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 “Life isn’t a game. It’s a series of games…”

I was driving home last Friday after class and heard this said.

I go home to Maryland on most weekends, so I have plenty of time in the car to catch up on my favorite podcasts between the ride home Friday and the ride back to school Sunday. So this week, that meant listening to the most recent interview with Dr. Jordan Peterson on Joe Rogan’s podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience.

So for about 10-15 minutes of this podcast the two of them go back and forth on the topic of competition and competition’s role in life. And during this conversation what they were saying really stuck out to me as having a major connection to physical therapy and especially experiences we go through as students when we’re in school. So here’s the gist of what they said…

Jordan Peterson (paraphrasing): One definition of a winner is someone who never let losing stop them. Life isn’t a game…it’s a SERIES of games. Be the winner of the series of games. And part of that is learning how to be a good loser because your not going to win every single game.

Joe (paraphrasing): If your not willing to lose, your not willing to LEARN. He then went on to talk about his experiences bombing on stage as a stand-up comedian and how those were some of the moments he learned the most from.

This hit home for me. During my part-time clinical in the Fall, I was helping a patient do a 4-way ankle with a band. She starts to do inversion and my CI asks me, “so what is the main muscle responsible for inversion?” In my head I’m saying to myself..”Uhhh shit. How can I not remember this? Here I am a second year PT student and I dont fucking know what muscle does inversion?!? Bruh why couldnt you have asked me this shit when she was doing eversion – peroneus longus and brevis.” But what actually came out was, “Ummm Anterior Tib?” Nope. Posterior Tib. I was literally pissed off about getting that wrong for the next 2 days. But guess what. Every god damn time I see someone doing an inversion ankle exercise now, in my head I’m going, “posterior tib.”

THAT’S LEARNING. And that’s when I find things stick the best. When I make an absolutely bone-headed mistake that creates an emotional response, which is usually to be pissed at myself.

Not to say that has to be your reaction. But I do think the mistakes we make, especially the one’s we internalize as BIG mistakes (whether they really are or not) is where we learn the most.

I don’t like being wrong. So it goes against my nature, but I now try to SEEK out opportunities where there is at least the possibility of me making a mistake that would create that same reaction as the posterior tib experience. I may not win some of those individual games day-to-day in the clinic, but…I want to win the series. So bring them on.

I highly recommend listening to this entire podcast episode. It’s FULL of great insights from both Jordan and Joe. I learned a lot, so hopefully you will get some value from it also.

Find the episode here on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6T7pUEZfgdI

Also, if you go into the podcast app on your phone and search for the Joe Rogan Experience, it is episode 1070.