Lessons from the Jets, business blunders, and what it takes to compete with purpose.
No, Not Everything Was Better Yesterday
How nostalgia tricks us into thinking the past was better than the present
It took my terrible football team to teach me the difference between losing and getting beat.
I see it every Sunday with my beloved New York Jets. But you also see it in business and in life every day.
Over the last decade, they’ve had a record of 55 wins and 110 losses, the worst record in the NFL over that span. For years, I watched them get beat by everyone from Tom Brady to Josh Allen. But I realized that more often than not, they weren’t beaten by the Patriots, Bills, or anyone else. They lost.
And there’s a distinction bigger than you think.
Many of those L’s were self-inflicted. Just look at the first game of 2025 against the Steelers and their old friend Aaron Rodgers. The game went back and forth. It was exciting. And then, early in the fourth quarter, Xavier Gipson fumbled a kickoff return at the Jets’ 22-yard line. The Steelers turned that turnover into a touchdown to take a 31–26 lead. And the rest was history.
That one play was a microcosm of what separates losing from getting beat. Losing means you did it to yourself. Getting beat means someone else outperformed you.
The greats make mistakes. Patrick Mahomes throws interceptions. Steph Curry misses three-pointers. Shohei Ohtani strikes out plenty. But they don’t lose. They get beat by someone who executed better, who played sharper, who rose to the moment.
This plays out in business all the time. Some of the best companies in the world have stumbled. Netflix once thought it was smart to split their company in two and created “Qwikster.” Apple forced millions of iPod users to automatically download a U2 album nobody asked for. Amazon tried and failed with the Fire Phone.
They all got beaten up in the marketplace, but they didn’t lose. Why? Because they learned, adapted, and kept playing. They made mistakes, but they didn’t sabotage themselves out of the game.
The difference matters.
Losing is when you beat yourself through carelessness, lack of preparation, or poor execution. Getting beat is when you gave your best and someone else was simply better that day. One leaves you with regret. The other leaves you with respect.
In life, we all face this same fork in the road. We can lose, or we can get beat. Losing is skipping the preparation, ignoring the details, letting fear or ego trip us up. Getting beat is showing up, giving everything you’ve got, and accepting that sometimes someone else will win.
The Jets remind me of this constantly, even in heartbreak. And maybe that’s the lesson we need most: to stop losing to ourselves.
You don’t control every outcome, but you control your effort, your focus, and your resilience. You control whether you hand the game away or make someone else earn it.
In the end, that’s what separates those who stay stuck from those who keep rising.
The greats, whether in sports, business, or life, don’t go undefeated. But they refuse to beat themselves.
So here’s the challenge: Stop losing to yourself. Do the work. Prepare. Show up with intention. If you’re going to fall short, let it be because someone else was better that day, not because you gave the game away.
Because when you stop losing, you start growing. And every time you get beat, you’re one step closer to becoming great yourself.
