Clear direction on how to lose.

Understanding how to lose is an art. Without understanding this, one has no chance of overcoming it and its many challenges. What has made me who I am today is understanding the fundamentals of loss and how to cope with the unknowns, difficulties, questions, and complexities that come with the territory. The moment I registered the depth of this feeling in my life — and what drove me to who I’ve become — was one of many specific music competitions I would enter to continue refining my skills when I had downtime from touring. I outperformed the competition beyond measure from the perspective of not only my peers but all of the judges except one. One of the judges went out of his way to over-complicate the scoresheet and insisted that I underperformed in certain areas despite the consensus of the crowd and the other judges. I was nine years old when this occurred. The next youngest competitor was 21.

I’ve never felt like a victim of this circumstance. Rather, I view myself as an observer of how deeply it hurt. It’s not because of the loss. Rather, I processed at the young age of nine that there were individuals out there, regardless of my merit, talent, ability, humility, experience, and polite manner, who simply didn’t want me to win. I processed that this fact of life is a fundamental value of loss.