Once You Win, Now What: Learning to deal with the pressure of being on top

So, now that we’ve won some crucial elections, and Trump is going to be back in office and will make it a priority for America to win again, what happens now?  Winning is tricky, not just in winning once or twice here and there but in having a winning attitude every day, no matter what is happening in your life.  And to answer another question I get asked all the time, why do I participate in so many competitive events throughout the year, especially in shooting sports?  What’s the point?  Well, to have this conversation, actually, and this is a point I make abundantly in my Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, winning is very difficult because once you win a time or two, you end up on everyone’s target list for personal destruction.  The social ostracization begins with the masses who don’t win very much and it can get pretty tough.  So I compete a lot, not for the fun of it but for the practice of staying sharp in maintaining a winning way of thinking, which then cascades into other parts of my life.  But for many, winning is easy.  As an outsider, you put all your efforts into something.  You win, then become the king of the hill.  Then what do you do? You now have people looking at you as the one to topple.  A lot of people suffer greatly when they win in politics because once the shoe is on the other foot, and your competitive enemy now looks at you with the obsession of beating you, you might likely find yourself spending most of your time looking over your shoulder instead of maintaining a winning attitude which caused you to win in the first place. 

Since I compete a lot, I get to see the ugly side of people working hard to win at anything, from bowling to golf.  A win over peers makes life a little bit better and makes all the mundane things we do in a day just a little sweeter when we win.  Humans are competitive people, which works best in capitalism when people compete for market share.  But I can tell you, especially in shooting sports, that some people you compete against get pretty crazy when they think obsessively about beating you once you establish yourself as the one to beat, and if they can’t beat you, they get pretty mad.  Learning to deal with that pressure is a large part of the battle because everyone can win a time or two just by random luck.  But how do people manage the expectations of being a winner?  That can be a bone-crushing, soul-draining endeavor.  Maintaining a winning attitude once you become the king of the hill that everyone wants to knock off takes a lot of work and personal motivation.  It would be easy for me just to put trophies on the wall and say, I won a lot and was pretty good.  But continuing to grind through more and more wins isn’t for me about winning; it’s about dealing with all the people who want to knock me off and dealing with that pressure.  Even if it’s a little thing.  The competition from people who always want to beat you sharpens you up for life’s real battles.  If the pressure under leisure bothers you, then real stuff, where it counts, can destroy you.

I was at Top Golf recently with many people, and you wouldn’t believe how competitive everyone was in getting the best score.  I don’t golf much, but I was doing very well.  And there were people there who golf all the time.  It’s the primary recreational activity they do in life, and they were losing and were mad about it.  My strategy to compensate for my lack of finesse with the various wedges was to use the driver to hit the ball as hard as possible toward the 300 point holes in the back of the course.  And most of them were going in.  And it was driving my competitors crazy.  I often have the same reaction in a fast draw.  I have a very fast draw where I shoot right out of the holster at my hip.  And it’s hard for people who have been shooting for a long time to deal with that because the core skill is going a little slower to go fast, which is the opposite of driving a golf ball by relying on hitting it hard every time.  Typically, people who win a lot find something they can excel at, and they leverage that against variability and emotion for consistency of performance.  And they usually end up winning more than average against other people.  That was certainly the case with several political campaigns.  One of the reasons Trump has been so dominant in politics is because he learned to win in life, so defending his king of the hill perspective was nearly impossible for losers who wanted to use mass collectivism to hide their incompetency, such as was the entire campaign of Kamala Harris.  Once she showed herself as a loser who didn’t know how to win anything, she was easy to beat, even with the media trying to cheerlead her on.  Democrats weren’t prepared for an honest election where they had to win.  They had built their entire political platform on cheating and couldn’t handle the pressure down the stretch, no matter how much money they spent, just like the guy who buys all the fancy golf clubs competing against a person who handles the pressure of winning better.  Money can’t solve the problem. 

A lot of people in life can’t handle the pressure of being a winner.  So all they ever really achieve is the rock-chucking part of wearing down an opponent.  Whoever is the king of the hill at that time makes themselves an easy target for all the rock chuckers.  Someone recently told me, “Do you know how much people hate you?”  It was as if it was my social obligation to be liked and to lose to make them feel better about themselves.  Because they were too lazy to become winners, they resorted to the classic peer pressure application of saying, “You should let me win if you want to be my friend.”  Well, why would anybody want to be friends with a loser?  What’s the fun in that?  I like seeing people working hard to beat me at things because it improves them.  I think, especially in a capitalist culture, that people are forced to make themselves better by making me a target for their perfection.  And if they sneak away a win here and there, I am usually happy for them.  I have a lot of trophies, so I like to see other people enjoy victory, especially if the competition makes everyone better.  That’s the name of the game.  But once you are a winner, you must expect everyone to come after you.  And that will undoubtedly be the case with these political wins.  Don’t be happy to put the trophy on the wall and rest on your laurels.  Once you win, you must continue to win and strive at it with every breath in your body, every day.  And by making winning a daily practice, you will find that it helps you in everything you do.  And that the world around you will benefit from the competition. 

Rich Hoffman

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The Darkest Days in America are Behind Us: Now the hard work starts, winning and staying hungry to continue to win

The hardest part about winning is staying hungry for the next victory, precisely where I see America presently. Of course, that doesn’t discount all the bad effects we are witnessing today, the results of stacks and stacks of losses where Americans allowed themselves to be suckered by a globe full of losers. The high gas prices, the inflation numbers, the transvestites in our public schools are all signs of a dead culture if you look at face value, the results of terrible liberal management unleashed upon us all. What we see as death, destruction and mayhem are the results of losing to Democrats because we were too kind to smash their faces into the harsh reality of competency. Yet, after the Roe v. Wade ruling by the Supreme Court and many other judgments they have made, the success of the many Trump endorsements in recent primaries and how the midterms are shaping up, how the Constitution has served as the ultimate backstop to global tyranny, the darkest days are behind us in America. It might not feel that way when you go to the grocery in this disastrous Biden economy. But we are in a far better position now than we were in the winter of 2021 when Joe Biden was inaugurated and Trump pushed out of the White House. Rush Limbaugh died; by all appearances, the bad guys were winning in the world and would continue to do so forever. Covid was in full bloom, and mask mandates and authoritarian restrictions were permeating everywhere. I remember at that precise time traveling in New Mexico and staring out into the vast deserts near White Sands and contemplating the end of America. Compared to those days, we have obviously turned the corner as a nation, even though the effects of the bad management over the last two years have now caught up to us.

It’s one thing to get caught off guard by thieves and scum bags who intentionally rob us and destroy our country all along. But as I watch the follies of the January 6th trial and the disaster of the special emergency testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson shows just how thin the Democrat case really always has been.   It was a desperation shot from mid-court by a team losing 90 to 2 in a basketball game that was over before the clock even started. The only reason there is damage to our country now and all the chaos we see playing out is because we were too nice to our opponents and did not have the heart to destroy them when we should have. We fed them and hoped they wouldn’t grab hold and try to kill us. Of course, they are killers and know nothing else but death and destruction. It was our fault that we didn’t guard ourselves against their intentions. But the cat is out of the bag now. Many of the things conservatives have warned about regarding the Democrat Party, that it has its roots in Marxism, that it’s a death cult, that they intend to sell out America to globalism ultimately, are now seen by even moderate voters. They are turning away from Democrats by the millions. From my perspective, who have been warning about these very things for decades, it is good to see that people finally have a reference to draw from. It’s a shame our economy had to be wrecked to do it. But it has been good for people to live and learn through this time because there will be a way to repair it all at the end of the tunnel. Republican politics will be the answer to all the problems we are seeing, and up to this point, getting people to look at those problems has been the biggest challenge. Now that those problems have been up in everyone’s face and they have no choice but to look at them, we are finally starting to have an honest discussion about what to do about it. 

But that’s when things really get hard. Winning is hard. Losing is easy. After a victory, it’s very difficult to maintain the energy to go out and do it again. Yet that is what we must do. We can’t be satisfied with the Constitutional victories against vaccine mandates, which stopped the spread of Covid around the world. Many places around the globe that do not have constitutions like the one we have in America are still on lockdown protocols. If not for America, the tyranny would still be ruling the world. And there are no Supreme Courts in other countries that provide checks on power, as we have seen over gun rights and abortion in America. In most places in the world, power is unleashed through minority oligarchs. They don’t have Supreme Courts that can put checks on out-of-control power, which is ultimately what has saved America from the destruction that had been long-planned. It has been scary to see the ill intentions of our attackers, but the Supreme Court was always there, using the Constitution as a backstop to evil. It’s been tested like never before, and it has held, and we should all be happy about that. But we must now take what we know and fight for what’s right and win the next day and the next. To keep winning and to have the hunger to do it. It’s not enough to say that the unique American system of checks and balances worked when global tyranny was most aggressive on our doorstep for world domination. A single win is not enough; what is needed is a series of victories and embarrassing ones for the enemies of America that will destroy them ultimately. For what they did, compassion is stupidity. 

The trick will be to still be hungry for wins after the midterms and Republicans sweep their seats in the House and Senate. When Republicans get control of the out-of-control Biden White House and start to untangle the damage done by it and make that long climb out of the darkness, we have found ourselves in over the last several years. History books will remember this period as worse than the Civil War, worse than The Great Depression, worse than all the World Wars, and worse than any period America has endured over a short period of existence. We don’t think of it in real-time because we have been living it. But time will remember the fear and burden of what happened to us with Covid, election fraud, and the purposeful collapse of the American dollar by foreign attackers coming through the backdoor of finance. So we deserve our share of victory and to celebrate the defeat of our enemies. But on those days of victory, when the danger is averted, that is when the real challenges start. There is much to do, and there will be a period between 2022 and 2024 where things won’t be so tricky because Republicans will be in charge. When those days come, and the Democrats are crying for “fairness,” remember what they did when they thought we were all going to die. And work even harder for victories in those coming days and rub their faces in the smell of defeat. And make them like it, and don’t let up. Make the destruction of the Democrat Party the goal of victory and never stop. Because of what they did, they deserve complete and ultimate destruction. They do not deserve compassion or even polite consideration.

Rich Hoffman

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