Winners lose more.
There’s a story behind that.
This is your daily message from Chad number 1213 to upgrade your mental game today by telling yourself a better story, because the most important story you hear is the story you tell yourself. This message is dedicated to Krystal Niu. It helps others find these messages when you follow, like, or comment.
Here’s the upgrade:
You may think you need to be sure you’ll succeed before you step in front of people, but upgraded thinking knows failing is part of the show.
Here’s the story:
You might know her as Red Panda. If you’ve been to an NBA game, you may have seen her at halftime or Season 8 of America’s Got Talent. Krystal Niu was born in China, into a family of acrobats. When she was seven, her dad started teaching her a traditional bowl-balancing act. By twelve she was performing full-time. By fourteen she was touring the world with the Shanghai Acrobatic Troupe. At nineteen she came to America.
Now picture the act if you haven’t seen it. She’s balancing on a towering unicycle about seven feet tall in high heels. She flips bowls off her foot, and they land on top of her head. One flip at a time, the stack gets taller. When she came to America, she made a seven-minute highlight reel, ordered a thousand VHS copies, and mailed them to agents and venues all over the country. A thousand tapes. And then nothing. For a year. Then, the day before Thanksgiving 1993, the phone rings. The Clippers halftime act fell through and someone remembered her tape from almost a year earlier. She was on a plane to LA within hours. She remembers four standing ovations. By the next season she was booked at more than forty NBA games.
Want to know her success rate? By her own estimate, seventy-five to eighty percent of her shows are perfect. Which means roughly one night in four, a bowl hits the floor. In front of the whole arena. And she gets back up there anyway.
In 2013, at 42, already a legend in NBA arenas, she walks onto America’s Got Talent and auditions like a beginner. She advances. Then she steps away to take care of her father, who has cancer. She comes back as a wild card and goes out in the semifinals. Her dad died in May 2014. After a year away, she went back to practice. A bowl that fell got caught under her wheel. She went down hard and broke her arm. Ten more months gone.
She came back in 2015. She is booked at 60-80 halftime shows each year with a contract fee of $6,765 for each five minute performance. You do the math. Then July 2025 Krystal fell at a WNBA game and fractured her wrist requiring surgery. By November she was back at an NBA halftime in Chicago.
She’s not flawless. In spite of her track record of dropped bowls and broken bones, she’s still in high demand. It’s not just Krystal. Pete Rose has more hits than anybody in baseball history. He also made more outs than anybody in baseball history. Babe Ruth hit 714 home runs. When he retired, he also held the record for most strikeouts. Michael Jordan said it himself in a Nike commercial. He missed more than 9,000 shots. He lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times he was trusted to take the game-winning shot, and missed.
The principle is winners lose more than losers lose. Why? Because winners show up more than losers show up. That’s Krystal Niu. After every dropped bowl she climbs back on the unicycle. The crowd isn’t cheering because she never falls. They’re cheering because she gets back on. The better story to tell yourself is, “I’ll drop a bowl sometimes. I’m getting back on anyway.”
Tell me a story of getting back on after a fall to fromchadsmith@gmail.com. Send someone a text and tell them, “Your misses don’t cancel your show.” You can get a free copy of my book, The Most Powerful Story in the World, by going to fromchad.gumroad.com. The transcript of this message and hundreds of others are always available at http://www.fromchad.com.
