Athletics Motivation Quotes

If you're waiting until you feel talented enough to make it, you'll never make it.

I honor you for every time this year you: got back up vibrated higher shined your light and loved and elevated beyond —the call of duty.

Athletes who are able to stay completely focused in pursuit of their dreams are the ones that are most likely to become champions.

If you want something as bad as you want to breathe, then you can do it.

The smell of the sweat is not sweet, but the fruit of the sweat is very sweet.

Every great athlete, artist and aspiring being has a great team to help them flourish and succeed - personally and professionally. Even the so-called 'solo star' has a strong supporting cast helping them shine, thrive and take flight.

Awake! arise! the hour is late! Angels are knocking at thy door! They are in haste and cannot wait, And once departed come no more. Awake! arise! the athlete's arm Loses its strength by too much rest; The fallow land, the untilled farm Produces only weeds at best.

Gillette--The best a man can get." I stared at the screen. What happened to me? I was meant to be one of those guys, vigorous and athletic and successful and, most of all, American. I was going to walk on the moon, be a movie star or a rock got or a comedian. I was going to have an amazing life and kids with Helen and die like Chaplin a thousand years from now in my Beverly Hills mansion surrounded by my adoring family, with the grieving world media standing by. Instead, I was just another show-business mediocrity. A drunk who shat his pants and ran for help. My life had been careless and selfish. Pleasure in the moment was my only thought, my solitary motivation. I had disappointed whoever had been foolish enough to love me, and left them scarred. I was a very long way from being the best a man can get.

Champions realise that defeat - and learning from it even more than from winning - is part of the path to mastery.

Learn like an amateur. Train like a champion. Fight like a warrior. Triumph like a conqueror.

Losing teaches you how to win; winning teaches you how not to lose.

If records refuse to be broken, shatter them.

A Star is always a star no matter what stage they are on or at

No wrong in aiming or applauding the win but always agnize one's efforts.

In business, sport, entertainment and beyond an idea is worth next to nothing. The energy, effort, passion, talent, tenacity, strategy, resilience and resourcefulness to see it through and make something of it is worth everything.

But problems are not to be feared. Problems are not curses. Problems are simply tough games for the athletes of the mind and true athletes always long to get a game going.

The more you practice the better you'll be, the harder you train the great in you they'll see.

Shatter your fears and you will shatter records.

Compete with yourself until the only one left to compete with is yourself.

You can’t buy motivation. You can’t obtain it from someone else. “Motivation is something nobody else can give you,” Joe DiMaggio said. “Others can help motivate you, but basically it must come from you, and it must be a constant desire to do your very best at all times and under any circumstances.

Being a person who pushes himself to his or her own limits in order to become as great as he or she can possibly be means being a person who is constantly faced with some kind of fear. May it be mental or physical, may you be an athlete or a writer, YOU are facing fear, every single day, by doing something your mind or body never did before. But by overcoming that fear you take one step higher on the ladder, and the goal is to take those steps every single day.

All the talk of bullying and alienation provided an easy motive. Forty-eight hours after the massacre, USA Today pulled the threads together in a stunning cover story that fused the myths of jock-hunting, bully-revenge, and the TCM. “Students are beginning to describe how a long-simmering rivalry between the sullen members of their clique [the TCM] and the school’s athletes escalated and ultimately exploded in this week’s deadly violence,” it said. It described tension the previous spring, including daily fistfights. The details were accurate, the conclusions wrong. Most of the media followed. It was accepted as fact.

Many think that the mark of a great champion is the nature and margin of their victories and the peaks they scale and reach. That’s only part of it. The mark of the greatest of champions is how they react and respond to defeat. That is when they become enshrined in our hearts and minds – as they rise again and into the immortal pages of history.

Step up your game and success will step up to you.

Be extremely careful following the Masses. Much of the time the "M" is silent.

How you complete something speaks volumes. These moments and choices are the blocks for your next endeavor's foundation.

A good Athlete may not be a good Coach, likewise, a good Coach may not be a good Athlete

What you practice in private you will be rewarded for in public.

The activity which seems unthinkable today can become your warm-up in the future!

You cannot break records without breaking fear first.

One who sets records is great. One who breaks records is extraordinary. One who shatters records is exceptional.

an empathic and patient listener, coaxing each of us through the maze of our feelings, separating out our weapons from our wounds. He cautioned us when we got too lawyerly and posited careful questions intended to get us to think hard about why we felt the way we felt. Slowly, over hours of talking, the knot began to loosen. Each time Barack and I left his office, we felt a bit more connected. I began to see that there were ways I could be happier and that they didn’t necessarily need to come from Barack’s quitting politics in order to take some nine-to-six foundation job. (If anything, our counseling sessions had shown me that this was an unrealistic expectation.) I began to see how I’d been stoking the most negative parts of myself, caught up in the notion that everything was unfair and then assiduously, like a Harvard-trained lawyer, collecting evidence to feed that hypothesis. I now tried out a new hypothesis: It was possible that I was more in charge of my happiness than I was allowing myself to be. I was too busy resenting Barack for managing to fit workouts into his schedule, for example, to even begin figuring out how to exercise regularly myself. I spent so much energy stewing over whether or not he’d make it home for dinner that dinners, with or without him, were no longer fun. This was my pivot point, my moment of self-arrest. Like a climber about to slip off an icy peak, I drove my ax into the ground. That isn’t to say that Barack didn’t make his own adjustments—counseling helped him to see the gaps in how we communicated, and he worked to be better at it—but I made mine, and they helped me, which then helped us. For starters, I recommitted myself to being healthy. Barack and I belonged to the same gym, run by a jovial and motivating athletic trainer named Cornell McClellan. I’d worked out with Cornell for a couple of years, but having children had changed my regular routine. My fix for this came in the form of my ever-giving mother, who still worked full-time but volunteered to start coming over to our house at 4:45 in the morning several days a week so that I could run out to Cornell’s and join a girlfriend for a 5:00 a.m. workout and then be home by 6:30 to get the girls up and ready for their days. This new regimen changed everything: Calmness and strength, two things I feared I was losing, were now back. When it came to the home-for-dinner dilemma, I installed new boundaries, ones that worked better for me and the girls. We made our schedule and stuck to it. Dinner each night was at 6:30. Baths were at 7:00, followed by books, cuddling, and lights-out at 8:00 sharp. The routine was ironclad, which put the weight of responsibility on Barack to either make it on time or not. For me, this made so much more sense than holding off dinner or having the girls wait up sleepily for a hug. It went back to my wishes for them to grow up strong and centered and also unaccommodating to any form of old-school patriarchy: I didn’t want them ever to believe that life began when the man of the house arrived home. We didn’t wait for Dad. It was his job now to catch up with

by imposing on us certain conditions of life, our social identities can strongly affect things as important as our performances in the classroom and on standardized tests, our memory capacity, our athletic performance, the pressure we feel to prove ourselves, even the comfort level we have with people of different groups—all things we typically think of as being determined by individual talents, motivations, and preferences.

The sole reason I work out like I do isn’t to prepare for and win ultra races. I don’t have an athletic motive at all. It’s to prepare my mind for life itself. Life will always be the most grueling endurance sport, and when you train hard, get uncomfortable, and callous your mind, you will become a more versatile competitor, trained to find a way forward no matter what.

Don’t waste the rest of your time here worrying about other people—unless it affects the common good. It will keep you from doing anything useful. You’ll be too preoccupied with what so-and-so is doing, and why, and what they’re saying, and what they’re thinking, and what they’re up to, and all the other things that throw you off and keep you from focusing on your own mind. You need to avoid certain things in your train of thought: everything random, everything irrelevant. And certainly everything self-important or malicious. You need to get used to winnowing your thoughts, so that if someone says, “What are you thinking about?” you can respond at once (and truthfully) that you are thinking this or thinking that. And it would be obvious at once from your answer that your thoughts were straightforward and considerate ones—the thoughts of an unselfish person, one unconcerned with pleasure and with sensual indulgence generally, with squabbling, with slander and envy, or anything else you’d be ashamed to be caught thinking. Someone like that—someone who refuses to put off joining the elect—is a kind of priest, a servant of the gods, in touch with what is within him and what keeps a person undefiled by pleasures, invulnerable to any pain, untouched by arrogance, unaffected by meanness, an athlete in the greatest of all contests—the struggle not to be overwhelmed by anything that happens. With what leaves us dyed indelibly by justice, welcoming wholeheartedly whatever comes—whatever we’re assigned—not worrying too often, or with any selfish motive, about what other people say. Or do, or think. He does only what is his to do, and considers constantly what the world has in store for him—doing his best, and trusting that all is for the best. For we carry our fate with us—and it carries us. He keeps in mind that all rational things are related, and that to care for all human beings is part of being human. Which doesn’t mean we have to share their opinions. We should listen only to those whose lives conform to nature. And the others? He bears in mind what sort of people they are—both at home and abroad, by night as well as day—and who they spend their time with. And he cares nothing for their praise—men who can’t even meet their own standards.

My approach to training echoed how I climbed. The romance of climbing didn’t interest me. I didn’t seek harps and wings. I heard no opera up there. Instead, my mountains had teeth. The jagged edge we walked up there dragged itself across my throat, and the throats of my friends and peers. I took the mountains’ indifference to life as aggression, and fought back. I armored myself against that indifference; with training, with thinking, with attitude. I trained with friends who shared a similar approach. Our mantra was dark, but it motivated us. When we ran we breathed in rhythm—no matter the speed—and that beat had words: “They all died.” We inhaled and exhaled the great alpine epics—like the tragedy that befell Walter Bonatti’s party on the Freney Pillar—to push ourselves to a place where we would never come up short, physically. The consequences of falling short made training important. I realized early that controlling the things that I could control gave me greater freedom to address the things that I could not control. And the mountains offered those in spades.

When I went back and compared motivation styles to performance improvement over each athlete’s career, one factor stood out. Those who scored high in a particular type of extrinsic motivation called external regulation had lower improvement rates. External regulation is defined as when “the sport is performed not for fun but to obtain rewards (e.g., praise) or to avoid negative consequences (e.g., criticisms from parents).” The five highest-ranked athletes in external regulation were five athletes who showed the least amount of improvement.

Someone like that—someone who refuses to put off joining the elect—is a kind of priest, a servant of the gods, in touch with what is within him and what keeps a person undefiled by pleasures, invulnerable to any pain, untouched by arrogance, unaffected by meanness, an athlete in the greatest of all contests—the struggle not to be overwhelmed by anything that happens. With what leaves us dyed indelibly by justice, welcoming wholeheartedly whatever comes— whatever we’re assigned—not worrying too often, or with any selfish motive, about what other people say. Or do, or think.

Your thoughts, beliefs, and assumptions drive everything in your life and career. People who operate on a high level of creativity and mastery are rigorous about mental awareness and preparation. Top athletes, fighters, artists, writers, businesspeople, and scientists use different methods to stay clear, focused, motivated, and productive. Not only are precise and motivating thoughts critical to maintaining momentum toward big goals, but the ability to look at things from new and critical perspectives is a fundamental skill in creating a diverse, interesting, and integrated body of work.

Whatever the motives out of which they were established, the old WASP admissions criteria actually meant something. Athletics were thought to build character - courage and selflessness and team spirit. The arts embodied an ideal of culture. Service was designed to foster a public-minded ethos in our future leaders. Leadership itself was understood to be a form of duty. Now it's all become a kind of rain dance that is handed down from generation to generation, an empty set of rituals known only to propitiate the gods. Kids do them because they know that they're supposed to, not because they, or anybody else, actually believes in them.

But trivial as are the topics they are not utterly without a connecting thread of motive. As the reader's eye strays, with hearty relief, from these pages, it probably alights on something, a bed-post or a lamp-post, a window blind or a wall. It is a thousand to one that the reader is looking at something that he has never seen: that is, never realised. He could not write an essay on such a post or wall: he does not know what the post or wall mean. He could not even write the synopsis of an essay; as "The Bed-Post; Its Significance—Security Essential to Idea of Sleep—Night Felt as Infinite—Need of Monumental Architecture," and so on. He could not sketch in outline his theoretic attitude towards window-blinds, even in the form of a summary. "The Window-Blind—Its Analogy to the Curtain and Veil—Is Modesty Natural?—Worship of and Avoidance of the Sun, etc., etc." None of us think enough of these things on which the eye rests. But don't let us let the eye rest. Why should the eye be so lazy? Let us exercise the eye until it learns to see startling facts that run across the landscape as plain as a painted fence. Let us be ocular athletes. Let us learn to write essays on a stray cat or a coloured cloud. I have attempted some such thing in what follows; but anyone else may do it better, if anyone else will only try.

The young athlete would be well advised to keep athletics in its place. Be passionately involved in the activity, exert yourself to succeed. Gain from competing the massive satisfaction that competing offers. Yet be a well-rounded, sensitive, literate human being. It is not the job of athletics to produce people who know or care for nothing except athletics. Keep it in its place, behind your family, your concern for the general life of the world, and your education. There are athletes and coaches who prepare to act as if athletics were life; it is not. It is but a corner—and a rich one—of life which will contribute immensely to the holistic development of the individual. -- Joe I. Vigil

The expectation of a reward or evaluation, even a positive evaluation, squelched creativity. She calls this phenomenon the intrinsic theory of motivation. Stated simply: “People will be most creative when they feel motivated primarily by interest, enjoyment, satisfaction, and the challenge of the work itself—not by external pressures.” She warns that many schools and corporations, by placing such emphasis on rewards and evaluation, are inadvertently suppressing creativity. It’s a compelling theory, and one that, intuitively, makes sense. Who hasn’t felt creatively liberated writing in a private diary or doodling in a notebook, knowing no one will ever see these zany scribbles? The theory, though, doesn’t always jibe with the real world. If we are only motivated by the sheer joy of an activity, why do athletes perform better in the heat of competition rather than during training sessions? Why did Mozart abandon works in progress because his

Do you consider yourself athletic? How would you rate yourself, say, as a swimmer? Average, below average, maybe a little above average? So-so? Terrible? Well, I’ve got news for you: whether you know it or not, you are a world-class super-Olympic gold medal swimmer. I’m not kidding. You know how I know that? Because I took anatomy, physiology, bacteriology, and chemistry in college, as part of my science minor. And here’s what I learned: we all start out the same way, as tiny sperm cells. In order for you to be born, assuming your daddy had an average sperm count, you had to have out-swum some 200,000 other sperm. And it was uphill all the way. Now, I do not know what motivated you, but that little tail was wiggling like mad, and you were screaming, “Out of my way! Out of my way! I want to teach school! I want to dance! I want to be in real estate! I want to be a journalist!” or whatever it was you were screaming at the top of your little sperm voice.

What motivates Olympic athletes to train for years for one event—in some cases, for just seconds of actual competition? It’s the same thing that kept my friend Pete nosing around old bookstores for years. It’s the same thing that makes a person venture out of a comfortable job to start a new business. We see it in the artist who spends day after day in a studio chipping away at a block of stone. Look closely and you’ll find it in the shopper who passes up the good deal in search of the best deal. It’s one of the things that makes us most human. We consciously pursue what we value. It’s not simply a matter of being driven by biology or genetics or environmental conditioning to satisfy instinctive cravings. Rather, we perceive something, prize it at a certain value, then pursue it according to that assigned value because we were created that way. This ability to perceive, prize, and pursue is part of our essential humanness, and it’s the essence of ambition.

Brunelleschi’s successor as a theorist of linear perspective was another of the towering Renaissance polymaths, Leon Battista Alberti (1404 –1472), who refined many of Brunelleschi’s experiments and extended his discoveries about perspective. An artist, architect, engineer, and writer, Alberti was like Leonardo in many ways: both were illegitimate sons of prosperous fathers, athletic and good-looking, never-married, and fascinated by everything from math to art. One difference is that Alberti’s illegitimacy did not prevent him from being given a classical education. His father helped him get a dispensation from the Church laws barring illegitimate children from taking holy orders or holding ecclesiastical offices, and he studied law at Bologna, was ordained as a priest, and became a writer for the pope. During his early thirties, Alberti wrote his masterpiece analyzing painting and perspective, On Painting, the Italian edition of which was dedicated to Brunelleschi. Alberti had an engineer’s instinct for collaboration and, like Leonardo, was “a lover of friendship” and “open-hearted,” according to the scholar Anthony Grafton. He also honed the skills of courtiership. Interested in every art and technology, he would grill people from all walks of life, from cobblers to university scholars, to learn their secrets. In other words, he was much like Leonardo, except in one respect: Leonardo was not strongly motivated by the goal of furthering human knowledge by openly disseminating and publishing his findings; Alberti, on the other hand, was dedicated to sharing his work, gathering a community of intellectual colleagues who could build on each other’s discoveries, and promoting open discussion and publication as a way to advance the accumulation of learning. A maestro of collaborative practices, he believed, according to Grafton, in “discourse in the public sphere.” When Leonardo was a teenager in Florence, Alberti was in his sixties and spending much of his time in Rome, so it is unlikely they spent time together. Alberti was a major influence nonetheless.

I've defined myself, privately and abstractly, by my brief, intense years as an athlete, a swimmer. I practiced five or six hours a day, six days a week, eating and sleeping as much as possible in between. Weekends were spent either training or competing. I wasn't the best; I was relatively fast. I trained, ate, traveled, and showered with the best in the country, but wasn't the best; I was pretty good. I liked how hard swimming at that level was- that I could do something difficult and unusual. Liked knowing my discipline would be recognized, respected, that I might not be able to say the right things or fit in, but I could do something well. I wanted to believe that I was talented; being fast was proof. Though I loved racing, the idea of fastest, of number one, of the Olympics, didn't motivate me. I still dream of practice, of races, coaches and blurry competitors. I'm drawn to swimming pools, all swimming pools, no matter how small or murky. When I swim now, I step into the water as though absentmindedly touching a scar. My recreational laps are phantoms of my competitive races

Cohen continued to struggle with his own well-being. Even though he had achieved his life’s dream of running his own firm, he was still unhappy, and he had become dependent on a psychiatrist named Ari Kiev to help him manage his moods. In addition to treating depression, Kiev’s other area of expertise was success and how to achieve it. He had worked as a psychiatrist and coach with Olympic basketball players and rowers trying to improve their performance and overcome their fear of failure. His background building athletic champions appealed to Cohen’s unrelenting need to dominate in every transaction he entered into, and he started asking Kiev to spend entire days at SAC’s offices, tending to his staff. Kiev was tall, with a bushy mustache and a portly midsection, and he would often appear silently at a trader’s side and ask him how he was feeling. Sometimes the trader would be so startled to see Kiev there he’d practically jump out of his seat. Cohen asked Kiev to give motivational speeches to his employees, to help them get over their anxieties about losing money. Basically, Kiev was there to teach them to be ruthless. Once a week, after the market closed, Cohen’s traders would gather in a conference room and Kiev would lead them through group therapy sessions focused on how to make them more comfortable with risk. Kiev had them talk about their trades and try to understand why some had gone well and others hadn’t. “Are you really motivated to make as much money as you can? This guy’s going to help you become a real killer at it,” was how one skeptical staff member remembered Kiev being pitched to them. Kiev’s work with Olympians had led him to believe that the thing that blocked most people was fear. You might have two investors with the same amount of money: One was prepared to buy 250,000 shares of a stock they liked, while the other wasn’t. Why? Kiev believed that the reluctance was a form of anxiety—and that it could be overcome with proper treatment. Kiev would ask the traders to close their eyes and visualize themselves making trades and generating profits. “Surrendering to the moment” and “speaking the truth” were some of his favorite phrases. “Why weren’t you bigger in the trades that worked? What did you do right?” he’d ask. “Being preoccupied with not losing interferes with winning,” he would say. “Trading not to lose is not a good strategy. You need to trade to win.” Many of the traders hated the group therapy sessions. Some considered Kiev a fraud. “Ari was very aggressive,” said one. “He liked money.” Patricia, Cohen’s first wife, was suspicious of Kiev’s motives and believed that he was using his sessions with Cohen to find stock tips. From Kiev’s perspective, he found the perfect client in Cohen, a patient with unlimited resources who could pay enormous fees and whose reputation as one of the best traders on Wall Street could help Kiev realize his own goal of becoming a bestselling author. Being able to say that you were the

You need to avoid certain things in your train of thought: everything random, everything irrelevant. And certainly everything self-important or malicious. You need to get used to winnowing your thoughts, so that if someone says, “What are you thinking about?” you can respond at once (and truthfully) that you are thinking this or thinking that. And it would be obvious at once from your answer that your thoughts were straightforward and considerate ones—the thoughts of an unselfish person, one unconcerned with pleasure and with sensual indulgence generally, with squabbling, with slander and envy, or anything else you’d be ashamed to be caught thinking. Someone like that—someone who refuses to put off joining the elect—is a kind of priest, a servant of the gods, in touch with what is within him and what keeps a person undefiled by pleasures, invulnerable to any pain, untouched by arrogance, unaffected by meanness, an athlete in the greatest of all contests—the struggle not to be overwhelmed by anything that happens. With what leaves us dyed indelibly by justice, welcoming wholeheartedly whatever comes—whatever we’re assigned—not worrying too often, or with any selfish motive, about what other people say. Or do, or think. He does only what is his to do, and considers constantly what the world has in store for him—doing his best, and trusting that all is for the best. For we carry our fate with us—and it carries us. He keeps in mind that all rational things are related, and that to care for all human beings is part of being human.

Another such irritating hypocrisy is the oligarchic attitude towards mendicity as against organized charity. Here again, as in the case of cleanliness and of athletics, the attitude would be perfectly human and intelligible if it were not maintained as a merit. Just as the obvious thing about soap is that it is a convenience, so the obvious thing about beggars is that they are an inconvenience. The rich would deserve very little blame if they simply said that they never dealt directly with beggars, because in modern urban civilization it is impossible to deal directly with beggars; or if not impossible, at least very difficult. But these people do not refuse money to beggars on the ground that such charity is difficult. They refuse it on the grossly hypocritical ground that such charity is easy. They say, with the most grotesque gravity, "Anyone can put his hand in his pocket and give a poor man a penny; but we, philanthropists, go home and brood and travail over the poor man's troubles until we have discovered exactly what jail, reformatory, workhouse, or lunatic asylum it will really be best for him to go to." This is all sheer lying. They do not brood about the man when they get home, and if they did it would not alter the original fact that their motive for discouraging beggars is the perfectly rational one that beggars are a bother. A man may easily be forgiven for not doing this or that incidental act of charity, especially when the question is as genuinely difficult as is the case of mendicity. But there is something quite pestilently Pecksniffian about shrinking from a hard task on the plea that it is not hard enough. If any man will really try talking to the ten beggars who come to his door he will soon find out whether it is really so much easier than the labor of writing a check for a hospital.

Men have a built-in drive to succeed. The waffle boxes in which a man is most likely to succeed are the boxes he will spend the most time in. When a man knows he can do something well—that’s where he’ll expend his energies. Other boxes—the ones in which he’s less successful—are the ones where he’ll spend the least time and energy. A man who is highly productive at work will enjoy going to work and may even spend too much time there. A man who is adept at athletic competition wants all of it he can fit into his schedule. A man who reads well and thinks clearly is naturally motivated to extend his education. A man who is skilled at making things with his hands will always have a project going. Unfortunately, this drive to succeed has a dark side. If a man figures out he’s very good at unproductive things, he will be just as attracted to them as he is to his positive pursuits. A man who realizes he’s good at being lazy will fill his schedule with idleness. A man who constantly hears from others that he’s an underachiever will commit himself to underachieve for the rest of his life. If crudeness comes easily and

Once an athlete feels his coach does not believe in him resentment develops and everyone loses at that point.

Rather than comparing ourselves with normal people, we’ll gain more insight into our needs by seeing what active, fit, and highly motivated older humans are capable of doing. There aren’t as many of these people—after all, they aren’t normal—but they often reveal what is possible at the highest levels of athletic performance.

It was not the money that was my main motive; it was the challenge and the thrill where I got my kicks. Armed robbery to me was like a sport. To take on an armored vehicle with two armed security guards—it was like an athlete attending the Olympic Games.

Evolved to Run Walking long distances is fundamental to being a hunter-gatherer, but people sometimes have to run. One powerful motivation is to sprint to a tree or some other refuge when being chased by a predator. Although you only have to run faster than the next fellow when a lion chases you, bipedal humans are comparatively slow. The world’s fastest humans can run at 37 kilometers (23 miles) per hour for about ten to twenty seconds, whereas an average lion can run at least twice as fast for approximately four minutes. Like us, early Homo must have been pathetic sprinters whose terrified dashes were too often ineffective. However, there is plentiful evidence that by the time of H. erectus our ancestors had evolved exceptional abilities to run long distances at moderate speeds in hot conditions. The adaptations underlying these abilities helped transform the human body in crucial ways and explain why humans, even amateur athletes, are among the best long-distance runners in the mammalian world. Today, humans run long distances to stay fit, commute, or just have fun, but the struggle to get meat underlies the origins of endurance running. To appreciate this inference, try to imagine what it was like for the first humans to hunt or scavenge 2 million years ago. Most carnivores kill using a combination of speed and strength. Large predators, such as lions and leopards, either chase or pounce on their prey and then dispatch it with lethal force. These dangerous carnivores can run as fast as 70 kilometers (43 miles) per hour, and they have terrifying natural weapons: daggerlike fangs, razor-sharp claws, and heavy paws to help them maim and kill. Hunters

I am not a cheerleader nor do I celebrate mediocrity.  Neither should you.  You are your own motivator.  Expect more from yourself.  I laid out my plan, what I do to improve.  Now all it takes is you to apply yourself and your blood, sweat, and vomit just like any other athlete who you ever looked up to has.  No one will do it for you and you will not improve just because you think you deserve it.  No worthy accomplishment is easy.  Make a choice and make a stand that there are no more excuses for not getting better.  Train in the heat, cold, rain or whatever the conditions may be.  Take responsibility for your actions.  If you fail, it is your fault.  If you succeed then it is because you did it.  Take pride in that.  Earn it.

Motivational quotes and speeches are not about becoming an astronaut, brain surgeon, 1st place athlete or making a certain amount of money. It's about excitement, excitement from realising the absurdity of existence and appreciating that you're part of it. And then inspiring others to follow, until we've all found that appreciation and the inner peace that comes with it.

Listening to your body does not imply a lack of grit but a willingness to honor true physical limits. Kenyan runners have a reputation for listening to their bodies but certainly do not take it easy on themselves; they are among the world’s most gifted and accomplished athletes.

You can't have a Champion Athlete without great competitors pushing them away.

The limits of self-control present a paradox: We cannot control everything, and yet the only way to increase our self-control is to stretch our limits. Like a muscle, our willpower follows the rule of“Use it or lose it.” If we try to save our energy by becoming willpower coach potatoes, we will lose the strength we have. But if we try to run a willpower marathon every day, we set ourselves up for total collapse. Our challenge is to train like an intelligent athlete, pushing our limits but also pacing ourselves. And while we can find strength in our motivation when we feel weak, we can also look for ways to help our tired selves make good choices.

(I would tell my athletes) you're here; your parents are sacrificing to send you to school. Don't let them down. Work a little harder. Be accountable. Be an impact person for your team. Help your teammates out. You know, they're not machines; they're going to have a bad every now and then. -- Joe I. Vigil

Even supermotivated people who’re working to exhaustion may not be doing deliberate practice. For instance, when a Japanese rowing team invited Olympic gold medalist Mads Rasmussen to come visit, he was shocked at how many hours of practice their athletes were logging. It’s not hours of brute-force exhaustion you’re after, he told them. It’s high-quality, thoughtful training goals pursued, just as Ericsson’s research has shown, for just a few hours a day, tops. Noa Kageyama, a performance psychologist on the faculty of the Juilliard School of Music, says he’s been playing the violin since he was two but didn’t really start practicing deliberately until he was twenty-two. Why not? There was no lack of motivation—at one point, young Noa was taking lessons with four different teachers and, literally, commuting to three different cities to work with them all. Really, the problem was just that Noa didn’t know better. Once he discovered there was an actual science of practice—an approach that would improve his skills more efficiently—both the quality of his practice and his satisfaction with his progress skyrocketed. He’s now devoted himself to sharing that knowledge with other musicians.

The most successful athletes are self-motivated. “The most important thing is to love your sport,” said Peggy Fleming, the former Olympic figure-skating champion. “Never do it to please someone else—it has to be yours. That is all that will justify the hard work needed to achieve success.

Cus D’Amato, who trained Mike Tyson, said emotions, particularly anger, are like fire. They can cook your food and keep you warm, or they can burn your house down. Many great athletes use anger in a positive way. Anger motivates them. Anger steels their resolve. It is much better to become angry than to become afraid.

You’re going to experience adversity; you’re going to have days that are incredibly challenging, even scary. There are going to be days that cause you to question your motives and ability. It’s important to realize that the toughest days are your best days, because they have the potential to force the most adaptation—mentally, as well as physically.

Dahmer’s preferences, when it came to the male physique, were slender and lean, yet athletic and slightly but not overtly muscular young men. Because so many of Dahmer’s victims were African American or, for the most part, men of color, it was at first presumed that Dahmer hated non-Caucasians. Dahmer denied that any of the murders were racially motivated, and said that what led him to approach the men he did was whether or not he was attracted to them; but, even more importantly, that they met the physical requirements that stimulated him the most. Investigating detectives found no indications that Dahmer had problems with people of color. Dahmer emerged as truthful as far as the detectives determined, yet not necessarily always immediately forthcoming.

It has been proven time and again that a 5:1 ratio of positive to negative comments provides children with the best education and motivation to be successful. The coach that is constantly pointing out the negative, and never providing praise when it has been earned, is dangerous for your child and will lead to their emotional breakdown.

All those people who have achieved greatness in their life have one thing in common as a personality trait within them that is "Discipline". They follow a routine and they are constantly striving towards excellence. If you have a million-dollar dream but lacks discipline, your dream will be your dream only it will not become a reality. Great people have mastered discipline in their life and without discipline, they are just people without greatness.

Life is given to all of us and everything that you want to become depends now on your preparation, hard work, and dedication. Only if you are willing to put yourself in process of grinding, hustle, and hard work then there will be a point in life where the opportunity KNOCKS on your door to give you a chance. A chance you always waited for and an opportunity you always wanted to have for yourself so you take yourself on to the path of greatness. You are close to success and succeeding in yourself only when you take charge, take action and make decisions for yourself. No one in this world has become great just by doing average things and being average. The people who go the extra mile, extra effort, and that extra one thing in their life makes them successful and lets them avail themselves of the opportunity that knocks on the door. If you are blind to yourself then you can't see opportunities. You are one opportunity away from success and the life you are dreaming but the question is, are you prepared?

Ralph Brown coached high school football at St. Margaret’s Episcopal School in San Juan Capistrano, California. He is an accomplished football player who has won various championships and awards. He proudly served as a sports broadcaster for Fox Sports West Prenzone for 3 years, and he was a sports analyst for the ABC affiliate in Lincoln Nebraska, covering Husker Football. Ralph currently serves as a mentor and motivational speaker to young athletes.

One of its primary roles is in motivation and reward. You probably know of dopamine because of its reputation as the brain’s pleasure juice. When you feel pleasure, you are getting squirted on by dopamine.

A great way to open the dopamine floodgate is to watch and listen to inspirational stuff about the activity you are prone to quitting at. Unlike meme-turds, videos are a more immersive sensory experience, and virtually all capitalize on the dopaminergic power of music. Music has the ability to not just arouse pleasurable feelings but also increase craving or wanting—two critical elements of sports motivation.

If your child is going to be a high performer, he needs control over his athletic experience. The sport must be his choice, his performance must be based upon his efforts and motivation, and his development must be a result of his failures and successes. As a result, the outcome of his achievement belongs to him and him alone.

The best coaches have a growth mindset and know how to motivate, communicate, and inspire their athletes to achieve more than they ever would on their own. They instill a love of the game, a passion for achievement, and model the character and values that they preach to their athletes. They know when a kid needs a hug and when he needs a metaphoric kick in the rear. All high performers can point to various coaches as major contributors in their ultimate success, and most lifelong athletes can point to a coach who taught them to love sport and to be active for life.

Careful consideration of reward effects reported in 128 experiments lead to the conclusion that tangible rewards tend to have a substantially negative effect on intrinsic motivation,” they determined. “When institutions—families, schools, businesses, and athletic teams, for example—focus on the short-term and opt for controlling people’s behavior,” they do considerable long-term damage.3

There are also millions of satisfied users worldwide, from youngsters to seniors, including: top athletes such as Shaquille O’Neal and Trace Armstrong; celebrities such as Madonna and Clint Eastwood; many health professionals, including chiropractors, physical therapy centers, and Dr. Norman Shealy (renowned pain specialist and holistic doctor); motivational experts such as Tony Robbins; and sports franchises such as the Denver Broncos and the Miami Dolphins.

The Metaphor That Stuck In 1996, the Summer Olympic Games were held in my home city of Atlanta. As I watched athletes from all over the world perform in their respective events, I remember wondering what motivated them to compete at the highest levels. On the surface, it seemed logical to assume that these world-class athletes were driven by all the positive rewards that would go to the champion—fame, admiration, and of course, the gold medal. After training for most of their lives, who wouldn’t want to experience “the thrill of victory”? But as I watched the games unfold, it became obvious that while some athletes were motivated by positive rewards, many others were trying to avoid “the agony of defeat.” Rather than think about all the accolades that would come from success, some athletes were motivated to run even faster, and jump even higher, because they were trying to avoid an undesirable outcome. Carl Lewis, arguably one of the greatest track and field athletes of all time, and nine-time Olympic gold medalist, was an excellent example of this. After his last event in Atlanta, when he won the gold medal on his final attempt in the long jump, the sportscaster asked, “Mr. Lewis, what were you thinking about just before you jumped?” As it turned out, Carl Lewis wasn’t thinking about medals, money, or having his picture on a box of Wheaties. Instead, he said his primary motivation was that his family was in the stadium and he didn’t want to disappoint them by losing his final Olympic event.

Nothing sustains motivation better than belonging to the tribe. It transforms a personal quest into a shared one. Previously, you were on your own. Your identity was singular. You are a reader. You are a musician. You are an athlete. When you join a book club or a band or a cycling group, your identity becomes linked to those around you. Growth and change is no longer an individual pursuit. We are readers. We are musicians. We are cyclists. The shared identity begins to reinforce your personal identity. This is why remaining part of a group after achieving a goal is crucial to maintaining your habits. It’s friendship and community that embed a new identity and help behaviors last over the long run.

Today, the ultra-endurance world—in which competitors push their bodies to the limits of what human physiology can withstand—continues to provide a window into both how and why we go on. In The Lure of Long Distances, Robin Harvie notes that the word athlete derives from a Greek word for “I struggle, I suffer.” Ultra-endurance athletes have a relationship to suffering that separates them from most recreational exercisers and that often resembles the wisdom of spiritual traditions. For many, the motivation is not just to complete fantastic feats, but to explore what it means, as one athlete I spoke with puts it, to “suffer well.” Their experiences paint a portrait of how humans maintain hope and momentum in the darkest moments. We endure by taking it one step at a time, by making space for suffering and joy to coexist, and with the help of others.

I was a twenty-four-year-old, handicapped, thus-far-unemployable former athlete with a grade-nine education on an extended faux gap year who gave the occasional motivational speech. My biggest hobby was walking. But—I was beautiful.

In 2015, scientists from the Center for Space Medicine and Extreme Environments in Berlin followed athletes competing in the Yukon Arctic Ultra. They wanted to know: How does the human body cope in such a brutal context? When the researchers analyzed the hormones in the bloodstreams of the athletes, one hormone, irisin, was wildly elevated. Irisin is best known for its role in metabolism—it helps the body burn fat as fuel. But irisin also has powerful effects on the brain. Irisin stimulates the brain’s reward system, and the hormone may be a natural antidepressant. Lower levels are associated with an increased risk of depression, and elevated levels can boost motivation and enhance learning. Injecting the protein directly into the brains of mice—not something scientists are ready to try with humans—reduces behaviors associated with depression, including learned helplessness and immobility in the face of threats. Higher blood levels of irisin are also associated with superior cognitive functioning, and may even prevent neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s. The Yukon Arctic Ultra athletes entered the event with extraordinarily high blood levels of this hormone, far beyond levels seen in most humans. Over the course of the event, their irisin levels climbed higher. Even as their bodies fell victim to hypothermia and exhaustion, the athletes were bathing their brains in a chemical that preserves brain health and prevents depression. Why were their blood levels of irisin so elevated? The answer lies in both the nature of the event and what the athletes had to do to get there. Irisin has been dubbed the “exercise hormone,” and it is the best-known example of a myokine, a protein that is manufactured in your muscles and released into your bloodstream during physical activity. (Myo means muscle, and kine means “set into motion by.”) One of the greatest recent scientific breakthroughs in human biology is the realization that skeletal muscles act as an endocrine organ. Your muscles, like your adrenal and pituitary glands, secrete proteins that affect every system of your body. One of these proteins is irisin. Following a single treadmill workout, blood levels of irisin increase by 35 percent. The Yukon Arctic Ultra required up to fifteen hours a day of exercise. Muscle shivering—a form of muscle contraction—also triggers the release of irisin into the bloodstream. For the Yukon Arctic Ultra competitors, the combination of extreme environment and extreme exertion led to exceptionally high levels of this myokine.

But at the end of the day, you have to want it. Plain and simple. The ego doesn’t have to be destructive, and it doesn’t have to make you lose sight of the real reasons you do what you do. It doesn’t have to go to your head. But when push comes to shove, nothing motivates like winning does. I remembered that electricity. I still felt the young athlete inside me who thrived on winning. I’d gotten wiser over the years, and that wisdom had made me a more complete person, a better partner—but it also made me slower. There was no way around it. The more perspective I got, the more disconnected I became from the pure drive to win and dominate. Without that drive, the discomfort and pain that racing took didn’t seem worth it.

fairness has never being part of life, its a matter of accepting your own athletic event because its a matter of a day to end for us to be crowned winners from different disciplines.

While everyone has a unique way to get motivated and stay that way, all athletes thrive on competition, and that means beating someone else, not just setting a personal best … We all work harder, run faster, when we know someone is right on our heels …

Women have come a long way , since that day on September 7th 1968 , when they burnt myriad symbolic feminine products , including mops and bras , as a mark of protest . The women wanted to call world-wide attention to women's rights and women's liberation ! Today women are making headlines each and every day as the makers and creators of positive change in all walks of life . Be it as doctors , pilots , engineers , artists , writers , musicians, innovators, teachers , astronauts , researchers, managers , private or government employees , designers , scientists , dancers, singers, entrepreneurs , architects , bus-drivers , nurses , chefs , actors, athletes , politicians , or home-makers , women have been and are continuing to prove themselves that they are equal to or better than men in all walks of life ! A big 'Salute ' to all the women in the world !

Ultimately, it's what you are on the inside that gets you through a marathon. My constant motivation is the knowledge that ‘There will be a day when you can no longer do this. Today is NOT that day.’ (This is what I have written on the back of my race shirt.) So, if you are the type of person who surrenders easily, or does not commit to the training, or does not respect the distance, you will likely fail. Try a different sport. Maybe skydiving. It's hard to un-commit to that once you've jumped out of the plane. Notice something here. I have not mentioned anything about speed. Too many people put way too much emphasis on a marathon finisher's time. You can NOT judge a runner's effort based on their finishing time. One of my best friends ran the Detroit Marathon last weekend. She has stage 4 cancer, and finished the race in the back of the pack. But no one will ever convince me she is not an athlete, or that her effort was any less than an elite runner. Speed is relative. Distance is absolute.

Let’s think more about the goal of building internal drive in our students, which is part of our fourth goal. You may know that there has been a recent backlash against the practice of rewarding children for every good turn, and for the now-pervasive practice of giving every child a participation trophy. Motivation researchers have long found that offering rewards for a job well done (or just a job done at all) often has the ironic effect of decreasing students’ internal motivation to perform that job (Deci, Koestner & Ryan, 2001). This is similar to what happens to professional athletes when they start making money to play, and they find that the passion and drive for the game that they felt in high school and college begin to melt away. When an individual gets rewarded for an action, that individual starts focusing more on the reward than on the natural pleasure that the action may bring them. Remove the reward, and they are actually less likely to perform the action than they would have been if they’d never been rewarded at all. In contrast, research (Ryan & Deci, 2000) has also found that there are three factors that foster sustained internal drive in us humans: competence (“I can do this”); autonomy (“I have control over what happens here”); and relatedness (“I am connected to people around me”). Plan A is not a particularly good recipe for fostering these factors, especially when Plan A comes in the form of sticker charts, points, and other systems of rewards and consequences that attempt to manipulate a student’s behavior through mechanisms of power and control—the opposite of building a sense of autonomy. Plan C doesn’t do a good job of this either, because while reducing expectations has advantages such as helping avoid challenging behavior, it does not leave the student with a sense of accomplishment and thus competence. We think you will come to find that Plan B provides a great recipe to foster internal drive, by helping students learn the skills (competence) to solve problems independently (autonomy) through an empathic interpersonal process (relatedness).

One often reads of elite athletes for whom their chosen sport is their life. Not simply a livelihood or a hobby, but an obsession that informs every aspect of their mental, physical, emotional and philosophical being. I am similarly consumed with sex. Far from just the act of sex, it is its possibilities that dictate my thoughts and motives. Sex is the distillation of my own essence, it is the prism through which my life is processed.

Holmes and Collins (2001) found that visualizing success involves creating internal cognitive representations that mirror actual action. This helps release dopamine, improve motivation, and build confidence while encouraging improved execution when performing outside of one’s imagination. As such, visualizing success can be an incredibly useful tool for any athlete or performer wishing to maximize their potential within a competitive environment.

If you’re reading this book you are now equipped with the tools you need to find your own Okugake. Fuelled by an intrinsic form of motivation for self-discovery through self-discipline and armed with Stoic Sports Science, you too now understand The Art of Resilience, and like the pioneers and heroes mentioned in this book (from Captain Webb to Emil Zatopek), can embark on your own athletic adventure.

The one thing every athlete wants and needs is somebody who's as motivated and committed as she is. Someone who's willing to work hard along with her.

Jeremy George Lake Charles Healthy Living Sports Americans have adopted a healthy lifestyle that includes regular physical activity and good nutrition. While attention to healthy living has long been the norm in professional sports, the emphasis on nutrition has trickled down to high school. Jeremy George Lake Charles Coaches and sports administrators who educate their athletes about healthy lifestyles and choices are taking proactive steps to lead programs to excellence. Intramural sports programs offer team-oriented recreational fitness opportunities for service members to keep fit. The district sports motivators, formerly known as sports liaison officers, are charged with motivating people of all ages to exercise and become more physically active. Children who exercise are more likely to benefit from their abilities and keep active, rather than sit and get bored, which keeps them active, and children who regularly watch their parents exercise and exercise are also more likely to do so, their trainers say. Jeremy George Lake Charles Through sport, children learn important lessons from their lives, which enable them to maintain a healthy lifestyle as adults. Maintaining the body to exercise allows children to develop healthy habits that last a lifetime. You need to have knowledge of the body and ways to improve your condition in order to remain active. Administrators and coaches who emphasize the connection between healthy living and sporting expectations can help their students - athletes understand the importance of healthy choices. However, the best way to make better decisions is to exercise, especially in sports camps. Exercise can make you healthier and happier, whether you exercise or not.

Today, kids want to be famous athletes, movie stars, rock stars, beauty queens, or CEOs because that is where the fame, money, and prestige are. That is the reason it is so hard to motivate kids in school today. They know that professional success is no longer solely linked to academic success,

Recognizing Your Strengths The strengths you have inside your core. All the strengths represent the self in the world. The values you stand behind the virtues of living a fruitful life. Your values leading the path for you to be recognized by the deeds you do. The internal strengths that shine within you. The kindness you have, help bonding the world. The love you spread, nurtures the world. The forgiveness you have, begin the healing in the world. The humility inside you, representing you bringing out the best of you. The fairness you treat the world, you are showing a leader in the world. The love of learning you practice doing, you are bringing light in the world. The spirituality you practice, peace will follow. The talents you have matter in this world. Artistic gift of yours brings a colorful world. Literate gift of yours inspires the world. Engineering gift of yours advance the world. Athletic gift of yours impresses the world. All the strengths you have mean everything to us all. Recognizing your strengths a beginning of all. Working hard in nurturing your strengths you are helping us all. One day we all can ripe your fruit feeding us all.

Recognizing Your Strengths The strengths you have inside your core represent the self in the world through the internal strengths that shine within you showering the world. The values you stand behind the virtues of living a meaningful life. Your values lead the path for you to be recognized in the world by the action you take. The kindness you have helped bonding the world. The love you spread, nurturing the world. The forgiveness you have, begins healing in the world. The humility inside you representing you bringing out the best of you. The fairness you treat the world, you are showing a leader in the world. The love of learning you practice doing, you are bringing light in the world. The spirituality you practice, you are making peace in the world. The talents you have mattered in this world. Artistic gift of yours, creates a colorful world. Literary gift of yours, inspires the world. Engineering gift of yours, advance the world. Athletic gift of yours, impresses the world. All the strengths you have mean everything to us all. Recognizing your strengths is a beginning of all. No talent is too small or too rare that cannot be used in this intricate world to favor the world. Working hard in nurturing your strengths you are helping us all. One day we all can reap your fruit feeding us all.

There are varying motivations for becoming a professional athlete, from the money to the fame to the women to the drive to the competition. But on this night at this singular moment the Mets remembered what it was like to do something for pure love. They had accomplished the baseball impossible, and the result was euphoria.

The desire to compete and win is part of what motivates great athletes to play their best. But the negative thought (fear) of losing also drives them to pursue victory. The same is true concerning the bema. Paul saw himself as a competitor, determined to win. How awesome then must our God be that when we see Him, we will either desperately wish or jubilantly celebrate that our life had been devoted to Him?

For many years, psychologists believed that in any domain, success depended on talent first and motivation second. To groom world-class athletes and musicians, experts looked for people with the right raw abilities, and then sought to motivate them. If you want to find people who can dunk like Michael Jordan or play piano like Beethoven, it’s only natural to start by screening candidates for leaping ability and an ear for music. But in recent years, psychologists have come to believe that this approach may be backward.

The extension of the moral-historical perspective makes the meaning of the thesis of the athletic and somatic renaissance apparent. At the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, the phenomenon labelled the 'rebirth of antiquity' in the language regulations of art history entered a phase that fundamentally modified the motives of our identification with cultural relics from antiquity, even from the early classical period. Here, as we have seen, one finds a regression to a time in which the changing of life had not yet fallen under the command of life-denying asceticisms. This 'supra-epochal' time could just as easily be called the future, and what seems like a regression towards it could also be conceived of as a leap forwards.

You are a Hero. Be Heroic. Always.