What if you treated hardships as a welcome test of characters Chapter 3 – Responsibility: The first step of learning Sometimes You Win Sometimes You Learn ends with another fabulous chapter on the advantages of a learners’ mindset: Think of some of the losses in your life and how they made you feel. Not good. And it's not just the pain of the moment that affects us. Our losses also cause us other difficulties. Here are a few: Time passed. Life was busy. I kept working. And before I knew it, Thursday morning rolled around and off I went to the airport.

Wisely humble people are never afraid to admit when they are wrong.When they do, it’s like saying they’re wiser today than they were yesterday.” From the opening beautiful into by the late John Wooden through the amazingly inspirational quotes sprinkled throughout, John C. Maxwell does a wonderful job of laying out the case for learning and growing through failures and disappointments. And life is definitely harder for those who stop growing and learning. Some people become focused on a specific goal that when they achieve it they relax because they feel they made it. That mindset has the power to unmake them (arrival plateau).

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I have friends who know a lot about guns. Some do a lot of hunting. And I've gone hunting with friends several times. I've shot rifles and shotguns, but I don't really know a lot about guns. And to be honest, they don't have great interest to me. I'm not really pro- or antigun. I just don't think a lot about them. And I'm not a technical person. But I knew this pistol had been given as a gift from the heart, so I accepted it and put it in my briefcase. The next several days were very busy for me. I had a commitment to speak to a large group in Dallas, and I was entirely focused on getting ready for it. There was one brief moment while I was working on my lesson when I thought to myself, Oh, I need to remember to get that gun out of my bag. But I was in the middle of writing, and I didn't want to stop because I was on a roll. So I thought, I'll do it later. Seeing Things in Proper Perspective: The best learners are people who don’t see their losses and failures as permanent ( develop a growth mindset)

The Rationalization Trap:“Maybe it’s really not that important.”—Losses allow us to lose perspective.John Maxwell says successful people in his circle had an attitude of “been there, done that, got it all figured out”. But as he grew older he realized that attitude only got them so far and they plateaued because they weren’t growing. Now, I'm going to give you the outline of the book. I'm going to talk about maybe two, three of these chapters briefly today, but I'm going to give you the outline of how the book works. It's all about learning, and the roadmap of learning is the following; humility is the spirit of learning or the attitude of learning. If you are a person of humility, you have the right spirit to learn. Reality is the foundation of learning. Most people will never start learning until they face reality, which is grim and dark. Responsibility is the first step of learning. In other words, what happens there is I take responsibility for what's happened to me, not blaming anyone else. Improvement is the focus of learning, in other words, why do we learn? Because we want to improve. That's the reason we're learning, that's our focus. We want to get better. Hope is the motivation of learning. We learn because we have a feeling that if we learn it, it can get better. It's hope that keeps that alive. I loved the idea of taking responsibility for all you can control and letting go of all you can’t. You can find it even more beautifully elaborated by Ryan Holiday and I find it a more empowering stance than feeling responsible for the final result no matter what (as preached, for example, by Extreme Ownership).