Winner

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Being a Winner

This assembly looks at being a ‘winner’ and what this really means. There is a video and there is also a quiz which you can get people up to take part in. If you do, you’ll need paper and pens.

When we think of winners, we understandably think about people who win things like tournaments, athletics, football teams, boxers, Formula One drivers etc. 

Quiz

You can do this as a quiz, or you can simply feed back the answers. 

If you do a quiz, you can have two people up front answering questions (or two small teams). They have 2-3mins to come up with the people they think are the most popular athletes in the world. By ‘athletes’, we mean sports people, not just people from athletics, so make that clear! The team that comes up with the most people on the list wins a prize (chocolate is always good!) 

This list came from ESPN and was done (according to UK Business Insider, article done May 10 2016) by ESPN’s director of sports analytics who created a formula that uses earnings on and off the field, social-media popularity, and Google search popularity. 

20. Zlatan Ibrahimovic (football)
19. Rory McIlroy (golf)
18. Mesut Özil (football)
17. Maria Sharapova (tennis)
16. Wayne Rooney (football)
15. Novak Djokovic (tennis)
14. Usain Bolt (sprinter)
13. MS Dhoni (cricket)
12. Phil Mickelson (golf)
11. Gareth Bale (football)

10. Kobe Bryant (basketball)
9. Rafael Nadal (tennis)
8. James Rodriguez (football)
7. Tiger Woods (golf)
6. Kevin Durant (basketball)
5. Roger Federer (tennis)
4. Neymar Jr. (football)
3. Lionel Messi (football)
2. LeBron James (basketball)
1. Christiano Ronaldo (football)

Question

Here’s some questions for everyone to think about. 

What makes a winner? 

Is it popularity, fame, amount of money earned, success in their sport? 

How would you define success or winning?

If you came to the end of your life and had to say whether it had been a success or not, what things would you look for? 

What you think now may well change as you get older!

Video

Video is by Dove Men – ‘Real Winners Care’ (2017)

Direct Link – https://youtu.be/NjAA9Tnr_A0

End Point

In the video, we see what real winners are like – people like the Brownlee brothers. According to Wikipedia“At the final race of the 2016 World Triathlon Series in Cozumel, Mexico, Alistair Brownlee helped his brother Jonny over the line after his brother, who was leading comfortably heading into the final kilometre of the 10 km run, began to show the effects of heat and exhaustion and began to weave across the course and appeared on the verge of collapse. Alistair effectively gave up his chance of winning the race in order to assist his brother finally pushing him over the line and coming in third himself.”

You may remember or have seen this moment with the Brownlee brothers. But I bet you don’t remember who won the race…

Winning is important. If you set yourself to win, they go for it and give it all you have got. But don’t do this at any cost to people around you. Winning is important but being a true winner is something much deeper, much more lasting and much more important. 

There is a modern day parable of the man who spent his life climbing the ladder of success, only to find that his ladder was leaning against the wrong building. This is a metaphor to encourage us that success is important but life is about more than success.

In an interview with many older people, they were asked what they would do if they could live their life again. The two things that came back up (apart from wanting to be more kind and loving towards people) were:

1. To take more risks – but not stupid risks. Using another metaphor, if their life were represented by a boat – they wished that they hadn’t stayed in the boat in the harbour but had taken the boat out into deeper water.

2. To do something that made a lasting difference in the world beyond their life.

As a Christian, I believe that a life spent following Jesus is not wasted but is the greatest success for living life to the full. Many successful athletes in golf, football, rugby, cricket, athletics, the Olympics, rowing – have found this to be true and have credited their faith for their success and the reason behind what they do. They have lived their lives for something bigger than themselves – to make a difference. Like Jesus, their lives are about more than winning a competition but about serving, loving, caring, helping. 

So what about your life?