses are either well-deserved or well-earned:
- Well-deserved. I played as I practiced, but my competition exceeded my current talent. This is an intrinsic win.
- Well-earned. I played as I practiced, but the competition had a better strategy or even a higher level of execution. This is a loss.
For both, I adjust how I practice to better prepare myself for my desired outcome.
My entire metric for victory is intrinsic.
Did I perform as I practiced? Or for my team, did ‘we perform as we practiced?’
Every yes is a win.
And the only win I count.
- Carse, James P.. Finite and Infinite Games (p. 73). Free Press. Kindle Edition. ↩︎
Mikal-El 