Learning to lose without falling apart

I’ve lost a lot of games.

As a player.

As a coach.

And now, from the stands, as the father of two players.

In more than twenty years in my line of work, I’ve also lost off the court.

And if all those defeats have taught me anything, it’s this:

knowing how to lose doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.

It means not letting the defeat decide for you.

Not who you are.

Not everything you need to change.

We teach how to win. Losing you learn on your own (or not at all)

We put a huge amount of effort into preparing for victory.

Practices, systems, strategies, plans, goals.

Hardly anyone, on the other hand, teaches us how to lose.

Which is curious, because losing is far more common than winning.

In a league there’s only one champion. Everyone else finishes the season having fallen short somewhere along the way. And even the champion loses games.

The same happens at work, even if it’s less visible: for every proposal that goes ahead, there are usually a few that don’t.

So, if I think about it, losing isn’t the exception.

It’s the most common part of the game.

And yet every defeat catches us a little off guard.

I’ve learned to lose four times

Not all at once.

And not completely either.

Each role has taught me something different.

As a player: the defeat was mine

My first years of basketball were in minibasket, after spending a year trying handball.

I remember a game against Penya, as Joventut de Badalona is known (the same club where, many years later, Laia has played).

We lost scoring two points.

Two.

It was very hard. Not just because of the score, but because of what it exposed: the gap in level was huge. They had been playing and training for years. They had a coordination, a rhythm and a grasp of the game that we didn’t have yet.

When you’re a kid and you lose like that, the easiest conclusion is also the worst one:

“This isn’t for me.”

But that score didn’t say who we were.

It said how many years of basketball each team had behind it.

The first would have been a verdict. The second was information.

I kept playing. And years later I ended up coaching.

As a coach: the defeat was ours (and the responsibility, mine)

When you coach, you lose through other people.

It’s no longer just about how you feel. It’s about what you do with what your team feels.

I remember a half-time talk with a junior team at C.B. Sant Gabriel in Sant Adrià.

The locker room was completely crushed.

Defeated body language. Faces that didn’t know what to do or where to turn. Confidence on the floor.

I tried to remind them what we were capable of. What we did in practice. What we had shown in other games that same season.

We were the same team.

What had changed were the circumstances of that day: our misses, our lack of focus and the other team’s accuracy were sinking us.

It wasn’t enough to win.

But we turned the momentum around. We lost and, even so, we left that game feeling good about it: we believed we were capable of much more. And we kept that for the next time that sense of defeat showed up.

Looking back, that talk was trying to separate two things a defeat tends to mix up: what was happening to us that day and what we believed we were.

A coach can make good decisions and lose. And can get it wrong and win. The scoreboard doesn’t tell one from the other.

It’s probably one of the most useful lessons basketball has given me: don’t confuse the quality of a decision with its outcome.

As a parent: the defeat is theirs (and it hurts me)

This is probably the hardest role.

Because you lose without having played.

You see Alba or Laia walk off the court after a defeat and you’d like to do something. Anything.

Explain. Comfort. Correct. Find someone to blame. Fix it.

And that’s almost never what they need.

Besides, not all defeats are the same. They’ve been through all kinds, and each one calls for a different response.

It’s not the same to have played a good game—good attitude, fighting for every ball and every play, in defence and in attack—and lose because the rest of the group lacked commitment and attitude, as it is to lose a game where everyone misses or where the other team is simply better.

In the first case, the information says: “I did my part.” In the second: “It didn’t work out for us today” or “They were better today.”

What both have in common is what matters most to me: they keep learning to fall a hundred times and get up a hundred and one.

I’ve already written about the car ride after the game and why, sometimes, the best thing an adult can do is not fill the silence. Here I’m interested in something else: what that defeat stirs up in me.

Because part of the pain of a parent in the stands isn’t about them.

It’s about us.

About the expectations we’ve placed on them. About the comparisons we don’t say out loud. About wanting things to go well for them, which sometimes looks too much like wanting things to go well for us.

Learning to lose as a parent is, above all, learning not to claim a defeat that isn’t yours.

As a professional: losing while ahead on the scoreboard

You lose at work too.

It’s just that the scoreboard doesn’t always say what it seems to.

In SEO there are defeats that don’t depend only on what you do: an algorithm update, a change in how results are displayed, an AI-generated answer that keeps the click that used to reach your website.

But the most recent professional defeat I’ve experienced at the agency was of a different kind.

A client in the tourism sector. A little over six months of work.

We had reversed a negative trend in their organic traffic. We had started earning mentions and citations in the main language models. And the way we worked was paying off: month after month, every metric improved a little more.

And yet they decided not to continue.

We lost while ahead on the scoreboard.

I don’t consider it completely lost. I think it may be a pause and that, once they confirm everything was working and value the service they received, they might decide to come back.

But it’s exactly the kind of defeat that is hardest to read.

The temptation is to change everything: the approach, the proposal, the way results are reported. Maybe something does need adjusting. But reading this defeat as proof that the method didn’t work would be a mistake. The data says otherwise.

That’s why work has forced me to look at defeats more coolly than sport. Not because they hurt less, but because misreading a defeat is costly: it leads you to change what was working or to keep what no longer works.

What a defeat mixes up

If I put together what those four roles have taught me, I arrive at a fairly simple idea.

A defeat mixes up three things that are worth separating.

The pain

Losing hurts. And it’s fine that it hurts.

The pain is proof that it mattered to you.

I’m not interested in a way of “knowing how to lose” that consists of not caring about anything. That isn’t knowing how to lose.

It’s having stopped playing.

The pain doesn’t need analysing.

It needs time.

The information

Every defeat carries some information. Sometimes a lot. Sometimes very little.

The information answers questions like these:

What depended on me?
Which decision would I make again in the same way?
What would I change knowing only what I knew at the time?

That last question is the important one.

Judging a decision with the information we have afterwards is very easy.

And rather unfair.

Annie Duke, a former professional poker player, has a name for that mistake: resulting, judging the quality of a decision by its outcome.

The verdict

And then there’s the third thing, the most dangerous one.

The verdict.

It’s the conclusion we draw about ourselves:

“I’m no good at this.”
“It always happens to me.”
“That’s it, it’s over.”

The pain is legitimate.

The information is useful.

The verdict is almost always exaggerated.

And that’s where we break: not in the defeat, but in what we decide the defeat means.

I’ve already written about the temptation to turn results into identity in Competing without comparing. I’d only add that losing is precisely the moment when that temptation squeezes hardest.

Not every defeat teaches you something

There’s a phrase we hear a lot: “you learn more from defeats than from victories.”

Sometimes it’s true.

Sometimes it isn’t.

There are defeats that bring new information: something you weren’t seeing, a pattern that keeps repeating, a weakness worth working on.

There are defeats that only confirm that sometimes you lose. That the other team was better that day. That the ball didn’t go in. That the algorithm changed.

And there are defeats that, without ceasing to be defeats, build something. Like that junior game.

Trying to extract a big lesson from every defeat carries a risk: you end up changing things that were working.

A few weeks ago, explaining how I form my own judgement, I said that sound judgement should be stable but open to revision. Something similar happens with defeats.

Don’t change everything after losing one game.

Don’t ignore the fifth defeat in a row for the same reason.

The question I try to ask myself is this:

Does this defeat tell me something I didn’t know?

If the answer is no, maybe all you need to do is let it hurt for a while and get back to practice.

What I try to do after losing

I don’t always manage it. But when I do, it looks pretty much like this:

• Don’t analyse in the heat of the moment. The analysis can wait until tomorrow. So can the verdict.
• Separate decision and outcome. Was it a bad decision, or a good decision that turned out badly?
• Keep one lesson, not ten. Ten lessons are an elegant way of punishing yourself.
• Decide what I’m not going to change. After losing, it’s also worth protecting what works.
• Play again soon. The next opportunity puts a defeat in its place better than any reflection.

Losing without falling apart

Maybe that’s why the title isn’t just “learning to lose”.

We’re going to lose. All of us. Many times.

What we can learn is to keep a defeat from spreading beyond its actual size.

For a bad game to be a bad game. Not a season. Not an identity.

For a client who leaves to be a client who leaves. Not a verdict on what you’re worth.

That kid who lost scoring two points kept playing.

That crushed locker room ended up believing it was capable of much more.

And Alba and Laia keep getting up one more time than they fall.

I still don’t fully know how to lose.

But I’m better than I used to be at telling apart what hurts, what teaches me and what I’m just telling myself.

And almost always, a few days later, there’s another practice.