Being a winner starts with believing that one is a winner. But it doesn't quite end at that point. Being a winner is more of one thinking like a winner. I might say that all of us have probably thought like a winner at least once in our lives. A winner thinks in terms of achievement. Thus, whenever we have had focused our mind on achieving a goal, then we had thought a little bit the winner way. Being a winner is a matter of distinguishing from the rest in that the winner mindset is stretched over long whiles rather than momentary ones. While winning a single match might be seen as a feat of skills of the tactical kind, winning the whole series of matches that define the championship can be compared to a full strategy. I believe that everybody is a master of tactics in a way, therefore, anybody will be able to win a single match sometime. But the beauty of the winner quality is that he, the winner, wins most of the time, just the number of times necessary for us to turn our heads towards him, to remark him. We mark him because he's special, unique.
But, how did he arrive to this status? This, in many cases is the outcome of several circumstances. Though it requires hard discipline and strong commitment to stay a winner, I dare to propose that many winners had the good luck to be born with skills that were appreciated in the environments they lived in, they were also acquainted with the notion of discipline and did end associating the presence of this discipline to the pleasure of achievement and public recognition. We have here, thus, an exceptionally fortunate combination of events and circumstances. Our winner, according to this story, couldn't have helped but being a winner!
Winning, as many other elements related to human life, is basically, as I see it, an attitude, and so, pretty much more the result of a learning process than of anything else. We learn to win. And we learn to win like we learn to speak our first language, by assimilating everything in our environment, and experiencing the joy of a series of achievements. We can also learn "not to win". The truth is that is statistically more likely that we learn "not to win" than that we learn to win. Learning to win is a self expanding process, and so is lean "not to win". The more you win, the more you win, and the more you don't win, the more you don't win. And there comes into existence a real schism between these two categories of human beings. (I need to acknowledge here that this idea is widely developed in Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers", so that I waiver originality in presenting this idea here, not because I did not think it, or have learned it there, but just because it has been openly discussed somewhere else by a famous author.)
Winning and not-winning are forms of programming, both very well rooted, running in the minds of human beings. So, if there was a way, let's say, by using a "magic wand", to root out the not-winning program and to replace it with the winning program, then Jack T. Loser will start, miraculously, behaving like an all time winner! Just in the same way that a custom car performs in a way that exceeds several times its original performance, you will see Jack's face and body driven by a new, more powerful engine, the result of a re-engineering of sorts of his human software.
Such a re-engineering of the mind has been proposed, under several names and fashions, by a number of authors, including scientists, preachers, motivational speakers, aficionados, new age writers, etc. I am not familiar in a first hand way to the very highly praised overnight results of these different systems and doctrines. But I do believe that most of them are basically right, and I believe that they do not do any harm to the individual self practitioner, on the contrary, I am of the opinion that some of the followers of these methods are bound to improve their lives. The lucky ones would even become winners, but I tend to think that the winner status would not be reached by each and every reader of a book of this kind. There's nothing wrong in those books, but I will take the liberty to post a simple question: how many people is able to learn how to play the piano, drive a car or adequately perform in a karate fight just as a result of reading a book? I dare say: just a few (I'm sure that at least these few will succeed, relying only in what they learned in the book, but this will, of course, mean that the book's writings' universal application is unreal, and the statement of universality just not true.)
Back again in our quest for the building of a winner, by means of building a winner's mindset, we see that "nature" had done its deeds while creating the natural winners, and that our built-up winner requires some specific programming, in such a way that it will be a (perfect, perhaps?) substitute for the doings of nature and fate. An interesting idea naturally arises: a winner can be built up by somebody else, and this can be achieved by an specialist rooting out the failure codes and replacing them with winning codes. I believe that more than simple reading of a book is necessary to achieve this universality. I believe that a workshop of winning is the logical factor to include in the building up of the winner's mindset. This workshop will create images, or even icons, that will shine over the first batch of iconic elements, those which engaged the actions of the subject with imminent and recursive failure. The presence of a new imagery will drive the individual in a way and intensity that allow him to think he wins, to focus on winning. This work, this personal effort, reproduces the chain of events that produced the natural winner. But in this case, the built-up winner is subject to these experiences thanks to a theory, a personal monitor, and tangible action.
Then, again, I might be wrong. But, isn't every approach, if proved its harmlessness, worth, at least, a try?
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