Everyone cheers for the underdog. We cheer for the come-from-behind win. We cheer for the status to be disrupted, for the assumed victor to be usurped even before the crown is on their head.
I think we all cheer for underdogs because we cast them as the good guy. In most storytelling, the good guy is either wildly relatable or too eccentric to be understood. The relatable good guy faces seemingly insurmountable odds to obtain what they want from the struggle ahead, but chooses to ride into battle undeterred.
We relate to these characters and that choice because we cast ourselves in that role every day. We perceive our problems to be of such difficulty at first, and it takes the reckless choice of wading in to find out the water isn’t so deep.
Everyone is the good guy in their own story. So we secretly root for ourselves as the underdog. We are desperate for our comeback from a day, a month, or even years of defeat.
But comeback implies that we’re bound by a scoreboard or by the points against us. In reality, the only person keeping score is yourself, and you are the only person who cares as much as you do about what it reads.
You can wipe the tally clean whenever you want. You don’t have to overcome your past mistakes or failures to win the game.
All you have to do to get ahead is to win today.
