There's a saying I don't like much that goes "The man who won't be beaten can't be beaten." It sounds good at arm's length but when you think about it, what if two men who won't be beaten fight a duel to the death? That's going to be a helluva long duel to the death. And in most battles, it takes more than refusing to be beaten to win. It might take, for example, skill or strength or maybe brains.
In every heavyweight boxing match, you have two guys who won't be beaten…and then one is.
Years ago, I had a friend who lived by that credo and he was enormously destructive, both to himself and to those around him. It was an obsessive necessity for him to succeed in everything he did…or at least, to never admit he hadn't. He often seemed to have those two things confused. And like I said, he was destructive. If you had, let's say, a mouse running around your house and you asked him to catch it, he would almost certainly catch that mouse. He might, in the process, destroy your home but he would catch that mouse.
Or if he didn't, he'd just insist he had. There was kind of a circular "logic" to his thinking. It was kind of like, "You may think I didn't succeed but as we all know, I always succeed so that proves you're wrong." Something like that.
Few if any of you would know this person or even know of him. He was not particularly successful in his life; not even in any one aspect of his life. But to hear him tell it, he succeeded in every single thing he did…or on those rare occasions when even he couldn't claim he'd achieved what he set out to do, someone sabotaged him, someone lied about him, someone cheated, etc. Sound familiar? I'm not talking about Donald Trump here.
Well, yes I am but I'm also talking about an awful lot of other people these days and not just people in any particular political party. I keep running into or reading about people who tell us how unbeatable they are…and they don't have to do this. If they really win all the time, we'll notice. But since they don't win all the time, they keep telling us they do, how they never lose, how they always "dominate." There's one writer acquaintance I have who just loves that word…"dominate."
He always sounds to me like he will not be satisfied if he is very successful. He must be more successful than someone else. If he won 20 million dollars in the lottery, he would be really pissed if you won 30 million.
My closest friends do not do this, which is one of the reasons they're my closest friends. They get joy from the success of others. They don't make everything into a contest in which you have to "one-up" the other guy. There's just too much of that in this world. Your goal in life should be to be happy…not to be happy when someone else isn't.