Defeats: Encounter them but don’t be defeated – Maya Angelou

Defeats: I love the maturity in Maya Angelou’s quotes. I am quite grateful that our quote of the day segment is enriched with such a beautiful quote with enormous depth and meaning to it.

“We May Encounter Many Defeats But We Must Not Be Defeated.” – Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou’s quotes and extremely powerful and sensational, at times it makes the nerves in my body reverberate as I read through them.

Defeats

Let’s see – how often have we heard this word? If I am not mistaken, it forms an everyday part of our parlance – although I wish there was a way without it.

-> Before trying to sound too negative, I am sure there is a certain utility to the defeats as well. After all, they do try to question our limitations and challenge our abilities. It reminds me of the quote from Randy Pausch – the brick walls are there for a reason!

-> I must admit that I have seen a fair share of defeats before I start getting too philosophical in trying to decipher this quote further. The meanings of these quotes are quite fascinating to me and the concept of defeat, failure is one such indeed.

-> It will be a rather useless life to have led if you have not met a few failures so far in life. Each time, something went bad, I have gone into a shell trying to understand what happened and why it did.

I can promise you that I haven’t still found a very convincing answer to that. But I have made some interesting observations which have helped me further as I have grown up a bit.

The Lessons

None of these lessons have been easy to take in. The worst part of any failure is the emotions you have to go through when things don’t work your way.

-> The usual trend I have noticed is Denial, Rage, Sadness and then finally acceptance. I am sure there are more stages I have missed in enumeration, but you get the gist of it. The only lesson we learn through the process is the speed with which we go through them and the time we spend on each phase

-> None of these thoughts immediately change the impact of a defeat or failure you have faced. They still hurt and sometimes there isn’t a lot you can do about it. But, that’s just giving up without even knowing the extent of what all you can try

-> Going back to the quote – we may encounter defeats but not defeated says one very simple thing to me. We are just way too strong to just accept defeat and sit down without doing anything.

The defeats are not going to change the outcome. Fact is when you started going after something – you went after it for a reason, with passion and attachment. The end result is that you still haven’t got what you need. The question now is – how badly do you want that something? 

It is easy to accept defeat and do nothing about it. There is no challenge to it – listen to what others say, simply go by the flow.

What do you want?

Yes! Defeats are hard and lousy. They are annoying to say the least. Most importantly, they have denied you something which you really like to have.

-> The question now is, what do you want to do about it? Are you willing to accept defeat and give it all up?

-> What next? What happens if you give it all up? Does that achieve your goals?

-> You may find solace that you are keeping your expectations low and preventing yourself from feeling bad. But, if you are being true to yourself – is this really the case? You may be preventing yourself from keeping your hopes and dreams up. But that doesn’t get you anywhere, it doesn’t help you achieve anything. 

Your hopes and dreams are precious to you for a reason. You can decide to accept defeat, but you still have to live with it. The choice is quite reasonably yours – the question is what are you willing to do about it?

“We May Encounter Many Defeats But We Must Not Be Defeated.” – Maya Angelou