Interesting stuff. Can I throw in a phrase that lives with me every day in my career.
THE GAME:
As a younger engineer working in Bids & Proposals - the most competitive area of most companies - I was giving my-all to trying to win work for the company. To win work meant we all continued, to lose, meant…..y’know.
I took it very seriously, clearly, because a colleague once said to me “mike it’s just a game”.
I have since that time used that association in situations that arise almost daily. The exceptions being aspects like health & safety.
Every day is our chance to make a ‘play’, be it just chosing one of ‘x’ options that dictate our activities over the coming days, or a long term strategy aimed at the next career move.
WINNING/SUCCESS:
I like your use of the term ‘frame’. As I see it our lives contain many ‘frames’. All of us are able to succeed or fail to different degrees in the various frames of our lives. Off the top of my head I would say my life’s ‘frames’ are:
-Family
-Work
-Personal Health
-Hobbies/Sports
I am sure I am not the best Husband/Father in the world. I have got better at it (self-improvement) but doubt I will get better than most in my life-time.
Changing Kit.
Proffessionally I have been lucky (made good strategic decisions?) but I am no academic, nor a great leader. I have done better (financially) than I ever expected of myself and yet I am still surrounded by people ‘better then me’ based upon most mainstream measures.
Changing Kit.
As age starts to be an issue, I need to take better care of myself blah, blah… I have come to admire poeple who are able to do all the right things in term of diet, excercise, etc. Mentally that key element seems to be missing in myself. Certain failure unless I can find the motivation.
Changing Kit.
Sports - like you I have never enjoyed them much - they always lead to competition. Hobbies, many of which can also be doomed by those seeking competition. For me my hobbies are the most self-indulgent (satisfying) parts of my life. To me fabricating something from scrap, or making something that was broken - work again, or learning something new are all personal successes.
I think it all comes down to the measure you chose to use.

‘The rules’, as you’re describing them (or my understanding of it anyways) I think are very different from person to person. My rules on the ‘game’ of life are ‘get better than my current self’ - other’s rules maybe ‘be better than my parents/siblings/classmates/partner/expert in the field’ etc. My judging process as to whether ‘have I been successful or not is very much an internal process … I look at myself, and I make the decisions. For others its very much an external one - having to have their success ‘ratified’ by some external person/force … eg “yes dear, very good dear”. I do that when I have no benchmark for what ’successful’ is - for example with my illustration coursework, I ask my tutors because I trust them to know better.

My theory is that its a lot to do with how you were brought up, being encouraged to be competitive? With lots of other children where you inevitably played with them and so have more of a social streak…

I personally was an only child a lot of my childhood (my sister was born when I was 11) and also didn’t have a large extended family around me. I was very shy, and didn’t get involved any sporting activities as I was very sheltered by my parents (i could hurt myself cycling, no?). Compare this to someone who is the middle of 5 children, and so from a young age are describing their success/failures to what their other siblings have achieved….

I have no idea what you meant by ‘example’ so I’ve just rambled on a bit …

And can I just say, that I feel my way of benchmarking me against my own self is a lot less painful than doing it against someone else. When I was dancing, I was happiest when it was not about anyone else, but how good I was compared to how good I was the month before … the moment I started thinking, “hmmm, I have got this much better in the last month, and they have got THAT much better in the last month”, everything became much less fun! It becomes demoralising, and actually affects my rate of improvement … so I tend to generally avoid comparing myself to others.

I find I divide those two concepts quite strongly because of who/what I’m playing against …

Im happy that I got you thinking. I think the link between winning and succeeding is the most tenuous part of this blog and I welcome the opportunity to discuss it further.

“The desire to win is still very important; [...] a good pursuit of victory is [a] condition for a feeling of success, rather than attainment of victory.”

Let me say what this means to me and see if that was your intention. I hear you saying something like: looking back on a game of sport, you judge your success of the event based on your having adopted an appropriately competitive attitude (pursuit of victory) and having played well with that intention, irrespective of who actually won? And an unsuccessful game might be on in which either you wanted to win and played poorly for some reason or one in which you couldn’t be bothered to win and thus your play, however good it was, was not focussed on the object of the game.

If I got this rignt, then we seem to be in agreement. For me playing the game is a question of stepping into the frame defined by the game. This comprises its rules; not following the rules (cheating) would be not in the sprit of the game, not playing to win would equally not be in the spirit of the game.

What I’m want to understand better is the transfer of the game concept of win/lost to the self judgement of succeed/fail and whether it could be useful to apply a similar idea in other contexts where I hear myself and other people speaking of success and failure (e.g. I have to have a good job and a successfu career). Im wondering if when there is success/failure at stake, I can infer a metaphorical game of some sort whose rules and ’spirit’ determine the judgement of success. And if so I suspect it might be fun to identify the game as such and be aware of the option of stepping out of the frame and leaving its winning and losing behind rather than taking it with me as my success and or failure.

Playing tennis in my youth, these two were fairly tightly bound. If I won, I felt that I had succeeded, and if I won, I felt I had failed.

This has faded, though, as I’ve aged. Now, I find it increasingly possible to feel that I have succeeded if I have played well by my own standards, irrespective of the score. In golf this is even moreso. Sometimes I can play horribly, have a horrible score, yet still feel successful on the basis of just a couple of good shots.

The desire to win is still very important; it is fundamental to my idea of “playing well”. The latter is done in pursuit of the former. However, a good pursuit of victory is increasingly becoming my condition for a feeling of success, rather than attainment of victory.

The destination is necessary because it defines the journey, but reaching it or not reaching it is not what makes the journey a good (successful) one.

Here’s a related thought on sport. One measure of the quality of a game/sport (as a coordinated set of activities, rules, etc) is the extent to which successful play is rewarded with victory. Put more simply, are sports in which aesthetically bad play triumphs, in some way worse sports?

Also thanks to Cardenio for this encouraging definition of “Loser” on the Urban dictionary.