Ask Mike Avila about the loss that shaped him, and he won’t tell you about a broken neck. He’ll tell you about a wrestling match he lost as a teenager.
It stung so badly that he did something most people don’t: he sought out tougher competition on purpose, wrestling a college-bound athlete just to get better. He spent the next two years winning every match and becoming “the guy nobody wanted to wrestle.” But the lesson outlasted the sport. Getting beaten, he realized, isn’t the same as losing.
This distinction sounds like word games until you sit with it. Then it changes how you carry every setback you’ll ever face.
Getting beat is an event. Losing is a decision.
In Mike’s definition, getting beat is something that happens to you a competitor was faster that day, a bid went to another company, life pinned you to the ground. It’s an event, and events pass. Losing is different. Losing is what happens when you give up on yourself. One is done to you. The other you choose.
By that measure, Mike has been beaten more times than he can count and has almost never lost. He’s been out-boxed and out-wrestled by better athletes and come back to beat them. He’s watched a rival construction firm win an important bid and treated it as nothing more than a chance to be better next time. As he puts it: you may get beat, but you never lose unless you quit.
His brother summed up the whole philosophy in one line: “Mike doesn’t know how to lose.” Not because he never got beaten. Because he never accepted it as final.
Why this matters when you’re pinned down
The real test of this idea came during his recovery from that third crash. Nerve damage doesn’t run on a schedule the feeling comes back if and when it wants, and there’s no guaranteed way to speed it up. For a man who knew he could rebuild his body because he’d done it twice before, the not-knowing was its own kind of torture.
Then the racing officials told him that despite being the number-one skier in the world for five of the previous six years, he’d have to qualify from scratch to make the World Championship team. No exceptions.
Mike was furious. It felt like the whole world was winning. But here’s what carried him: “Although I knew I was beaten into the ground, I hadn’t given up, which meant I hadn’t lost.” He said it to himself every single day. Then he trained to ski with his paralyzed arm strapped to his side, using only his core and went out and beat the field to qualify anyway, coming back from nearly a full lap down to win.
He got beat by his body, by the officials, by rotten luck. He didn’t lose. Because he never stopped working.
How to use this in your own setbacks
Most of us collapse the two ideas together. We fail at something and immediately file it under “I’m a loser,” “I can’t do this,” “this isn’t for me.” That’s not just harsh it’s inaccurate, and the inaccuracy is what keeps us down.
Try Mike’s reframe the next time it happens. Whatever went wrong at work, in a relationship, with money don’t say you lost. Say you got beaten by something, someone, or just life in general. That’s okay. Getting beat is often a learning opportunity in disguise. He actively sought out situations where he’d get beaten, from the expert motocross class to tougher wrestlers, because getting beaten by people better than you is one of the fastest ways to grow.
So long as you keep moving forward, you can hold your head high knowing you haven’t lost. You just haven’t gotten where you want to be yet.
That word yet is doing a lot of work. It turns a verdict into a status update.
Mike explores the full “beat vs. lose” framework, along with the growth-mindset research behind it, in The Secret to Never Giving Up. If setbacks tend to knock the wind out of you, this chapter alone is worth the read.