Many years ago I remember supporting a team whose coach's pre-performance speech was "go out there and have fun". I flippantly piped up after observing the slightly deflated looks on the faces of my teammates "winning is the most fun you can have playing sport".
This, of course, is my opinion, it is not a fact but one that kept the value of doing something useful with life at that moment, rather than possibly wasting it on worry, aggressive play, and diminished performance.
Winning is a big part of playing a game, but it probably isn't as big a part as it has become in society.
Alfred Lord Tennyson famously wrote, "it is better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all". In the context of performance maybe we could tweak that to "It is better to have played and lost than to never have played at all".