How to Live · ages 7–10
Does winning matter?
You played well and lost. Was it still a good game?
Here is a hard one. You played the best game of your life — every pass sharp, every decision quick — and you lost. Was it a good game?
The scoreboard says one thing and something in your chest says another, and the argument is about which one gets to answer. There are two senses of “matters” hiding here, and most arguments about winning are really people using a different sense at the same time. Winning matters to the game: that is what a game is, a machine for making the result exciting. But it does not follow that winning is the only thing that matters about playing — the effort, the improvement, the fairness, the laughing.
Try it this way: if winning were the whole point, then the moment a game became unwinnable, the sensible move would be to walk off the pitch. Nobody does. Watch what people do when the score is hopeless — they keep playing, and nobody thinks they are mad to.
Which suggests the scoreboard was never the whole story. The question worth carrying around is: when you lost your last game, what were you actually sad about?
Try it
Play rock-paper-scissors at home for a week and keep score of two things: who won each round, and who laughed. At the end, ask which of the two numbers tells you more about the week.
What do you think?
Do you think there is a right answer to this question?
Talk about it
- Can two people both play a game well and still have a winner and a loser?
- If everyone gets a prize, what is the prize for?
- Is it better to lose trying something hard, or to win against someone easy?
Yes, but… — the arguments people actually make
If winning doesn't matter, why keep score?
Notice that “matter” is doing two different jobs. Winning can matter to the game — that is exactly what makes it exciting — without being the only thing that matters about playing. You can want to win fiercely and still think the answer to this question is “less than how you play”.
Losing just means you weren't good enough.
A race has one winner and everyone else loses it, including people who ran faster than they ever have before. If that counts as “not good enough”, the phrase has stopped measuring anything useful. “Better than last time” is a measurement losing still lets you make.
Competing is natural — even animals do it.
Animals also cooperate, share and take care of each other, and nature hands out no medals for any of it. “Natural” reports what happens; it has never been a good guide to what to admire.
What other philosophers think
- AristotleExcellence is a habit built by doing, not a result on a scoreboard. What a contest is for is the quality it pulls out of you — which is why how you play survives losing and winning does not.
- EpictetusSome things are up to you — your effort, your fairness, your nerve — and some things are not, and the result is the clearest case of not. Misery comes from staking your peace on the part that was never yours.
- Pierre de CoubertinFounded the modern Olympics on the creed that the important thing is not the triumph but the struggle — a line borrowed from a bishop's sermon, and cheerfully ignored by almost everyone who has ever competed.
- Alfie KohnArgued that nearly everything competition is credited with — effort, excellence, character — appears just as often without it, because the structure itself makes other people into obstacles.
If you want to go further
- No Contest: The Case Against Competition — Alfie KohnThe fullest argument that competition does not build character but quietly eats it, and that almost everything we play for survives its absence.
- Nicomachean Ethics — AristotleBook II is where excellence becomes a habit rather than an outcome — the oldest and still the sharpest case for how over whether.
- The Inner Game of Tennis — W. Timothy GallweyA coach's book about the opponent in your own head, who is usually the tougher one.
Most of these were written for adults, which is why it is worth reading them with someone older.