- [Jordan] What does the person who loses
something important with grace do?
And the answer is fairly straightforward.
He accepts the defeat and thinks, okay,
what is it that I have left to improve
that will decrease the
possibility of a similar defeat
in the future?
- [Joe] Yes.
- [Jordan] Right?
So what he's doing is,
because the great athlete
and the great person
is not only someone who's
exceptionally skilled
at what they do, but who's
trying to expand their skills
at all times.
- [Joe] Yes.
- [Jordan] And the attempt
to expand their skills
at all times is even more important
than the fact that they're great
to begin with because the
trajectory is so important.
- [Joe] More important, in
particular, to the audience.
It's extremely important-
- [Jordan] Right.
- [Joe] to the audience because you are,
the person who's competing,
you are expecting them
to live out this life
in a perfect way, or in
a much more powerful way
than you are capable of.
- [Jordan] Yes, and so
part of that is the skill.
- [Joe] Yes.
- [Jordan] Because they
put in the practice,
but part of that also is the willingness
to push the skill farther into new domains
of development with each action.
And that's really what
people like to watch.
They don't like to watch a
perfect athletic performance.
They like to watch a
perfect athletic performance
that's pushed into the domain of new risk.
They wanna see both at the same time.
- [Joe] Yes.
- [Jordan] You're really
good at what you do,
and you're getting better.
Okay, so you lose a match,
which is not any indication
that you're not good
at what you do.
You might not be as good
as the person who beat you,
but if you lose the match and then whine,
what you've done is sacrificed
the higher order principle
of constant improvement
of your own skills.
- [Joe] Yes.
- [Jordan] Because you
should be analyzing the loss
and saying, the reason I lost
in so far as it's relevant
to this particular time and place
is the insufficiencies I
manifested that defeated me.
And I need to track those insufficiencies
so that I can rectify them in the future.
And if I am blaming it
on you or the referees
or the situation, then I'm
not taking responsibility
and I'm not pushing myself forward.
The issue that we're talking about here
are the issue of being a good sport.
You need to figure out why that's true.
And the reason that it's true is that
you're trying to push
your development farther
than you've already developed
at every point in time.
And then that's the proper moral attitude.
You're trying to push
your development farther
than you've already developed
at every point in time.
And then that's the proper moral attitude.
