Win or Learn?

Anyone who has competed, or at least been around competitors enough, is familiar with that old saying, "win or learn." It's one of those ideas that contains some truth to it, as you do often learn from losses.

That is not how it works, unfortunately. If you compete enough, you will find that there are losses where there's not that much to be learned. Likewise, wins absolutely represent learning opportunities in some cases.

Where it becomes an empty platitude is when losses are not used as a contextual education tool and instead viewed as an automatic learning exercise. There may be real value in a loss, but if you don't use it as part of a learning feedback loop it becomes dead information. It's also easy to misconstrue what happened in a competition if you don't take the time to review it critically and/or get outside perspectives from people who can help you.

However, there is truth to it to some degree. For example, sometimes athletes dominate their opponents in a match. That may lead to a quick victory or just a complete steamroll where not much happens except an accumulation of points. These matches don't provide useful information unless some kind of bad habit or mistake occurs on the way to victory.

Losses, on the other hand, tend to be information-rich. The density of errors in losses is much higher than wins, on average, which means there's far more to utilize in a learning feedback loop. It gives you a lot more material to train yourself with.

The way I break it down is that winning is good as an end in itself. It feels good, it proves you're doing something right, and, in the case of martial arts, it sometimes indicates that you're ready to be promoted to the next rank. This is why wins are socially sought after more than anything else.

Losing feels worse and nobody will congratulate you when it happens. The social benefits are minor or outright negative, but the skill benefits are much higher. It also means you're probably in the right place to be challenged. If someone wins a bracket over and over again, chances are they need to be bumped up to the next level of competition. Students do best when they're placed against opponents who are around their skill level, and when people are evenly matched losses will naturally occur.

In the martial arts world this often doesn't happen because gyms want to advertise their winning ways via sandbagging. It's a decision that harms the student in the name of improving the bottom line of a gym or the reputation of a coach, which to me is nothing short of a violation of the coach-student contract.

Here's the bottom line: "win or learn" is contextual. Sometimes wins are educational, but often they aren't. Losses are full of useful information in most cases, yet sometimes they're black holes. No matter what, the benefits of a loss are not automatic—they require you to do something with the information you get. If you aren't putting the data you get from each match into a learning feedback loop, you're depriving yourself of potential skill gains.