3 · L's and W's

I always take an L with a smile because L's are lessons, and W's are wisdom, not wins. You can't gain any wisdom without a lesson, and your biggest advancements in wisdom come from your hardest lessons. So I take all lessons on, with open arms.

You've done two chapters on the present. Now we go back.

Everything you've read so far was about the verdict you pass on what's happening today. But the biggest verdicts you carry aren't about today. They're about things that happened years ago, rulings you handed down so long ago you've forgotten they were rulings. You think they're facts. That was the year I blew it. That was the relationship that broke me. That was the deal that should have made me and didn't. Those aren't memories. They're sentences, and you've been serving them.

This chapter is where we open the file.

The alphabet

When I was younger, I heard people talk about taking L's, and I understood it the way everybody does. An L is a loss. You lost. You took one on the chin. Somebody says "took an L" and the whole table winces.

At some point I stopped seeing it that way, and I don't think it was a decision so much as something I noticed. Every L I had ever taken had taught me something. Not in a greeting-card way. In a specific, measurable, I-do-this-differently-now way. The deal that fell apart taught me how to read a room before I walked into it. The person who burned me taught me what the early signs look like, and I have never missed them since. The year everything went wrong taught me what I actually needed versus what I'd been told I needed, and it turned out to be a much shorter list.

So I started calling them what they were. L's are lessons. That's not a slogan. That's the accurate label. What else would you call an event that changes how you operate for the rest of your life?

And if L's are lessons, then W's can't be wins, because a win doesn't teach you anything. A win confirms what you already thought. It feels great and it leaves you exactly as wise as you were the day before. So W's are wisdom. Wisdom is what you have after the lesson lands. It's the only thing you actually get to keep.

Lessons and wisdom. That's the whole alphabet. Wins and losses were never real. They were the two-bin version of the same thing, and you already know what I think about two bins.

The tuition

Here's the part people don't want to hear.

You cannot get wisdom without a lesson. There's no other door. Nobody has ever become wise by having things go their way. Read any biography you want. The person you admire, the one who seems to see around corners, the one whose judgement you'd trust with your life — go look at what they went through. Every single one of them paid. Every single one of them has a year, or a decade, or a person, that they would not wish on anybody, and every single one of them will tell you that's where the sight came from.

And here's the sharper version of that: your biggest advancements in wisdom come from your hardest lessons. Not your medium ones. Not the ones you shrugged off. The ones that flattened you. The ones you still don't like to talk about. The correlation isn't loose. It's tight. The harder it hit, the more it taught, because the harder it hit, the less of your old picture survived, and the less of your old picture survived, the more room there was for a true one.

So when I say I take an L with a smile, I'm not being brave and I'm not being a fool. I'm doing the arithmetic. Something just happened that I would not have chosen. That means something is about to be taught that I could not have learned any other way. And the size of the hit tells me the size of the lesson. Of course I smile. I just got handed something I can't buy.

Open arms. Not because it doesn't hurt. Because I know what's in the box.

The file

Now go back to yours.

I want you to think about the hardest thing that ever happened to you that you have never called a lesson. You know the one. It's the one you still call a loss, or a mistake, or a waste, or the thing that set you back. It might be a person. It might be money. It might be a version of yourself you're still embarrassed by. It's the file you don't open, or the one you open too often, and either way it's still labeled wrong.

Ask yourself one question about it, and answer honestly, and take your time.

What do I know now that I could not have known without it?

Not what you wish you'd known before. What you know now, because of it. Be specific. Not "I learned a lot." What, exactly, do you see now that you couldn't see then? What do you do differently? What do you refuse now that you used to accept? What do you catch early that used to catch you?

Most people, when they actually sit with this, come up with more than one thing. And then something shifts that I can't fully describe, except to say that the file gets relabeled while you're looking at it. It doesn't stop being painful. It stops being a loss. It becomes the most expensive class you ever took, and the class is over, and you passed, and you kept everything you learned.

That's the first time the reader gets their own story back. Not a nicer version of it. The true one.

Why this isn't a trick

I want to head off something, because I know how this can sound.

This is not "everything happens for a reason." I don't believe things happen for a reason, and if I did I wouldn't have written chapter one. Things happen. That's it. There is no author handing you lessons on purpose. Nobody arranged your worst year so you'd grow.

The lesson isn't in the event. The lesson is in what you do with it. The same thing can happen to two people and one of them walks away with wisdom and the other walks away with a grudge, and the difference isn't the event. It's the label. The one who called it a lesson went looking for what it taught and found it. The one who called it a loss went looking for who to blame and found that instead. Both of them found what they were looking for. Only one of them got to keep something.

So this isn't fate. It's a decision you make after the fact, and it's the most profitable decision available to you, and it's free.

The smile

People ask me about the smile. They think it's for show, or they think it means I don't feel things.

The smile is the moment the verdict doesn't form.

Something happens. The old reflex wants to file it: loss. The smile is what it feels like when you don't. When you stand in the gap from chapter one, and instead of the ruling, you have a different thought, which is: okay. What's in here. Show me. That thought has a shape, and the shape is a smile, and it isn't fake. It's the face of somebody who knows a delivery just arrived.

You won't manage it every time. I don't. Some things hit hard enough that the smile comes a week later, or a year later. That's fine. Late is fine. The lesson doesn't expire. It waits in the file until you're ready to open it, and the day you open it and relabel it, you get the wisdom and you get the energy back that you were spending keeping the file closed. Both. Same day.

All of them

I'll close with the part of my own line that matters most to me, and it's the last four words. With open arms.

Not some lessons. Not the ones I can handle. All of them. Because the moment you start sorting lessons into the ones you'll accept and the ones you won't, you're back to two bins, and you're back to paying. Open arms means the door is open. Whatever's coming, I'll take it, because I already know what it is. It's tuition, and I'm enrolled, and I'm not leaving.

Movement One is done. You've seen that there's no verdict, that the verdict is a tax, and that even your worst chapters were lessons you've been calling by the wrong name. That's the claim of this book, and you've now applied it once to the present and once to the past.

The next movement is harder, because it's about other people. And the sentence that opens it is the one that most people can't hold.

Practice. Name your hardest L. Write it in one line, plainly, the way it actually happened. Underneath it, write the W it gave you, in one sentence. Not what you wish it gave you. What it did. Read the two lines together. That's the true label. Leave it on.