Winners and Losers in Retirement

Spring is award season. For many people, the Academy Awards show is the ultimate display of winning and losing. “Best this” and “best that” awards for pictures and actors. We might remember the winners for a short time, but what about the losers? This year’s Oscars committee nominated twenty-four winners and eighty-nine losers. That’s a lot of losers.

Who are Hollywood’s biggest losers? The answer might surprise you.

Meryl Streep was nominated this year for her role in The Post. This was her eighteenth Oscar nomination, and she has won only four times. What a loser. If you think that’s shameful, the award for biggest loser goes to John Williams, the fantastic composer famous for creating the iconic music of ET, Star Wars, the Indiana Jones movies, and many more. This year marked his fifty-first nomination. He has won only five Oscars, meaning he has lost an astounding forty-six times. I’m surprised he can keep composing with such a dismal track record.

How We Let Wins and Losses Define Us

Clearly, these celebrities know how to keep producing great art rather than defining themselves by their won-loss records and quitting. For many of us, however, our win-loss record has a significant impact on how we visualize our future.

As we age, we tend to define ourselves more by our past than by our future. We waste energy replaying the wins and regretting the losses, rather than maximizing what comes next.

This past-heavy focus is only natural since our futures become smaller in terms of years and our pasts become bigger. The danger comes when we overemphasize past wins and losses and allow them to overshadow our current potential. As Dan Sullivan has said, “We remain young to the degree that our ambitions are greater than our memories.”

I can teach you how to create and define a great path for your retirement future—but you won’t get very far unless you can move past your win-loss record. Many of these memories are tied to emotions that have a way of grabbing our shirttails and stopping our progress so that we feel like Wile E. Coyote in a Road Runner cartoon.

Redefine Your Past Instead

Rather than dwelling on the feelings of our past, use those memories as a tool to redefine your past and use that wisdom to empower your future. Most of us have thought, “If I had known then what I know now…” Well, why can’t we revisit those times with what we know now? Why shouldn’t we become our own best coach and teacher? We humans have a unique ability to redefine our pasts and use this new wisdom to empower our futures.

Famous losers like Meryl Streep, John Williams, and others keep pushing forward and making their futures better than their pasts because they don’t let their pasts define them. Instead they know their unique gifts, passions, and standards, and they are eager to make the most of them at every opportunity.

Here’s hoping you can use your wins and losses to redefine your future and make a difference in your own corner of the world. The good news, as Rick Warren tells us in The PurposeDriven Life, is that “we are products of our past, but we don’t have to be prisoners of it.”

For additional help planning a great retirement, go to Encorecurve.com.

About the author – Andy Raub is known as “America’s Encore Coach” because of his passion to help retirees repurpose their lives and reorganize their money. Andy is the author of the new book The Encore Curve – How to Retire with a Life Plan That Excites You and the founder of the Encore Curve Program.