Sometimes you win, sometimes you learn.
John C. Maxwell
The meaning of the quote
In the 1980s, Sara Blakely‘s father went around the dinner table every week and asked her and her brother what they had failed at.
An empty answer disappointed him, and a big failure earned a high-five.
Blakely later said in a video that those dinners changed what failure meant to her.
“Failure for me became not trying versus the outcome.”
She got plenty of chances to test that idea, bombing the law school entrance exam twice, selling fax machines door to door for 7 years and then hearing no from almost every manufacturer she showed her idea for Spanx over the next 2 years.
In 2012, Forbes named her the youngest self-made female billionaire.
John C. Maxwell took the old saying most of us grow up with, sometimes you win and sometimes you lose, and swapped the last word. Losing is something that happens to you, while learning is something you do.
Maxwell made the quote the title of his 2013 book, Sometimes You Win, Sometimes You Learn. In the book, he argues that a loss isn’t a complete loss as long as you learn something from it.
The learning part doesn’t happen on its own, and Maxwell often makes that point with a line of his own.
“Experience isn’t the best teacher; evaluated experience is.”
Blakely’s father was running that evaluation at the dinner table. Saying a failure out loud every week made his kids look straight at it instead of hiding it, and nobody learns from a loss they refuse to look at.
Exercise:
What did your last loss teach you?
A notebook and 10 minutes a week are enough to build the same habit.
- Write down 1 failure every week.
A missed penalty, a bad test score or a pitch nobody liked all count. If you can’t think of anything, you probably played it too safe that week. - Add 1 lesson next to each failure.
Write 1 sentence about what you’ll do differently next time. A failure with a blank space next to it is still just a loss. - Read the list before your next attempt.
Before the next exam, tryout or pitch, look at what the last one taught you. In the story The garden of failures, a woman inherits her grandmother’s garden journal with 50 years of notes on what she planted and what thrived. Notes like that only help when someone opens them again.
Give it a few months, and the notebook turns into a record of everything your losses taught you.
About the author
In 1969, a 22-year-old John Maxwell became the pastor of a rural church in Hillham, Indiana, that averaged fewer than 30 people.
His father was a well-known pastor who later oversaw about 200 churches, and Maxwell picked Hillham on purpose because nobody there would recognize his father’s name. The job paid $80 a week, so his wife, Margaret, worked as a teacher to help cover the bills.
Within 3 years, the church had grown to more than 300 people.
He went on to lead larger churches in Ohio and California, where Skyline Church in San Diego grew from 1,000 to 3,000 people under him.
His first book came out in 1979, and he has since written more than 100 books that have sold more than 31 million copies worldwide.
When the Horatio Alger Association honored him in 2019, he gave its young scholars the quote’s idea in different words.
“Don’t count your losses; count your lessons.”
Sara Blakely’s father taught the same thing without the slogan, a dinner at a time.
In the book Sometimes You Win, Sometimes You Learn, where you can find the quote, Maxwell walks through 11 traits that help people learn from a loss, including humility and teachability.
Resources
- Sometimes You Win, Sometimes You Learn (Book)
- John C. Maxwell (Wikipedia)
- John C. Maxwell’s Horatio Alger Award profile (Article)
- How Sara Blakely went from selling fax machines to running Spanx (Article)
- The garden of failures (Article)
- An expert is a person (Article)
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