If the election is decided by the time you read this, many of your fellow Americans will be feeling like losers. Some will have worked months, maybe years, to elect a candidate who has been defeated. Some will have invested a heaping helping of hope, only to face at least four years under the opponent. There will be tears, denial, anger.
As this epic season ends, there is much at stake besides ideology and leadership. Namely: winning and losing. Success will send one side into shared ecstasy. Failure will deaden the other side with lonely grief. It will hurt.
"I would argue there's no starker dichotomy in American culture than in the idea of success and failure," says Scott Sandage, author of "Born Losers: A History of Failure in America."
The sting of failure ripples through all aspects of life, yet we're quick to write it off, or deflect fault, or deploy banalities to soften the blow.
"There seems to be no way in American public life to talk about failure without resorting to cliches," continues Sandage, who teaches history at Carnegie Mellon University. "Like, 'You're not a failure unless you quit,' or 'Failure is a learning opportunity.' They're kind of true, but they presume failure is always shameful. They presume failure is excusable only in the context of a continued all-out quest for success."
Sandage's book covers failed capitalist ventures from the past 200 years, a period during which Americans have broadened "failure" from a word that describes an outcome (as in, "a failed business") to a word that describes an identity ("I am a failure").
And it's this redefining of failure that gives people trouble, says Edwin Locke, professor emeritus of leadership and motivation at the University of Maryland. Just because you fail doesn't make you a failure.
"Some people may generalize a loss to dissatisfaction with themselves," Locke says. "But that's hugely mistaken, because not reaching a goal is limited to that goal. It's not a condemnation of your life."
Locke has researched goal-setting theory, which says that specific, hard-to-achieve goals produce better performance. He has found through experiments that people who set higher goals accomplish more but are more likely to fail. People who are terrified of failure set their goals too low, so they "succeed" by substandard markers but fail in a broader sense.
The trick is to unleash a healthy ambition, set specific goals and remain resilient and adaptable in the face of failure, Locke says.
Sometimes hard work leads to failure, as Sandage writes in his book. It's an un-American reality, but Katie Fox-Boyd and Farah Ahmad know all about it. They worked hard to get John Kerry elected president in 2004. We know how that turned out.
Yet there they were a couple of weeks ago in downtown Washington, canvassing through Grassroots Campaigns, working full time to get Barack Obama elected.
"It was a distressing time after the last election, but people are now working harder because of it," says Ahmad, 23.
The drive to rebound is an indispensable part of recovering from a loss. It's part of a simple equation for living successfully, regardless of failures, says Frank Farley, a professor of psychology at Temple University in Philadelphia who studies motivation, leadership and the psychology of sports and politics. That equation: Self-knowledge plus motivation equals a successful life.
The trick is to be a constant student of your evolving strengths and weaknesses, and keep moving forward, whether or not you deserved to lose.
"If you lose in some venture, in any aspect of your life, learn from it," Farley says. "That's the motivation part. You learn about yourself, and you do something based on that. Some people when they lose - they blow it off, they don't think more about it. They may be mad about it. But sensible people tend to reflect. 'What happened there?' Successful people get better at it. A loss, to them, is information."
Life coach Ed Modell encourages a similar plan.
"Rather than tell a client to not be upset about losing, we ask them powerful questions," says Modell, a past president of the Washington, D.C., chapter of the International Coach Federation. "Questions like, 'What have you learned about yourself from this experience?' and 'What do you need to do to get closure around this situation so you don't keep thinking of yourself as a failure?' "
The only good way to lose is to be open to learning from it and avoid the temptation to leap to two extremes: dismissing a loss as meaningless or considering a loss the final judgment on a matter. Land somewhere in the middle, the experts say. A loss should be a source of wisdom.
Sandage offers the example of Al Gore, the man who spent his life working toward the presidency. Defeated in that arena, he rose again to become the spokesman for the issue of climate change, winning the Nobel Peace Prize.
"He reinvented himself," Sandage says. "He found a new rationale for public service that was not about individual ambition."
Which brings us back to politics and Election Day. There should be a clear winner and a clear loser. But, for those on the loser's side, that doesn't mean the result should cloud Nov. 6 and 7 and all the days that follow.
So says Pat Williams, whose pragmatic resolve comes from his own experience with failure in politics. He once ran for state representative and lost.
"The next morning I took the top down on my convertible and went for a ride and realized nothing had changed except I'd lost an election.
"Regardless of who wins, there will still be rich, there will still be poor, there will still be homelessness, there will still be cancer. Think about who really controls your destiny."
He pauses for effect.
"You do." "Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor."
Truman Capote, in his book of essays "The Dogs Bark" (1973), perhaps hinting at his own problems with drug use and celebrity "Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat."
Writer Ralph Ellison in "Invisible Man" (1952), a novel about a young black man walking across the hot coals of racial tension in Harlem
"Remember, if you take risks, you may still fail, but if you do not take risks, you will surely fail. The greatest risk of all is to do nothing."
Robert Goizueta, a Cuban immigrant who rose from a Coke bottler to chairman and chief executive of the Coca-Cola Co.
"In God's economy, nothing is wasted. Through failure, we learn a lesson in humility which is probably needed, painful though it is."
Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, in "As Bill Sees It" (1967)
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