My Story: Winning By Losing by Bobby Bones at TEDxNashville (Transcript)

Bobby Bones at TEDxNashville

Here is the full transcript of radio personality Bobby Bones’ TEDx Talk presentation on My Story: Winning By Losing at TEDxNashville conference. This event occurred on March 17, 2017 at Nashville, Tennessee.

Listen to the MP3 Audio: My Story – Winning By Losing – Bobby Bones at TEDxNashville

TRANSCRIPT:

Hello! Thank you. Thank you. I’m here to talk about screwing up, because that is what I do a lot of. And so it’s all about winning by losing, and it sounds like a foreign concept, because you think, wow, people are good; they win. But really the biggest winners are often the biggest losers from what I have learned. And you know, we look at winners and we see basically their byline.

What we see is someone who is super successful and why they’re super successful, we see a few lines about them. But what we don’t see are the years, the days, the minutes that they put into, of just straight failure to be able to get where they are.

And people tend to fail upward and that’s what we don’t get to see, because, again, we only get to see the polished product. Now, for me, losing is a tool. I’ve also hand-drawn all my sketches tonight.

So I’ve learned that using the tool of losing is so great for me, because first of all I tend to lose a lot. My career has been one mess up after another. I’ll probably mess this up. First of all, I tried to do a TED talk before and they rejected me. So — thank you — they said no, that’s not good enough. So I put another one together about not being good enough and they said yes come on up.