Odds Stacked Against You Quotes

To be a woman is to be warbound, knowing all the odds are stacked against you.

You are giving up instead of getting hard! Tell the truth about the real reasons for your limitations and you will turn that negativity, which is real, into jet fuel. Those odds stacked against you will become a damn runway!

Confrontation was a great idea – unless the odds were so stacked against you that it was pointless.

Our world is not safe. It is a toxic swamp populated by predators and parasites. The odds are stacked against us from the moment of conception. We survive only because we fight the elements, hunger, disease, each other. And, although civilization promises us safe harbor, that promise is a fairy tale. Only the storm is real. It comes for each of us. And we cannot win. We can only choose how we will suffer our defeat. We can meekly take our beatings, and die like lemmings, finding solace in the belief that we shall one day inherit the earth. Or, we can plunge into the chaos with eyes wide open, taking comfort instead from the bruises, scars, and broken bones which prove that we fought to live and die as gods.

to be a woman is to be warbound, k n o w i n g all the odds are stacked against you. - & never giving up in spite of it.

I believe in love,” I said, “I just don’t think it’s worth the risk. Like when you’re dating someone, you’re either going to end up marrying that person or having your heart broken. It’s a fifty-fifty chance. And even if you do marry them, there’s another fifty percent chance you’ll end up divorced. At what point do people realize the odds are always stacked against them?

Because you were right when you said that people can’t always give us what we want from them; that you can’t ask them to love you the way you want. No one can be blamed for that. And the odds had been stacked against us from the start: we had no manual, no one to show us the way. Not one example of a happy couple made up of boys. How were we supposed to know what to do? Did we even believe that we deserved to get away with happiness?

Mamaw and Papaw believed that hard work mattered more. They knew that life was a struggle, and though the odds were a bit longer for people like them, that fact didn’t excuse failure. “Never be like these fucking losers who think the deck is stacked against them,” my grandma often told me. “You can do anything you want to.” Their

The odds are stacked against you until you realize: You make the odds.

Living authentically in a world that takes every opportunity to squeeze you uncomfortably into a box of someone else's design...that is the most radical act of self love. Blossoming in an environment where the odds are stacked immeasurably against you is a beautiful act of defiance.

Faith in technique is the religion of the dangerous trades. To go up against an armed felon in a gunfight or to fight him in the dirt you have to believe perfect technique, hard training, will guarantee that you are invincible. This is not true, particularly in firefights. You can stack the odds in your favor, but if you get into enough gunfights, you will be killed in one.

Lessen the odds are stacked against you, Use Cosmic Ordering.

to be a woman is to be warbound, k n o w i n g all the odds are stacked against you.-& never giving up in spite of it.

The odds may be stacked against you. But I believe when you tap into your unique gifts and abilities, while combining them with a sense of purpose, passion, and perseverance you will not only defy those odds, you will help create a better life for yourself and rest of us.

Because we’re the same you and me. Both fucked up, broken pieces on a game board that’s bigger than we can cope with. Both hoping to find some way of winning despite the odds being stacked against us all the damn time. Both addicted to things that push our boundaries and make us feel alive. Because at the end of the day, even feeling the worst of things is better than feeling nothing at all.

You are stopping you! You are giving up instead of getting hard! Tell the truth about the real reasons for your limitations and you will turn that negativity, which is real, into jet fuel. Those odds stacked against you will become a damn runway!

You can't just give up on a movie during the dark night of the soul, he'd said. What's that? I asked. That's the point in a film when all hope is lost and the protagonists must dig deeper than ever before to prevail against the odds stacked against them.

As I was editing this chapter, a survey of more than thirty-five hundred Australian surgeons revealed a culture rife with bullying, discrimination, and sexual harassment, against women especially (although men weren’t untouched either). To give you a flavor of professional life as a woman in this field, female trainees and junior surgeons “reported feeling obliged to give their supervisors sexual favours to keep their jobs”; endured flagrantly illegal hostility toward the notion of combining career with motherhood; contended with “boys’ clubs”; and experienced entrenched sexism at all levels and “a culture of fear and reprisal, with known bullies in senior positions seen as untouchable.”68 I came back to this chapter on the very day that news broke in the state of Victoria, Australia, where I live, of a Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission report revealing that sexual discrimination and harassment is also shockingly prevalent in the Victorian Police, which unlawfully failed to provide an equal and safe working environment.69 I understand that attempts to identify the psychological factors that underlie sex inequalities in the workplace are well-meaning. And, of course, we shouldn’t shy away from naming (supposedly) politically unpalatable causes of those inequalities. But when you consider the women who enter and persist in highly competitive and risky occupations like surgery and policing—despite the odds stacked against them by largely unfettered sex discrimination and harassment—casual scholarly suggestions that women are relatively few in number, particularly in the higher echelons, because they’re less geared to compete in the workplace, start to seem almost offensive. Testosterone

Joining a gang is like sky diving without a parachute. Oh, at first it’s all fun, as you take on gravity in a thrilling and exhilarating free fall towards earth. The truth is, anything that is risky and dangerous always starts out as fun. But the odds are always stacked in gravity’s favor, for you will eventually come face to face with the earth, and mother earth always wins those battles. The same thing can be said about being in a gang.

Mean girls were symptomatic of most patriarchal cultures. Their appearance had always boggled me, as women had enough odds stacked against them. You’d think they’d band together rather than tear each other down. But then again, I’m sure the roots were based so deep in our patriarchal society, that it sought to do exactly that—keep them fighting.

No matter how high the odds are stacked against you, you will never know the outcome unless you give it your best shot to tip the scales.

When the odds are stacked against you, throw something at that stack! If nothing else, it will be fun to watch it topple.

When the odds are stacked against you, break them down, deal one on one with each odd, you'll have a better chance, eventually you'll end up with an even slate

Work by Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania, Tom Boyce of UCSF, and others demonstrates something outrageous: By age five, the lower a child’s socioeconomic status, on the average, the (a) higher the basal glucocorticoid levels and/or the more reactive the glucocorticoid stress response, (b) the thinner the frontal cortex and the lower its metabolism, and (c) the poorer the frontal function concerning working memory, emotion regulation, impulse control, and executive decision making; moreover, to achieve equivalent frontal regulation, lower-SES kids must activate more frontal cortex than do higher-SES kids. In addition, childhood poverty impairs maturation of the corpus callosum, a bundle of axonal fibers connecting the two hemispheres and integrating their function. This is so wrong—foolishly pick a poor family to be born into, and by kindergarten, the odds of your succeeding at life’s marshmallow tests are already stacked against you.34

For those who still believe structural inequality is a figment of feminists’ imagination, let’s recap some of the ways the financial odds are stacked against women. The gender pay gap sits stubbornly at around 18 per cent in Australia. (It gets wider the higher up the ladder you go, by the way). Female-dominated occupations are less well paid than male-dominated ones. Six out of ten Australians work in an industry dominated by one gender. Australia has one of the highest rates of part-time work in the world: 25 per cent of us work part time. Women make up 71.6 per cent of all part-time workers and 54.7 per cent of all casual employees. Australian women are among the best educated in the world but have relatively low comparable workplace participation and achievement rates. And just to add insult to injury, products marketed to women are more expensive than those marketed to men!

there is a difference between gambling in business and gambling in a casino. In a casino, the odds are stacked against you. With skill, you can improve them, but never beat them. In contrast, in business, you can improve your skills to shift the odds in your favor. Simply stated, with enough skill, you can become the house.

The connection between childhood adversity and frontocortical maturation pertains to childhood poverty. Work by Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania, Tom Boyce of UCSF, and others demonstrates something outrageous: By age five, the lower a child’s socioeconomic status, on the average, the (a) higher the basal glucocorticoid levels and/or the more reactive the glucocorticoid stress response, (b) the thinner the frontal cortex and the lower its metabolism, and (c) the poorer the frontal function concerning working memory, emotion regulation, impulse control, and executive decision making; moreover, to achieve equivalent frontal regulation, lower-SES kids must activate more frontal cortex than do higher-SES kids. In addition, childhood poverty impairs maturation of the corpus callosum, a bundle of axonal fibers connecting the two hemispheres and integrating their function. This is so wrong—foolishly pick a poor family to be born into, and by kindergarten, the odds of your succeeding at life’s marshmallow tests are already stacked against you.

They knew that life was a struggle, and though the odds were a bit longer for people like them, that fact didn’t excuse failure. “Never be like these fucking losers who think the deck is stacked against them,” my grandma often told me. “You can do anything you want to.” Their community shared this faith, and in the 1950s that faith appeared well founded.

The odds always appeared so stacked against us and the outcomes so poor that over time I became deeply pessimistic about crash calls. I remember a registrar, seeing my distress at the end of yet another failed resuscitation, putting a comforting arm around me. “It’s not really resuscitation, you know,” he said. “It’s just a funny dance we do around the dying.

IMPROVE YOUR APPROACH. You keep getting rejected in bars? Find a different place, where the odds aren’t stacked against you. Nobody responding to your networking e-mails for “Ten minutes of your time please?” Then offer something. Give something for free so people immediately see value in your approach immediately. You keep cold-calling customers and they hang up? Find a different way to get distribution. CHANGE UP, DON’T GIVE UP.

Because this is how it feels when your elders turn their backs, when institutions fall from grace, when the world moves on even as you’re standing still, when something you believe in turns out to be a lie. Because you’re no longer a child, and you’re realizing the world you live in operates in shades of gray. Sometimes, there isn’t a right or a wrong—there’s only doing the best you can in spite of the odds stacked up against you and forgiving yourself when you fall short.

I HATE your family!” The audience started laughing. “I HATE your daddy for thinking she looked good that night! I HATE your momma for knowing what he likes. I HATE your daddy for blowing his top. I HATE your momma for ovulating that month. I HATE that the timing of their love was so perfect that night that nine months later you were born into this world. I HATE your father for not sticking it out, and being the first man to break your heart and dooming the rest of his kind. I HATE your momma for not teaching you what a GOOD man looks like. How to LOVE him, how to KEEP him, HOW TO BE FAITHFUL! I HATE your family! I have to HATE them because its hard to HATE you! I LOVED you and wanted our love to last forever and ever. But who could succeed when the odds were stacked so high against us. They say young love never last, but I didn’t want to believe that! I knew we would last, I knew we would soar! Shot down in our prime our love is now a statistic. I gotta blame someone and I know it wasn’t me. So I blame your family!

It goes against everything we believe in," Gavner sighed. "Sometimes we have to abandon old beliefs in favor of new ones," Kurda said. While Gavner agonized over his decision, I spoke up. "I'll go back if you want me to. I'm afraid of dying, which is why I let Kurda talk me into fleeing. But if you say I should return, I will." "I don't want you to die," Gavner cried. "But running away never solved anything." "Nonsense!" Kurda snorted. "Vampires would be a lot better off if more of us had the good sense to run from a fight when the odds are stacked against us. If we take Darren back, we take him back to die. Where's the sense in that?

you must not risk more than you can reasonably expect to gain; otherwise, you’re stacking the odds against you, and that’s gambling.

You want to cut off my leg.” His face tightened and a bead of sweat ran down his forehead to soak into the pillow. “It is our only option,” I said. “The only way you are going to live.” “Live?” He snorted. “Even if this works, what good will I be?” he asked bitterly. “What good is a miner with one leg – you’d be saving me from death only to see me sent off to feed the sluag.” “Don’t say that,” I snapped, rising to my feet. “Your worth isn’t determined by your leg – it is determined by your heart and your mind. It is determined by what you do with your life.” “Pretty words.” He turned his head away from us. “Just let me die.” “No!” I shouted. “You listen to me, Tips, and you listen well. It isn’t your leg that can smell gold. It isn’t your leg that has ensured your gang never missed quota. And it isn’t your leg that all your friends chose to have as their leader. They need you, Tips. Without you, it will be your friends who will be facing the labyrinth.” I took a deep breath, trying to calm myself. “The odds have been stacked against you from the day you were born, yet here you are. Alive. And having persevered through all of that, how dare you turn your head and tell me to let you die. You’re better than that.” My voice trembled. “You once told me that power doesn’t determine worth. Well, neither does a leg.” He kept his head turned away from me, and the silence hung long and heavy. “You make a compelling argument.” His voice was choked, and when he turned his head, I could see the gleam of tears on his cheeks. “Do it then.

Sometimes the journey ahead can feel so daunting and so implausible that we lack the courage to take the first step. And there is never a shortage of good excuses: it’s not the right time; the odds are too stacked against me; or no one like me has ever done it before. I’m also willing to bet that Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to climb Everest, or even Thomas Edison, trying thousands and thousands of times to make the light bulb work, had a good list of excuses that they could have used, too. And I can promise you they all felt inadequate at many times along their path. You know what the sad thing is? It’s that most people never find out what they are truly capable of, because the mountain looks frightening from the bottom, before you begin. It is easier to look down than up. There’s a poignant poem by Christopher Logue that I’m often reminded of when people tell me their ‘reasons’ for not embarking on a great adventure. Come to the edge. We might fall. Come to the edge. It’s too high! COME TO THE EDGE! And they came, And we pushed, And they flew.

Lottie's cake is last. This one is layered three deep, impressive for a moist, snacking-style cake, which normally couldn't be stacked. The bottom layers are bound together by a thick cream cheese icing, while the top is coated with a thick streusel crumble held in place by a circle of decorative piping. "It's a layered blueberry buckle," Lottie says, looking at Betsy hopefully. "Now that is another unconventional choice from you," Betsy says, eyeing the streusel topping, an odd choice for a layer cake. A buckle is a humble sort of cake--- old-fashioned in its simplicity--- that she hasn't seen around in years. Nowadays most prefer a thick layer of icing, buttercream they can decorate, or the scraped edge of a naked cake. Something meant to impress on a table or in a photograph rather than just be eaten at a family dinner or on a picnic. Secretly it's kind of a relief to see such a normal person's cake given its due. "The decoration is lacking," Betsy tells her flatly, though the completely bare sides show an even sprinkling of blueberries, which is impressive. It can be difficult to keep berries from falling to the bottom of a cake, but these are evenly distributed throughout. The knife glides into the cake, which has a springy sort of give to it. She cleaves a slice away, leaving a small avalanche of streusel crumbs in its wake. The cake inside is plump and golden, studded with juicy blueberries. Betsy can tell before she even takes a bite that it has been cooked to perfection. The flavors hit her tongue and bring on a wave of nostalgia so strong that she has to steady herself against the table. It is heavenly, the sweet and sour of the blueberries wrapped in the soft vanilla-y cake. She is instantly transported back in time, back to her childhood. It is unquestionably the best cake of the bunch, simple and satisfying, the kind that if you were to bake it at home would leave you wanting more, taking secret trips to the kitchen to cut another slice.

the odds are stacked against you.

Sometimes Vinnie wonders why any woman ever gets into bed with any man. To take off all your clothes and lie beside some unclothed larger person is a terribly risky business. The odds are stacked almost as heavily against you as in the New York State lottery. He could hurt you; he could laugh at you; he could take one look at your aging naked body and turn away in ill-concealed embarrassed distaste. He could turn out to be awkward, selfish, inept – even totally incompetent. He could have some peculiar sexual hangup: a fixation on your underclothes to the exclusion of you, for instance, or on one sexual variation to the exclusion of all else. The risks are so high that no woman in her right mind would take such a chance – except that when you do take such a chance you're usually not in your right mind. And if you win, just as with the state lottery (which Vinnie also plays occasionally), the prize is so tremendous.

You don’t know anything about me,” I snarled. “Yeah I do. And that’s what you can’t stand,” he replied darkly. “Because we’re the same you and me. Both fucked up, broken pieces on a game board that’s bigger than we can cope with. Both hoping to find some way of winning despite the odds being stacked against us all the damn time. Both addicted to things that push our boundaries and make us feel alive. Because at the end of the day, even feeling the worst of things is better than feeling nothing at all.

When the odds are stacked this high against you, you take the peace you can find.

She didn’t fight because she was too afraid. Because it took a stupid kind of courage to keep fighting even when you knew all odds were stacked against you.

Stand strong and soldier on no matter. You hold your head high, with your middle finger in the air and dare to defy the odds that are stacked against you.

These are the Nebraska years and the sooner you quit being surprised by the hardship of them, the sooner you can survive. Not just survive, but actually thrive. With a Rocky-climbing-the-stairs enthusiasm you can eventually start to see the odds stacked against you as exhilarating. That’s

If you don't have true, deep, enduring conviction about the importance of the change you're pursuing, you will be buffeted, worn down, ground down, and diverted at those critical points where leadership is the only force that keeps the change moving. The biggest mistakes that I see come during those points. At root, the mistakes arise from the dissipation of conviction—leadership and management conviction.

Leadership without perspective and point of view isn't leadership—and of course it must be your own perspective, your own point of view. You cannot borrow a point of view any more than you can borrow someone's eyes. It must be authentic, and if it is, it will be original, because you are an original.

The odds may be stacked against you. Yet, I believe, when you tap into your unique gifts and abilities, while combining them with a sense of purpose, passion, and perseverance, you will not only defy those odds, you will help create a better life for yourself and the rest of us.

I guess pencil crayons are like life; we hope to gain wisdom through our experiences, and sadly many of us learn important lessons later in life - however all that colour we scratched and pressed into our canvases create stories for our children, and grandchildren - things to laugh at as we look back, and hopefully things others can use as examples of lessons of caution, and tales of overcoming negative situations despite the overwhelming odds stacked up against us. Tales of past likes and loves, lessons learned, and the stories about how you met the right person and how you ended up with them - often a winding tale until there's an 'AH-HA' moment of enlightenment, lol. Tales of raw adversity...because rawness is beautiful, and learned wisdom which proves showing weakness is actual bravery. That not everyone you lose is a loss, and that in life, a situation will keep repeating itself until one learns their lesson. As sad as it is to see these pencils being shortened, and the way one tries to preserve what's left as they get shorter and shorter... the new box of crayons which will eventually be bought will continue the storytelling of the old, and add new stories until they themselves expire.

It’s through challenges that winners’ thoughts are invoked. Through challenges, winners are inspired to think. Through challenges winners turn their dreams into reality. Through challenges, winners begin to lead. Through challenges, winners set forth towards victory, for nothing is sweeter than winning, especially when the odds are stacked against them.

Cal found his way into my bed while I was busy with Cami. I crawl under the sheets and snuggle against him, although I’m completely ignored as he continues reading his book. His look of concentration draws a soft chuckle from me. He makes you laugh and smile. Cal makes me do a lot more than that. He makes me want to have fun, enjoy life, and dream in a way I have long since forgotten over the years. Even with the odds stacked against us, he makes me want to believe we can work out. But most of all, he makes me want to trust him. To fall in love once again. With him.

Because this is how it feels when your elders turn their backs, when institutions fall from grace, when the world moves on even as you’re standing still, when something you believe in turns out to be a lie. Because you’re no longer a child, and you’re realizing the world you live in operates in shades of gray. Sometimes, there isn’t a right or a wrong—there’s only doing the best you can in spite of the odds stacked up against you and forgiving yourself when you fall.

The typical day went something like this. I’d wake up at 4:30 a.m., munch a banana, and hit the ASVAB books. Around 5 a.m., I’d take that book to my stationary bike where I’d sweat and study for two hours. Remember, my body was a mess. I couldn’t run multiple miles yet, so I had to burn as many calories as I could on the bike. After that I’d drive over to Carmel High School and jump into the pool for a two-hour swim. From there I hit the gym for a circuit workout that included the bench press, the incline press, and lots of leg exercises. Bulk was the enemy. I needed reps, and I did five or six sets of 100–200 reps each. Then it was back to the stationary bike for two more hours. I was constantly hungry. Dinner was my one true meal each day, but there wasn’t much to it. I ate a grilled or sautéed chicken breast and some sautéed vegetables along with a thimble of rice. After dinner I’d do another two hours on the bike, hit the sack, wake up and do it all over again, knowing the odds were stacked sky high against me. What I was trying to achieve is like a D-student applying to Harvard, or walking into a casino and putting every single dollar you own on a number in roulette and acting as if winning is a foregone conclusion. I was betting everything I had on myself with no guarantees.

How do you think Nate will win against the odds he’s stacked up against?

That’s how you know you’re doing the right thing. When the odds are severely stacked against you,

A fellow CEO laid this out for me graphically once when we were talking about M&A deals. “Think of M&A as having four quadrants defined by size and risk,” he said. “Big, low-risk deals are the ones everyone wants, but they don’t exist. Small, low-risk deals do exist, but you can’t make much money from them because of their size. Small, hairy deals are the worst quadrant, because the reward is limited and the odds are stacked against you, so why bother? The bingo quadrant is the big, hairy deals. If you can find a big, hairy deal with solvable problems, that’s where the real money is.

In fact, according to science, there’s a one in six trillion chance of each human’s birth even occurring. From conception to first breath, there are so many obstacles and odds stacked against us that it’s a statistical miracle that you and I are even alive.

character is the only guarantee you have of succeeding in life, and that strength of character matters most when the odds are stacked against you.

part six. Your fear of love began years ago—the absence of a father, a mother’s neglect, and even with the odds stacked against you. Nothing could stand in your way of becoming more than they could teach you to be. And you continue to fight for everything you deserve, and I want you to know that I am proud of you.

I’m used to no help. I’m used to the odds being stacked against me. And I wish I could tell you either of those made me less scared.

As entrepreneurs, we make bets everyday. We are gamblers ― gambling our hard-earned money on labor, inventory, rent, marketing, etc., all with the hopes of a higher pay out. Oftentimes, we lose. But, sometimes, we win and win BIG. However, there is a difference between gambling in business and gambling in a casino. In a casino, the odds are stacked against you. With skill, you can improve them, but never beat them. In contrast, in business, you can improve your skills to shift the odds in your favor. Simply stated, with enough skill, you can become the house.

Was that ethical?" Benteley asked. "That kicks over the board, doesn't it?" "I played the game for years," Cartwright said. "Most people go on playing the game all their lives. Then I began to realize the rules were set up so I couldn't win. Who wants to play that kind of game? We're betting against the house and the house always wins." "That's true," Benteley agreed. After a time he said, "No, there's no point in playing a rigged game. But what's your answer? What do you do when you discover the rules are fixed so you can't win?" "You do what I did: you draw up new rules and play by them. Rules by which all the players have the same odds. And the M-game doesn't give those odds. The M-game, the whole classification system, is stacked against us. So I said to myself, what sort of rules would be better? I sat down and worked them out. From then on I played according to them, as if they were already in operation.

Tell me about a time in your life when the odds were stacked against you but you overcame them and succeeded. Tell me three or four things of which you are most proud. Have you ever practiced and reached a high level in any area beyond just getting by in life? Areas of achievement might include music, sports, writing, or art. Many top producers have other areas of overachievement. Sports are a big one.

Never quit. It doesn’t sound particularly profound, but life constantly puts you in situations where quitting seems so much easier than continuing on. Where the odds are so stacked against you that giving up seems the rational thing to do.

Tell the truth about the real reasons for your limitations and you will turn that negativity, which is real, into jet fuel. Those odds stacked against you will become a damn runway!

True bravery had nothing to do with looking your opponent in the eye before you knocked him to the ground and pummeled him with your fists. True bravery was looking into the eyes of the woman you loved and promising them forever. Despite the odds stacked against you, you’d be willing to risk it all for one more day, one more year, or if you got really lucky, an entire lifetime.

There was nowhere they could go; nowhere that the truth of who they were, the forbiddenness of their love, wouldn’t come chasing them. Maybe love wasn’t enough after all. Not when every last obstacle was arrayed against you, all the odds stacked to make you fail. When the entire world was keeping you apart. “Okay,” Avery said, as the universe quietly rent itself in two.

Sometimes Vinnie wonders why any woman ever gets into bed with any man. To take off all your clothes and lie down beside some unclothed larger person is a terribly risky business. The odds are stacked almost as heavily against you as in the New York state lottery. He could hurt you; he could laugh at you; he could take one look at your naked aging body and turn away in ill-concealed, embarrassed distaste. He could turn out to be awkward, selfish, inept—even totally incompetent. He could have some peculiar sexual hangup: a fixation on your underclothes to the exclusion of you, for instance, or on one sexual variation to the exclusion of all else. The risks are so high that really no woman in her right mind would take such a chance—except that when you do take such a chance you’re usually not in your right mind. And if you win, just as with the state lottery (which Vinnie also plays occasionally) the prize is so tremendous.

Train like a scientist. Even though it may be possible that anyone can make a new scientific discovery, and anyone can win a fight against a professional fighter, the truth of the matter is the odds are against you. In fact, the odds are so unfavorably stacked against you, if you don’t train efficiently and push yourself to the very limits of what the human body and mind can endure, your chances of success are slim at best. While there is nothing new about pushing limits and training hard when it comes to fighting, successful modern fighters are starting to train with skepticism. I still remember the first day of one of my undergraduate physics classes, when the professor said, “Don’t trust me. If you don’t question everything I say here in class, if you don’t go home and check it yourself because you’re skeptical and refuse to take my word for it, then you don’t belong here, and you’re going to have a hard time making it in physics.” I remember it because at first it seemed like the opposite of what a professor should say, but once it sunk in, I realized he was right. Real mastery of physics does not come from memorization and repetition. Real mastery comes from understanding how well the laws of physics hold up when you try your best to break them. The same thing is true in fighting. You will never really master a choke until you have tried to choke out someone who does not want you to succeed at it. During an actual fight, on the street or in the ring, there is far too much chaos for anyone to succeed just by listening in class and repeating techniques. Everyone needs to have some rough personal failures to learn from. Everyone should have that awkward moment when your opponent’s only reaction to your attempted wristlock is a blank stare, and everyone needs to get knocked over once or twice because an opponent kicked right through the perfect block. Of course, sometimes there are techniques we do not have the luxury of testing out, either because they are too dangerous or the opportunities to use them in sparring may not come very often. You can’t learn everything the hard way, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still be a skeptic.

The odds were stacked against me from the start. Raised in poverty with a father who rejected his children, my teachers and the police were convinced I had no future and would wind up in prison. As I battled addiction and depression and dabbled with crime, all the while haunted by defeat, my path seemed set. But God had other plans, and over time, he turned every stumbling block that had been thrown my way into a stepping stone toward success. I wrote "Stumbling Blocks to Stepping Stones” in the hopes that sharing my story may be able to help others find meaning and impact in their lives. I know that a lot of people out there are struggling, much like I was for many years. As I shared in the book, my mission is to help show people that those struggles aren’t blocking the path, they are the path to prosperity. The terrible things in life aren’t happening to you, they are happening for you, and there is always a greater power there to lift you above it." -Rudy

The odds were stacked against me from the start. Raised in poverty with a father who rejected his children, my teachers and the police were convinced I had no future and would wind up in prison. As I battled addiction and depression and dabbled with crime, all the while haunted by defeat, my path seemed set. But God had other plans, and over time, he turned every stumbling block that had been thrown my way into a stepping stone toward success. I wrote "Stumbling Blocks to Stepping Stones” in the hopes that sharing my story may be able to help others find meaning and impact in their lives. I know that a lot of people out there are struggling, much like I was for many years. As I shared in the book, my mission is to help show people that those struggles aren’t blocking the path, they are the path to prosperity. The terrible things in life aren’t happening to you, they are happening for you, and there is always a greater power there to lift you above it.

finishing when all the odds have been stacked against us is the deepest kind of satisfaction.

In each of them we find a manual on how to survive and persist in a country that stacks all the odds against you. We also see that the world is changeable and waiting on our instruction (198)

Life is full of difficult times. But someone out there always has it worse than you do. If you fill your days with pity, for the way you have been treated, blaming your circumstances on someone or something else, then life will be long and hard. But, if you refuse to give up on your dreams, stand tall against the odds—then life will be what you make of it and you can make it great. Never, ever, ring the bell! Never quit. It doesn’t sound particularly profound, but life constantly puts you in situations where quitting seems so much easier than continuing on. Where the odds are so stacked against you that giving up seems the rational thing to do.

when she turned to Orlando to speak to him, I saw she had what Pa Salt would have termed a Roman nose, which sat prominently in her striking face. She was certainly not classically beautiful and, from the look of her jeans and old sweater, did not care to make herself more so. Yet, there was something very attractive about her and I realized I wanted her to like me—an unusual feeling. “Are you coping back there?” she asked me. “Not far now.” “Yes, thank you.” I leaned my head against the windowpane as the thick hedges, their height exaggerated by the low car, flew by me, the country lanes becoming narrower. It felt so good to be out of London, with only the odd red-brick chimney stack peeping out from behind the wall of green. We turned right, through a pair of old gates that led to a drive so potholed that Marguerite’s and Orlando’s heads bumped against the roof. “I really must ask Mouse to bring the tractor and fill in these holes with gravel before the winter comes,” she commented to Orlando. “Here we are, Star,” she added as she pulled the car to a halt in front of a large, graceful house, its walls formed from mellow red brick, with ivy and wisteria fringing the uneven windows in greenery. Tall, thin chimney stacks, which emphasized the Tudor architecture, reached up into the crisp September sky. As I squeezed myself out of the back of the Fiat, I imagined the house’s interior to be rambling as opposed to impressive—it was certainly no stately home; rather, it looked as if it had gently aged and sunk slowly into the countryside surrounding it. It spoke of a bygone era, one that I loved reading about in books, and I experienced a twinge of longing. I followed Marguerite and Orlando toward the magnificent oak front door, and saw a young boy wobbling toward us on a shiny red bike. He let out a strange muffled shout, tried to wave, and promptly fell off the bike. “Rory!” Marguerite ran to him, but he had already picked himself up. He spoke again, and I wondered if he was foreign, as I couldn’t make out what he was saying. She dusted him down, then the boy picked up the bike and the two of them walked back to us. “Look who’s here,” Marguerite said, turning directly to the boy to speak to him. “It’s Orlando and his friend Star. Try saying ‘Star.’ ” She particularly enunciated the “st” in my name. “Ss-t-aahh,” the boy said as he approached me, a smile on his face, before holding up his hand and opening his fingers out like a shining star. I saw that Rory was the owner of a pair of inquisitive green eyes, framed by dark lashes. His wavy copper-colored hair glowed in the sun, and his rosy cheeks dimpled with happiness. I recognized that he was the kind of child that one would never want to say no to. “He prefers to go by the name ‘Superman,’ don’t you, Rory?” Orlando chuckled, holding up his hand in a fist like Superman taking off into the air. Rory nodded, then shook my hand with all the dignity of a superhero, and turned to Orlando for a hug. After giving him a tight squeeze and a tickle, Orlando set him down, then squatted in front of him and used his hands to sign, also speaking the words clearly. “Happy birthday! I have your present in Marguerite’s car. Would you like to come and get it with me?” “Yes please,” Rory spoke and signed, and I knew then that he was deaf. I rifled through my rusty mental catalog of what I had learned

Fuck off, you’re not suicidal,” he replied dismissively. “Nobody burns as hot and cold as you do if they don’t love life.” “You don’t know anything about me,” I snarled. “Yeah I do. And that’s what you can’t stand,” he replied darkly. “Because we’re the same you and me. Both fucked up, broken pieces on a game board that’s bigger than we can cope with. Both hoping to find some way of winning despite the odds being stacked against us all the damn time. Both addicted to things that push our boundaries and make us feel alive. Because at the end of the day, even feeling the worst of things is better than feeling nothing at all.