The art of accepting defeat

In life,from time to time we as human will definitely face defeat. People tend to freak out and in the end this will result in wrong choices. This can be avoided if we are actually ready. We plan a lot of things and naturally we always plan for the best. What we take for granted is the tendency for all our grand plan to fail. That is why we are ill prepared for defeat or any negative occurrence that we face.


In a more concrete explanation, Nasim Nicholas Taleb explains this using the "Black Swan theory" he developed.

The Black Swan event according to him is

1. The event is a surprise (to the observer).
2. The event has a major impact.
3. After the fact, the event is rationalized by hindsight, as if it could have been expected (e.g., the relevant data were available but not accounted for).

This is a theory commonly used to describe unexpected event in the world such as the September 11. I would argue that this theory can also be applicable in our everyday life. In life we always face situations that we never thought could happen and unexpectedly these unexpected events actually change our life drastically. It would not be too much to say that unexpected situations define our lifes more than expected situations. One fine example would be when we study. We take a subject for one semester and attend classes every week because we know by the end of the semester we will have a final exam(expected event). Two weeks into study week we receive a past year exam question (unexpected event). On the day of the exam the question asked were exactly like the past year question we received(unexpected event). In the end we manage to get a decent result. Do we realise it is actually the unexpected event that got us the results?Would we have studied if we had expected the unexpected?Things could go the other way, we expect the past year to come out and then the exam questions are totally different and we end up failing the paper.

Honestly this year hasnt been a good year for me. I planned a lot of things and many did not turned up good. This was the year I considered suicide(just a SILLY thought if I may stress on this). Things were so bad that I wanted to give up. After thinking for a while I realised where I went wrong. I planned for victory but I did not plan for defeat. I figure out if I had planned for a defeat, I would have known what to do when things went wrong.

Basically the art of accepting defeat is simple. It is be PREPARED for a defeat even if you plan to WIN. If you plan to win, yes you would know what to do if you win BUT what happens if you LOSE?You need to be ready for the unexpected because even if something is least likely to happen,it may just happen.