Disappointed but not defeated

It's the Monday after Super Bowl Sunday!  It ended up being a really exciting game at the end, and congratulations to the Kansas City Chiefs on winning their third Super Bowl (and second in the last four years).  The Philadelphia Eagles played a great game, so I am sure that Eagles fans are disappointed this morning.  I don't know how this actually breaks down, but I would bet that about one-third of the people who watched the game last night were happy with the outcome, one-third of the people watching were disappointed, and the rest could care less (give or take).  While at the end of the day, the Super Bowl is just a game, dealing with disappointment can be difficult.  

The writer and blogger Ryan Holiday posted about dealing with disappointment a week or so ago in his blog, The Daily Stoic (see "You can be this, but don't be that").  Look at how NFL coach Steve Wilks dealt with what I am sure was a big disappointment for him.  Wilks was named the Interim Head Coach of the Carolina Panthers, after the team fired Head Coach Matt Rhule on October 10, 2022.  During Wilks' stint as the head coach, Carolina had a record of 6-6, which is not bad when you consider how they started, winning only one game out of the first five games of the season.  The Panthers finished 7-10, but apparently that still wasn't good enough for the Panthers owner and general manager.  They ended up hiring Frank Reich instead.  

I have nothing personally against Coach Reich, but let's take a look at why he was available in the first place.  He was fired as the Head Coach of the Indianapolis Colts earlier in the season after a 3-5-1 record up to that point in the season.  Even if you do like Frank Reich, the hire was a real head-scratcher to me.

Steve Wilks had every right to be disappointed and even angry.  But how did he respond?  He said, "The sun rose this morning and by the grace of God so did I...I’m disappointed but not defeated. Many people aren’t built for this but I know what it means to persevere and see it through.”

The writer Ernest Hemingway wrote in his classic novel, The Old Man and The Sea, "Man is not made for defeat.  A man can be destroyed but not defeated."  There's an old Japanese proverb about resilience (I mentioned it previously in my post, "The Oak and the Reeds"), which says "Fall seven times, rise up eight."  It's been said so many times by so many different people, that it really is a cliché - what matters is not how or when you fail, but how you persevere.  Wilks responded in the best way possible.

Holiday concludes his post by saying, "You don’t control what the fates decide for you. You don’t choose to be passed over for a job. Nobody wants to come face to face with an error or an unpleasant reality. But you do control whether you give up, whether you let it break your heart, whether you are defeated."