Less than a week after the presidential election, many Americans will feel like losers.

Some will have invested a heaping helping of hope into John McCain or Barack Obama, only to face four years under the opponent. There will be tears, denial, anger.

“I would argue there’s no starker dichotomy in American culture than in the idea of success and failure,” says Scott Sandage, author of “Born Losers: A History of Failure in America.”

The sting of failure ripples through all aspects of life, yet we’re quick to write it off, or deflect fault, or deploy banalities to soften the blow.

“There seems to be no way in American public life to talk about failure without resorting to cliches,” Sandage says. “Like, ‘You’re not a failure unless you quit,’ or ‘Failure is a learning opportunity.’ They’re kind of true, but they presume failure is always shameful. They presume failure is excusable only in the context of a continued all-out quest for success.”

Sandage’s book covers failed capitalist ventures from the past 200 years, a period during which Americans have broadened “failure” from a word that describes an outcome (as in, “a failed business”) to a word that describes an identity (“I am a failure”).

And it’s this redefining of failure that gives people trouble, says Edwin Locke, professor emeritus of leadership and motivation at the University of Maryland. Just because you fail doesn’t make you a failure.

“Some people may generalize a loss to dissatisfaction with themselves,” Locke says. “But that’s hugely mistaken, because not reaching a goal is limited to that goal. It’s not a condemnation of your life.”

Setting the bar

Locke has researched goal-setting theory, which says that specific, hard-to-achieve goals produce better performance. He has found through experiments that people who set higher goals accomplish more but are more likely to fail. People who are terrified of failure set their goals too low, so they “succeed” by substandard markers but fail in a broader sense. The trick is to unleash a healthy ambition, set specific goals, and remain resilient and adaptable in the face of failure, Locke says.

The drive to rebound is an indispensable part of recovering from a loss. It’s part of a simple equation for living successfully, regardless of failures, says Frank Farley, a professor of psychology at Temple University in Philadelphia. That equation: Self-knowledge plus motivation equal a successful life.

The trick is to be a constant student of your evolving strengths and weaknesses, and keep moving forward, whether or not you deserved to lose.

“If you lose in some venture, in any aspect of your life, learn from it,” Farley says. “That’s the motivation part. You learn about yourself, and you do something based on that. Some people when they lose – they blow it off, they don’t think more about it. They may be mad about it. But sensible people tend to reflect. ‘What happened there?’ Successful people get better at it. A loss, to them, is information.”

Life coach Ed Modell encourages a similar plan.

“Rather than tell a client to not be upset about losing, we ask them powerful questions,” says Modell, a past president of the D.C. chapter of the International Coach Federation. “Questions like ‘What have you learned about yourself from this experience?’ and ‘What do you need to do to get closure around this situation so you don’t keep thinking of yourself as a failure?'”

The only good way to lose is to be open to learning from it and avoid the temptation to leap to two extremes: dismissing a loss as meaningless or considering a loss the final judgment on a matter. Land somewhere in the middle, the experts say. A loss should be a source of wisdom.

Sandage offers the example of Al Gore, the man who spent his life working toward the presidency. Defeated in that arena, he rose again to become the spokesman for the issue of climate change, winning a Nobel Peace Prize.

“He reinvented himself,” Sandage says. “He found a new rationale for public service that was not about individual ambition.”