Losing
I once put a lot of work into bidding a job I didn’t get. At the time, I counted it as a loss. A few years later, I spoke with the contractor who got it. He told me the job & the client had nearly bankrupted him. That conversation changed how I saw the whole thing. A loss gives you information. Its value depends on what you do with it, beginning with whether you’ve understood the outcome at all.
I’d known how hard I’d worked on the bid & that someone else got picked. I hadn’t known what getting the job would cost. The disappointment was real, but my first reading of it was incomplete. I thought I’d missed an opportunity. Instead, I’d avoided a job that nearly broke another contractor.
That experience didn’t teach me to celebrate every rejected bid. It taught me to be slower about deciding what a rejection means. You know what you wanted. You don’t always know what getting it would have required. Before deciding you’ve been denied something wonderful, find out what you were trying to get into.
Winning hides things too. A weak competitor can hand you the result while your mistakes go unnoticed. A strong one finds them for you. Mike Tyson later said his loss to Buster Douglas taught him that losing wasn’t as terrible as he’d imagined. His life could go on. His later disqualification against Evander Holyfield showed that handling defeat was another lesson altogether. Losing reveals something. Learning from it takes work.
Useful information arrives with hurt feelings attached. Anger names a villain. Pride would rather discuss the referee than open the practice schedule. Those feelings deserve attention, but their explanations need checking. Feeling cheated doesn’t prove somebody cheated. Feeling incapable doesn’t mean you lacked the ability.
Start with what happened. What did you expect? Why? Read the agreement or watch the replay. Ask someone who saw what you missed. Look hardest at anything that challenges the story you’d rather tell. Your gut deserves a hearing too. Experience notices trouble before you’ve found words for it. Follow that instinct, then check it. Get as much of the story as you can. If something remains unknown, say so. Guessing doesn’t become research just because you like the answer.
As a parent, I say, “Accidents happen.” They do. A child who spills a glass needs patience, but once the water is wiped up, there’s something worth understanding. Was the glass near the edge? Did an elbow catch it? Was the table wobbling the whole time? Moving the glass won’t fix a loose table leg.
Get Justin Steubs’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Bigger losses deserve the same care. If a project lost money, compare the estimate with what the work actually cost. Working longer hours won’t fix an expense you keep forgetting to include. Make the correction specific: check the measurement, revise the estimate or get the agreement in writing. Then watch whether it works. This is where losing earns its keep. You’ve found something you can change before it costs you again.
Playing the best baseball team is a harder test than playing the worst. The stronger opponent exposes weaknesses an easier game leaves alone. But how hard the challenge is & how much you put at stake are different questions. Betting more money on the same outcome doesn’t improve the odds. It makes losing more expensive.
Never risk so much that you can’t recover. A builder testing an unfamiliar method on a small mock-up has room to inspect a failure & fix it. Finding the same problem throughout a finished building makes the lesson harder to use. The older you get, the more you realize time belongs in the estimate too. Leave yourself enough of it to put the lesson to work.
Picture a man walking into a casino hoping to make money. He loses, then keeps playing to get even, trying to make the last bet disappear by placing another. Finally, he walks out thinking, “See? I knew I was a loser.” He’s taken one evening’s result & made it his name.
Once you accept that label, another setback looks like proof. “What should I change?” turns into “Why bother?” Calling yourself worthless fixes nothing. If addiction is part of the problem, treatment & support offer real help breaking the pattern. Sometimes the lesson is simply to leave the table. You don’t owe a bad decision another chance to hurt you.
Your worth was settled before you ever competed. My Christian faith starts there: you were made in the image of God. No insult from a parent or label from a government can tell the whole story of someone He created. I believe God gives you abilities worth developing & a purpose worth pursuing. A loss can show you where you need work. It can’t prove you have nothing to offer.
I once wrestled with why God put the tree of the knowledge of good & evil in Eden. I kept coming back to choice. Choosing good means something because another choice exists. Love freely given requires the freedom to refuse. That same freedom leaves room to turn. Repentance lets you admit you were wrong, ask forgiveness & live differently. You don’t have to spend tomorrow defending yesterday.
When you lose, give yourself time to feel it, then find out what happened. Question your first explanation, make one useful correction & ask for help when you need it. Remember that job I didn’t get. You won’t always know right away what a disappointment has spared you or what it has to teach you. You’re loved the whole time you’re figuring it out.
A mentor once told me, “Make them sick, then make them well.” Face the hard truth, then find the way forward. That’s what makes losing valuable: you walk away knowing something useful & you do something with it. Find out why the glass fell, fix the loose leg & carry the lesson with you. You cannot recover yesterday, but you can keep its mistake from claiming tomorrow.
Originally published at https://justinsteubs.substack.com on October 21, 2026.
