Sunday, October 07, 2007

Winning and Losing

To attach a lot of importance to winning and losing, sometimes takes the fun away from the match. But some other times, some games aren’t fun enough if it’s not about winning and losing. Gambling is one of them. If you play just for the fun of it, with fake currency, it’s no point because no one will really play seriously. The stakes must be high for the game to be taken seriously. In life’s games, whether love or business, the stakes are what make it interesting. That’s when you gamble, that’s when you decide to take risks that you wouldn’t otherwise. But then, if the fear of failure overwhelms you, you’re likely to play safe and not a big gamble. And of course, as drilled in by the finance professors, a higher risk is the only way of seeking higher returns.

So how do you now reconcile the thoughts when they say about not bothering so much about the outcome or the result and enjoying the journey or the game anyway? A Miss World once remarked, that you got to be prepared to lose if you really want to win. Now how does one ensure the poise and the killer instinct which seems to come out of desperation, when one is convinced that failure is not an option. Guess Rudyard Kipling would have a convergent answer to the puzzle, when he spoke of the true man being capable of staking all his life’s earnings on a game of toss, and having the courage to start all over again after he loses.

It’s not the individual little battles that you keep fighting that matter. You should gamble, put in your heart and soul into the effort, with or without the fear of failure, but if you do fail, then the world hasn’t ended yet. There is the war waiting to happen.

wanderer

1 comment:

Unknown said...

A profound piece of insight into the vagaries of life. Ws a gud read fr sure ...