18 November 2016 12:00 am
We see a snowflake generation that never learnt the power of winning or losing that cannot come to terms with reality, whining about the win. Or the loss – depends which way you look at it – and how you have come to terms with the concept of winning and losing.
Maybe it is a technological thing, maybe it is a thing with millennials – with their heavily Instragrammed and Twittered lives – they are unable to accept or come to terms with reality and move on. Or so it seems.
The worst part is that the others are going along with it too – universities are giving them a week off to ‘overcome’ the stress of experiencing their much backed horse lose to someone the less lofty; ordinary, everyday folk preferred over the perfectly curated Starbucks Mocha drinking set. A millennial CEO of a cyber security company in San Diego went as far as resigning from his post in pursuit of gunning for Donald Trump, literally. Yet another millennial CEO wanted to hound down those in his company who voted Trump and ‘weed them out’.
Clearly, these are musings of a generation that cannot understand that all don’t win and that for every winner, there is a loser, that there really isn’t any middle ground, that the politically correct upbringing the millennials have had can actually be their downfall in the real world of winners and losers. The sooner we learn this lesson, the better we are.
Unfortunately, I do see some PC nonsense creeping into Sri Lankan way of doing things too. Certainly not the way to go, looking at the spoilt rotten generation of young men and women of the USA who it seems, cannot handle the fact that their candidate lost. Now get over it. Go back to your studies, your jobs and try to be inspired to make a change rather than take part in useless demonstrations and fashionable tweeting about Trump not being their president.
Celebrities to blame?
The tragedy here is that the values that produced winners, be it in personal life, business or academia, have given way to everyone – who-participates-wins mentality. That’s not how life is. Winning is a mindset you develop – and to The Donald’s credit, he has fine tuned that mindset that made him a billionaire and gave him the wherewithal to contest. Losing on the other hand, can teach you lessons too. Losing isn’t the bad word it has been made out to be. Like many others, I too have learnt the best lessons in life by losing some – the lessons in losing can be tremendous and prepare you for major triumphs ahead. But if you have been mollycoddled and never allowed to learn the lessons of losing, then you have not learnt anything at all.
Maybe the self-proclaimed and talentless celebrities, who occupy social media spaces the millennials hang out in, to blame as well.
There are hundreds of them who give out wrong advice, encouraging the younger generation to look for ways of doing things easy. These celebrities largely are those who have built their fortunes on social media followings and or reality TV.
The concepts of hard work and being rewarded for hard work are still true today as they were 100 years ago. If you work hard, you will reap your rewards – perhaps even work smarter too but work you must. Technology is powerful and a good thing to build a business or a concept on but
what will get you ahead is nothing less than hard work.
The celebrated NFL Coach Vince Lombardi summed it better when he said that winning is not just one thing; it is an all-time thing. You don’t win once in a while, you don’t do things right once in a while, you do them right all the time. Winning is a habit – it isn’t everything – it is the only thing.
It doesn’t help that an overly developed sense of entitlement is encouraging otherwise talented young men and women of the US to go on insisting that they will not accept Donald Trump as their president – it is only a display of the tragedy that has befallen the young there.
If only they could learn the lessons from the young men and women of Asia and Africa who struggle for opportunities that the millennials of the USA take for granted – who would give an arm and a leg for one small breakthrough. Perhaps more interns need to be sent to those parts of the world for such lessons in life.
“Sometimes by losing a battle, you find a new way to win the war” – Donald Trump
(Nayomini Weerasooriya, a senior journalist, writer and a PR professional, can be contacted at
nayominiweerasooriya@gmail.com)