Don’t Dwell on the L
Imagine that one kid who can’t do anything right, that kid who spills everything during a lab, the kid who does their whole portion of a project wrong and doesn’t let you know until the due date. We all know one of those kids and dread the day we have to work with them. There are people like that in everything: school, work and even sports!
Let me introduce to you ‘that kid’ of the NFL, ladies and gentleman, the Cleveland Browns. For those of you who are not a super football guru like myself, the Browns have been the laughingstock of professional sports for the longest time and it won’t change anytime soon. The Browns have gone through more than 20 quarterbacks since 2000 and are known for wasting talent, but we can’t forget about their record from last season of fifteen losses and one win.
Now, if we were to ask the manager of the Browns, I’m sure it’s not their goal to be the joke that they currently are. Yet, if you look at their record of the past few years, they have singlehandedly made the same mistakes over and over again. If my second year of high school has taught me anything, it is that you MUST learn from your mistakes. Trust me, I’ve made a fair share of them throughout the year: working too hard, working too little, not making enough time for family, the list goes on for miles.
We are always told by our peers, “If you work hard, you will be successful,” but that’s not always the case. Just look at the Browns and what they’ve accomplished; it’s unfair to assume they are not working hard just because they can’t win ball games. Therefore, it must be something to do with the way they’ve handled their continuous and repetitive string of mistakes.
Obviously, it’s discouraging when you work hard so you can pull that ‘W’, but life is full of ‘L’s’ and what’s more important than taking that ‘L’ is how you react to it. Nobody wants to mess up, but when you do, there are two options: learn from your mistake or to dwell on what you did wrong.
Realistically, the go-to option is to dwell on your mistake because that’s just what we do as students. We work so hard in school and extracurriculars, and when things don’t go as planned, it hurts us. It hurts our mindset, our drive to work and most of all, our self esteem. However, we have such busy lives as students that we can’t afford to dwell on our mistakes; it will mess with our social lives and school work, so our best option is to pick up and learn from our mistakes.
The Browns and myself have taken a fair-share of ‘L’s’ over the years but the main difference between myself and the Browns (besides being a football organization), is that I have been able to look into my past and fix my mistakes. Of course if we take an ‘L’ we aren’t going to be happy, but at the same time, we cannot let it get to our heads.
Life is full of unpredictability: we can’t always expect to get a ‘W,’ but for the times we don’t, we can’t sit there and dwell on that ‘L’. We need to move forward and live and learn.
