Last weekend, the American Music Awards were my form of entertainment. It was a night full of good music and crazy performances. Many brilliant, talented musicians were all hoping for the chance to walk on stage and claim an award for being the best something of the year. It is the time for the greatest to be recognized as being great.

As the nominees were introduced, I, like many others, was rooting for my favorite one. When the winner was called, that person walked on stage to claim their prize. Obviously, there wasn’t anything for the artists that didn’t get chosen for that award.

The other artists lost and in real life we will all be on the losing side at some point. It is up to us to understand that it is okay to lose, but due to certain practices, children are finding it difficult to accept that it is okay if you don’t win every time.

This starts at a young age.

From the moment we have been able to compete, we have always been rewarded no matter the outcome. After a competition in elementary school, the winner receives a ribbon and everyone else receives a participation ribbon. It is almost like we are scared to let the others go home empty handed.

To the receiver of the participation ribbon, it seems that they have won. There is no lesson in what it means to have lost or any acknowledgement on how to improve. It is being unintentionally taught that there never is really a loser.

Participation ribbons and their equivalents are preventing us from understanding that you can’t win at everything. By teaching young children that everyone gets a ribbon, they are failing to see that sometimes in life you will lose and the lesson of failure is all you get.

This can give us a false sense of greatness. As children, when we get that ribbon all we think is that we got a ribbon, that must mean that we are good. With that feeling, we may lose the drive to get better. In our mind, we are already great enough, so why try harder?

That feeling of greatness becomes something that we crave. We always need to hear that we did great, even when we didn’t achieve greatness. When my sister was younger she was an avid soccer player. After each game, she would always ask my dad, “Why didn’t you tell me I had a good game?” She felt that after each game she had done a “good job,” even when she hadn’t.

To try and avoid heartbreak, people will lie saying that they did a great job. We want them to know that we are proud of their efforts. What we need to say is “you did okay, but you could have done better.”

By enforcing this fabricated greatness, that mentality becomes ingrained into our brains and when we get told we didn’t do a “great job,” it is much more difficult to cope with.

Saying in your future job you are assigned to put together a proposal. You work very hard and feel like it is exactly what your boss wants. When you get the feedback, you discover that you didn’t do a good job. This can be much harder to accept since we have always been told that we have done a good job.

Everyone deserves to feel like they are a champion, but we can’t give our praises that don’t accurately describe the performance. We don’t think that it will have long term effects, but it does.

By not allowing children to feel a false sense of greatness, they are able to make the improvements needed to become great. They also have the chance to discover their strengths where they are able to fully achieve greatness.

Life doesn’t hand out participation ribbons, there is success and failure and that is all. We need to stop identifying failure as a negative idea and start acknowledging it has a lesson to make us better.