“I don’t think you learn anything from winning. You just jump up and down, it’s wonderful, it’s fabulous, it’s glorious. But losing — there’s a deeper music in loss.”
Author Pat Conroy, who passed away in 2016, said that in an interview with NPR’s Terry Gross in 2002 about his book “The Losing Season.” The book chronicles his time as a basketball player for The Citadel, a South Carolina military academy.
As Conroy says, losing may teach us more than winning does — when you listen to your own inner voice.
And here again is where Conroy offers good advice. “I had to listen to my voice. I had to find confidence by listening to me because I could not find it listening to [others].”
Leaders, too, need to follow their own inner voice. Call it an inner compass that is one part moralistic — pointing toward what it good — and another part motivation, stirring us to action.
Taken as a whole, such a compass stimulates a leader to persevere in times of hardship.