Sometimes, winning isn’t pretty. Clinching victory when you’re not at your best, or when the other team is having an off-day, can leave you feeling hollow. But still, the lessons you learn can set you up for life.
Do you get the impression nowadays that we just aren’t winning? After just seeing another New Zealand rugby team lifting a trophy, it seems the unfortunate process of always coming second is only becoming more entrenched. Worse still, it is becoming an all too familiar reality.
A cliché you often hear in rugby is ‘winning ugly’, which means getting a result despite being off your best.
It is often used to provide an honorable excuse for a less than fantastic performance, but in a time for us all to get some ‘ugly wins’, we need to go beyond this cliché.
A culture of whining is something that has developed in the last decade, and social media is playing a big role in this. It’s easier to moan about something than to find a feasible solution.
Winning ugly means not getting distracted by things not going as you expected, but just carrying on as best you can until you get the job done. This is how you play yourself out of a slump, how you learn to be better, how you build a solid foundation.
When you retrace the stories of successful teams, companies, or individuals, you will see a similar trend. It wasn’t just Champagne and caviar from the start, there was a lot of winning ugly involved. Whether it’s Colonel Sanders or Elon Musk, there were stages where winning ugly was all they could do, and they were happy about that.
To bring it back to current day rugby, even the Crusaders started this year’s SuperRugby season by winning ugly. They almost lost to an Australian team!
We can all voice our frustrations over things not being what they could be at the moment. It’s natural, but there has to come a time when the talking stops and the winning ugly begins. It is a responsibility that lies with all of us, as we all have a role to play.
This happens by making small changes. In rugby that could be by working harder on your fitness, spending more time at practice on developing specialist skills, or something as simple developing a new motivation mantra.
Similarly in our daily lives, it could be getting to the office a little earlier, cutting out the non-essentially purchases to bolster savings, but more importantly doing the unseen hard work in the background where recognition isn’t important.
Sometimes you have to really earn the positives, and by making a change with this mindset, they will come.
Leave a Reply