Are you a winner or a whiner?

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Next week will mark 3 years since my Grandmother passed.

She had a tremendous impact on my life and was always one for words. She dedicated her life to her family above all else, but she was also tough. She wasn’t the type of person to have embroidered pillows, but if she did, they’d have some of her favorite expressions like “You are lucky to be living” on them.

She appreciated everything that life gave her, but whining and excuses were not allowed. As I grew up, there were always plenty of things that I could complain or make excuses about, but she always had some quip back to me to assert, ‘So what are you going to do to fix that? The world isn’t going to do it for you.’ These little nudges had a big impact on my life. I’ve been knocked down a bunch along the way, but the folks who know me best, know that I get back up.

As a parent now, I think a lot about instilling those values in my kids. I’m a big fan of Angela Duckworth’s book “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance” and candidly worry about the lack of resiliency across the social fabric of our society. We live in a world where scapegoating is endless. Not only is that misplaced, but it’s entirely unproductive. As Teddy Roosevelt once said, “Complaining about a problem without proposing a solution is called whining”. I love this quote so much that I had it put up on the walls in our office. Our job as founders and funders isn’t to identify the problems, it’s about finding the solutions. That’s how you win – finding solutions to problems over and over and over again. If you do that consistently over a long time horizon, you will achieve far greater success than simply identifying and whining about the problems.

The other day, I saw a post about a Stanford study highlighting that repeated complaining actually weakens your brain and strengthens stress pathways. The simple act of complaining about something actually engrains neural pathways in your brain that not only make you complain more, but make you less happy. Who wants that? The scaffolding of our minds is always evolving, but changes aren’t sudden. They compound over long time horizons to enforce increasingly stronger pathways. This is the basis of cognitive-behavioral therapy - identifying unproductive behaviors and consciously altering your responses to enforce more productive patterns to the point that they become instinctual. No one is born a “whiner”, but more importantly, no one needs to remain one.

As a father, this is a lesson I try to instill with my kids every day. One of the favorite expressions we have in our household is “Are you a winner or are you a whiner?”. My kids know the answer and they know that it’s far preferrable to be winners > whiners. Not only is this one of the fastest parenting hacks I’ve seen to get kids to stop complaining (which every kid is going to do from time to time), but it’s also part of my long term efforts to ensure that my kids are establishing the neural pathways for solving problems, not just complaining about them. I ask them what we can do to solve whatever they are having difficulty over. I ask them how they can contribute or take control over solving that difficulty. I then ask them what they think they can do even better next time. I’m not qualified to give parenting advice, but I’m hopeful that my intention and efforts result in my kids establishing the pathways and tools necessary to tackle the problems they will face in the years ahead.

As I think about founders, there are just some folks who know how to win. They do it over and over and over again. It’s not a secret that when you’ve had success once, it gets easier to achieve the next time. Often the “wins” get bigger each time, too. Elon Musk didn’t start off with Tesla or SpaceX…those came after starting Zip2 and X.com (which ultimately merged with PayPal). He learned how to “win” and kept on winning. As David Faber from CNBC said the other day “I don’t think you can ever bet against Elon…he just knows how to win.”

As this Stanford study asserts, winning isn’t an inherent skill, it’s something learned. Tom Brady didn’t win national championships at Michigan and Elon Musk didn’t sell his first company for a billion dollars, but as I look at the most successful folks in society, they have developed and reinforced patterns that enable them to win. They don’t complain about problems, they solve them. They attack them head on and are ruthless in their self-improvement to identify pathways to help further improve their odds of winning. I often come back to this Tom Brady quote, “To be successful at anything, the truth is you don’t have to be special. You just have to be what most people aren’t: consistent, determined, and willing to work for it.” That’s how you win, not by scapegoating, whining or complaining, but by consistently showing up with the determination and work ethic necessary to take small wins and compound them into big ones. That’s how you learn how to win.

If you are a founder (or board member), don’t just identify problems, solve them. Stack the solutions on top of each other and sure enough, you will be sitting atop some wins. Those wins can help catapult you to even bigger wins. Complaining about the problems isn’t going to get you anywhere and will only reinforce patterns to failure. As Robert Frost once said, “The best way out is always through.” I can safely say that Grandma Zullo would approve of that.