What analogy are you using to define a problem? A common choice is a war or competitive analogy (e.g. the war on drugs, fighting cancer). War analogies are zero-sum: there can only be one winner, while there can be multiple losers. In many problems it is not the most appropriate model.
An example of this is the father character in the movie Little Miss Sunshine. Richard Hoover's failing motivational "Refuse to lose" program contains a contradiction within itself. He's claiming to sell the means for anyone to succeed, and yet by his very definition, there can only be one winner ("there are winners and there are losers. So the question is, are you a winner or a loser?"). You can see by the way he acts that he has narrowed the definition of anyone to include only those who he considers winners. This results in the meaningless statement "winners can be winners". His philosophy is self-nullifying.
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