Winning Medals Quotes

Some men want to win a gold medal, some want a family, some want to be rich, some want to be free, some want to kill other men, and some men want to do the right thing. Me, I only want you.

Beer has that Olympic medal color,” Rot replied, “but does it have a winning taste? I’d hardly call silver a champion flavor. No, I’ll stick to my red wine.

Give me enough medals and I’ll win you any war

And when we win a fucking gold medal, he’s going to be watching you, thinking he couldn’t be prouder of you. He’s going to walk around telling everyone his daughter won a gold medal, and you’re going to know you did it without him.

Because here’s the secret: in the kingdom of God, as long as you’re still fighting, you’re winning. God doesn’t hand out medals for performance. He hands out crowns for perseverance.

what we consider to be the most successful route for us to take, actually isn’t. Because too often our view of success is about some external bullshit idea of achievement – an Olympic medal, the ideal husband, a good salary. And we have all these metrics that we try and reach. When really success isn’t something you measure, and life isn’t a race you can win. It’s all . . . bollocks, actually . . .

You could eat in the finest restaurants, you could partake in every sensual pleasure, you could sing on stage in São Paulo to twenty thousand people, you could soak up whole thunderstorms of applause, you could travel to the ends of the Earth, you could be followed by millions on the internet, you could win Olympic medals, but this was all meaningless without love.

Bowden Cable is the sort of honest and dependable operative that is the backbone of SpecOps. They never win commendations or medals and the public has no knowledge of them at all. They are all worth ten of people like me.

If you bake a cupcake, the world has one more cupcake. If you become a circus clown, the world has one more squirt of seltzer down someone's pants. But if you win an Olympic gold medal, the world will not have one more Olympic gold medalist. It will just have you instead of someone else.

People run away from the love game because they know they won't win the race.

Give me enough medals and I’ll win you any war.

A study of figure skaters found that sub-elite skaters spent lots of time working on the jumps they could already do, while skaters at the highest levels spent more time on the jumps they couldn’t do, the kind that ultimately win Olympic medals and that involve lots of falling down before they’re mastered.

I do not say that all lawyers are bad, but I do maintain that the general tendency is bad: standing up in a court for whichever side has paid you, affecting warmth and conviction, and doing everything you can to win the case, whatever your private opinion may be, will soon dull any fine sense of honour. The mercenary soldier is not a valued creature, but at least he risks his life, whereas these men merely risk their next fee.

Disease is surely one of the ways in which we are tried by life and offered the chance to be heroic. Though few of us will win Olympic gold medals or slay dragons, disease can be the spark or gift that allows many of us to live out our personal myths and become heroes.

Maria, lonely prostitute on a street of pain, You, at least, hail me and speak to me While a thousand others ignore my face. You offer me an hour of love, And your fees are not as costly as most. You are the madonna of the lonely, The first-born daughter in a world of pain. You do not turn fat men aside, Or trample on the stuttering, shy ones, You are the meadow where desperate men Can find a moment's comfort. Men have paid more to their wives To know a bit of peace And could not walk away without the guilt That masquerades as love. You do not bind them, lovely Maria, you comfort them And bid them return. Your body is more Christian than the Bishop's Whose gloved hand cannot feel the dropping of my blood. Your passion is as genuine as most, Your caring as real! But you, Maria, sacred whore on the endless pavement of pain, You, whose virginity each man may make his own Without paying ought but your fee, You who know nothing of virgin births and immaculate conceptions, You who touch man's flesh and caress a stranger, Who warm his bed to bring his aching skin alive, You make more sense than stock markets and football games Where sad men beg for virility. You offer yourself for a fee--and who offers himself for less? At times you are cruel and demanding--harsh and insensitive, At times you are shrewd and deceptive--grasping and hollow. The wonder is that at times you are gentle and concerned, Warm and loving. You deserve more respect than nuns who hide their sex for eternal love; Your fees are not so high, nor your prejudice so virtuous. You deserve more laurels than the self-pitying mother of many children, And your fee is not as costly as most. Man comes to you when his bed is filled with brass and emptiness, When liquor has dulled his sense enough To know his need of you. He will come in fantasy and despair, Maria, And leave without apologies. He will come in loneliness--and perhaps Leave in loneliness as well. But you give him more than soldiers who win medals and pensions, More than priests who offer absolution And sweet-smelling ritual, More than friends who anticipate his death Or challenge his life, And your fee is not as costly as most. You admit that your love is for a fee, Few women can be as honest. There are monuments to statesmen who gave nothing to anyone Except their hungry ego, Monuments to mothers who turned their children Into starving, anxious bodies, Monuments to Lady Liberty who makes poor men prisoners. I would erect a monument for you-- who give more than most-- And for a meager fee. Among the lonely, you are perhaps the loneliest of all, You come so close to love But it eludes you While proper women march to church and fantasize In the silence of their rooms, While lonely women take their husbands' arms To hold them on life's surface, While chattering women fill their closets with clothes and Their lips with lies, You offer love for a fee--which is not as costly as most-- And remain a lonely prostitute on a street of pain. You are not immoral, little Maria, only tired and afraid, But you are not as hollow as the police who pursue you, The politicians who jail you, the pharisees who scorn you. You give what you promise--take your paltry fee--and Wander on the endless, aching pavements of pain. You know more of universal love than the nations who thrive on war, More than the churches whose dogmas are private vendettas made sacred, More than the tall buildings and sprawling factories Where men wear chains. You are a lonely prostitute who speaks to me as I pass, And I smile at you because I am a lonely man.

In any case, if it is true that men are superior at sports, why is it that transgender athletes tend to win more medals after they transition to female?

Which makes Archer and Nick-“ “Cousins,” Archer filled in, still stirring his soup. “Nearly murdered by my own relative. That has to win some kind of medal for dysfunction.” Then his expression darkened. “Or maybe it’s just family tradition.

Tell me something. Why is everyone so determined to believe Wilton is innocent?" Surprised, Davies said, "He's a war hero isn't he? Admired by the King and a friend of the Prince of Wales. He's visited Sandringham, been received by Queen Mary herself! A man like that doesn’t go around killing people!" With a wry downturn of his lips, Rutledge silently asked, How did he win his medals, you fool, if not by being so very damned good at killing?

I want to meddle with an Olympic medal made of silver metal. I want to alchemize it into gold, and use a mixture of science and mysticism to transform losing into winning.

I may not have an Olympic gold medal, but I have something better: a life where I spend every day with my favorite people in the world, doing exactly what I love. If that's not winning, I don't know what is.

We must re-create an attractive and caring attitude in our homes and in our worlds. If our children are to approve of themselves, they must see that we approve of ourselves. If we persist in self-disrespect and then ask our children to respect themselves, it is as if we break all their bones and then insist that they win Olympic gold medals for the hundred-yard dash. Outrageous.

What you don’t know going in is that when you come out, you will be scarred for life. Whether you were in for a week, a month, or a year—even if you come home without a scratch—you are never, ever going to be the same. When I went in, I was eighteen. I thought it was all glory and you win lots of medals. You think you’re going to be the guy. Then you find out the cost is very great. Especially when you don’t see the kids you were with when you went in. Living with it can be hell. It’s like the devil presides in you. I knew what I sighed up for, yes, and I would do it again. But the reality of war—words can’t begin to describe it.

We all love to win but how many people love to train?” ~ Mark Spitz (7 Gold medals in the1972 Olympics)   There

You don’t win an Olympic gold medal with a few weeks of intensive training,” says (Seth) Godin. “There’s no such thing as an overnight opera sensation. Great law firms or design companies don’t spring up overnight…every great company, every great brand, and every great career has been built in exactly the same way: bit by bit, step by step, little by little.” There is no magic solution to success.

When I look back, my greatest accomplishment in high school has nothing to do with competition and winning. I learned to use my own judgement and not to follow others blindly. I learned to judge myself based on my own standards. I learned to find my own voice. I learned to speak my own truth. I have nothing to show for these achievements, no grades, no medals, trophies, or diploma. Yet these are the achievements that can't be taken away by loss, failure, or misunderstanding.

Louis theorized that arranging a competition for arrogant filmmakers to win medals was the best way to keep them in line.

Most of the time, I feel like Phelps. At least when I’m not winning Olympic gold medals, which is an all the time thing for me.

Soon after, Tom, all of twenty years old, became the only soldier in the Civil War to win two Medals of Honor. In

Gentlemen, you don't have enough talent to win on talent alone.

One day might be different from another, but there ain't much difference when they're put together. September 14, 1911: Writer and teacher William Armstrong wrote celebrated children's books including the Newbery Medal-winning Sounder, about an African American sharecropper family with a loud and loyal hound, inspired by Odysseus' dog Argus. Armstrong was born in Virginia 102 years ago today.

He shakes his head. His dark messy hair has a few curls in it today.It's quite breathtaking,really.If there were an Olympics competition in hair, St. Clair would totally win,hands down. Ten-point-oh.Gold medal.

Yes, the issue was courage. It always had been, even as a kid. Things scared him. He couldn't help it. Noise scared him, dark scared him. Tunnels scared him: the time he almost won the Silver Star for valor. But the real issue was courage. It had nothing to do with the Silver Star...Oh, he would've liked winning it, true, but that wasn't the issue. He would've liked showing the medal to his father, the heavy feel of it, looking his father in the eye to show he had been brave, but even that wasn't the real issue. The real issue was the power of will to defeat fear. A matter of figuring a way to do it. Somehow working his way into that secret chamber of the human heart, where, in tangles, lay the circuitry for all that was possible, the full range of what a man might be. He believed, like Doc Peret, that somewhere inside each man is a biological center for the exercise of courage, a piece of tissue that might be touched and sparked and made to respond, a chemical maybe, or a lone chromosome that when made to fire would produce a blaze of valor that even the biles could not extinguish. A filament, a fuse, that if ignited would release the full energy of what might be. There was a Silver Star twinkling somewhere inside him.

From elementary school through high school, my siblings and I were hectored to excel in every class, to win medals in science fairs, to be chosen princess of the prom, to win election to student government. Thereby and only thereby, we learned, could we expect to gain admission to the right college, which in turn would get us into Harvard Medical School: life's one sure path to meaningful success and lasting happiness.

And . . . and the thing is . . . the thing is . . . what we consider to be the most successful route for us to take, actually isn’t. Because too often our view of success is about some external bullshit idea of achievement–an Olympic medal, the ideal husband, a good salary. And we have all these metrics that we try and reach. When really success isn’t something you measure, and life isn’t a race you can win. It’s all . . . bollocks, actually . . .

That’s the all-American dessert. Any proud, red-blooded American should easily be able to consume a huge bowl of that with a smile before they went off to plant a flag somewhere or win a gold medal or something.” “That is not the dessert of champions, baby.” “It most certainly is.” “My arteries hardened just looking at it.

In Paul's day, instead of giving gold medals for winning first place in an Olympic event, a crown of olive or laurel leaves was placed on the winner's head. By the time the athlete went home that night, the wreath would already be wilting and falling apart. Think of that. All that energy expended for a wreath that didn't last beyond a day.

Gymnastics gave her the power to snuff out gravity, fly like a bird and draw rainbows in the air. There was no medal she’d swap for that.

Despite winning five Deaf Olympic medals, the lack of recognition and support is like a silent injustice.

The sum of life needs to be pleasure. What's the point of having a million of medals, cups and planes if you don't have any fun? And how is that winning?

Those who cannot win trophies and medals, they create status symbols for themselves.

prizes worth winning, which they would not have seemed if they had been mere medals, however fine, rather than lockets with mementos of love hidden inside.

The Nobel Prize, An Olympics Gold Medal, The Academy Award (Oscars), The Pulitzer Prize or any other award or prize for that matter are nothing when compared to winning 'Her' heart.

I would tell him what it felt like to stand in that stadium and watch Jesse Owens beat Adolf Hitler’s best runners to win the gold medal. And then, what it felt like, afterward, to interview the son of black sharecroppers from Alabama knowing that he had just changed the world. I would tell him about standing in the shadow of the Hindenburg as it passed over the field.

A few words in defense of military scientists. I agree that squad leaders are in the best position to know what and how much their men and women need to bring on a given mission. But you want those squad leaders to be armed with knowledge, and not all knowledge comes from experience. Sometimes it comes from a pogue at USUHS who’s been investigating the specific and potentially deadly consequences of a bodybuilding supplement. Or an army physiologist who puts men adrift in life rafts off the dock at a Florida air base and discovers that wetting your uniform cools you enough to conserve 74 percent more of your body fluids per hour. Or the Navy researcher who comes up with a way to speed the recovery time from travelers’ diarrhea. These things matter when it’s 115 degrees and you’re trying to keep your troops from dehydrating to the point of collapse. There’s no glory in the work. No one wins a medal. And maybe someone should.

If you don't try to win you might as well hold the Olympics in somebody's back yard. The thrill of competing carries with it the thrill of a gold medal. One wants to win to prove himself the best.

For all the national pride people feel when their delegation wins a gold medal and their flag is raised, there is far greater reason to feel pride that humankind is capable of organizing such an event.

Every Olympian wants to win a gold medal. Every candidate wants to get the job. And if successful and unsuccessful people share the same goals, then the goal cannot be what differentiates the winners from the losers.

You’ll never go wrong if you describe what you think the child might be feeling (‘You must be so proud of yourself!’) or what the child has accomplished (‘A lot of practice and perseverance went into winning that medal’).

You remember what you told me, Mom? That there are no medals for the completion of a good life? I’ve been thinking about that. About how no one wins. Like you said, it’s impossible to win, because the finish line is death.

championships, and went on to break the U.S. record in distances from three miles to the marathon. At the 2004 Athens Games, Deena outlasted the world-record holder, Paula Radcliffe, to win the bronze, the first Olympic medal

The Loneliness of the Military Historian Confess: it's my profession that alarms you. This is why few people ask me to dinner, though Lord knows I don't go out of my way to be scary. I wear dresses of sensible cut and unalarming shades of beige, I smell of lavender and go to the hairdresser's: no prophetess mane of mine, complete with snakes, will frighten the youngsters. If I roll my eyes and mutter, if I clutch at my heart and scream in horror like a third-rate actress chewing up a mad scene, I do it in private and nobody sees but the bathroom mirror. In general I might agree with you: women should not contemplate war, should not weigh tactics impartially, or evade the word enemy, or view both sides and denounce nothing. Women should march for peace, or hand out white feathers to arouse bravery, spit themselves on bayonets to protect their babies, whose skulls will be split anyway, or,having been raped repeatedly, hang themselves with their own hair. There are the functions that inspire general comfort. That, and the knitting of socks for the troops and a sort of moral cheerleading. Also: mourning the dead. Sons,lovers and so forth. All the killed children. Instead of this, I tell what I hope will pass as truth. A blunt thing, not lovely. The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner, though I am good at what I do. My trade is courage and atrocities. I look at them and do not condemn. I write things down the way they happened, as near as can be remembered. I don't ask why, because it is mostly the same. Wars happen because the ones who start them think they can win. In my dreams there is glamour. The Vikings leave their fields each year for a few months of killing and plunder, much as the boys go hunting. In real life they were farmers. The come back loaded with splendour. The Arabs ride against Crusaders with scimitars that could sever silk in the air. A swift cut to the horse's neck and a hunk of armour crashes down like a tower. Fire against metal. A poet might say: romance against banality. When awake, I know better. Despite the propaganda, there are no monsters, or none that could be finally buried. Finish one off, and circumstances and the radio create another. Believe me: whole armies have prayed fervently to God all night and meant it, and been slaughtered anyway. Brutality wins frequently, and large outcomes have turned on the invention of a mechanical device, viz. radar. True, valour sometimes counts for something, as at Thermopylae. Sometimes being right - though ultimate virtue, by agreed tradition, is decided by the winner. Sometimes men throw themselves on grenades and burst like paper bags of guts to save their comrades. I can admire that. But rats and cholera have won many wars. Those, and potatoes, or the absence of them. It's no use pinning all those medals across the chests of the dead. Impressive, but I know too much. Grand exploits merely depress me. In the interests of research I have walked on many battlefields that once were liquid with pulped men's bodies and spangled with exploded shells and splayed bone. All of them have been green again by the time I got there. Each has inspired a few good quotes in its day. Sad marble angels brood like hens over the grassy nests where nothing hatches. (The angels could just as well be described as vulgar or pitiless, depending on camera angle.) The word glory figures a lot on gateways. Of course I pick a flower or two from each, and press it in the hotel Bible for a souvenir. I'm just as human as you. But it's no use asking me for a final statement. As I say, I deal in tactics. Also statistics: for every year of peace there have been four hundred years of war.

Why aren't you ever happy? I try to do something nice, and this is how you act? Dios mío, who would have guessed I would have such an ungrateful daughter?" Amá is highly skilled in the art of guilt trips. She could win a gold medal.

Bricks, bricks, and bricks could be given away at the Olympics, instead of gold, silver, and bronze medals. If all a champion wants is to win, then I’ll take all that unnecessary gold and silver off the international community’s hands. 


Sometimes heroics revolted him; they seemed like an insult to the soldier who weighed the risks of the situation and made calm, cunning decisions based on experience and imagination, the sort of unshowy soldiering that didn’t win medals but wars.

The fighting was horrendous. Bloodshed and death lie everywhere around us. It was not exciting, Vindhya. It is fearsome, and we were all scared out of our wits. There is no honour in battle but to protect you...There is no winning in War. There is only loss. People die on every side. How can any battle be won with such consequence and loss? I do not understand war. It’s so unfair, and so unjustified. We take innocent lives, yet we gain medals of highest honour and divine, sacred blessings. What is the sense of it?

We are fools when we love. I was terrified of losing her. I thought I saw her changing--I don't know if she really was, but I couldn't bear the uncertainty any longer. I ran toward the finish just like a coward runs toward the enemy and wins a medal. I wanted to get death over.

I lost my second judo tournament. I finished second, losing to a girl named Anastasia. Afterward, her coach congratulated me. "You did a great job. Don't feel bad, Anastasia is a junior national champion." I felt consoled for about a second, until I noticed the look of disgust on Mom's face. I nodded at the coach and walked away. Once we were out of earshot she lit into me. "I hope you know better than to believe what he said. You could have won that match. You had every chance to beat that girl. The fact that she is a junior national champion doesn't mean anything. That's why they have tournaments, so you can see who is better. They don't award medals based on what you won before. If you did your absolute best, if you were capable of doing nothing more, then that's enough. Then you can be content with the outcome. But if you could have done better, if you could have done more, then you should be disappointed. You should be upset you didn't win. You should go home and think about what you could have done differently and then next time do it differently. Don't you ever let anyone tell you that not doing your absolute best is good enough. You are a skinny blonde girl who lives by the beach, and unless you absolutely force them to, no one is ever going to expect anything from you in this sport. You prove them wrong.

Francesca had grown up watching me, like I'd grown up watching Sheila. She said I was inspiring, but what had I inspired? There was no joy left in her, no light. Those smiles were a mask, concealing a molten core of grasping ambition. I wanted to shake her by the shoulders and tell her it wasn't too late. She could wake up. She could realize there was more to life than winning. Happiness couldn't be won. It couldn't be hung around our necks while a crowd of thousands cheered. It wasn't a prize, something we had to suffer and toil to earn. If we wanted happiness, we had to create it ourselves. Not in one shining moment on a medal stand, but every single day, over and over again. I could have told Francesca all that, but it wouldn't have mattered. She'd have to learn for herself, like I did.

Sometimes I try to imagine how I'd be if I were Polish or Russian instead of Moroccan ... Maybe I'd do ice dancing, but not in those cheapskate local competitions where you win chocolate medals and T-shirts. No, real ice skating, like in the Olympics, with the most beautiful classical music, guys from all over the world who judge your performance like they do at school, and whole stadiums to cheer even if you go splat like a steak.

You know better than I," he said, "that all courts-martial are farces and that you're really paying for the crimes of other people, because this time we're going to win the war at any price. Wouldn't you have done the same in my place?" General Moncada got up to clean his thick horn-rimmed glasses on his shirttail. "Probably," he said. "But what worries me is not your shooting me, because after all, for people like us it's a natural death." He laid his glasses on the bed and took off his watch and chain. "What worries me," he went on "is that out of so much and thinking about them so much, you've ended up as bad as they are. And no ideal in life is worth that much baseness." He took off his wedding ring and the medal of the Virgin of Help and put them alongside his glasses and watch. "At this rate," he concluded, "you'll not only be the most despotic and bloody dictator in our history, but you'll shoot my dear friend Ursula in an attempt to pacify your conscience.

People love the idea of winning an Olympic medal or a world title. But what few people realize is that pretty much every second leading up to the actual win is uncomfortable, painful, and impossibly daunting—physically and mentally. Most people focus on the wrong thing: They focus on the result, not the process. The process is the sacrifice; it is all the hard parts—the sweat, the pain, the tears, the losses. You make the sacrifices anyway. You learn to enjoy them, or at least embrace them.

The 40th anniversary edition of the classic Newbery Medal-winning title by beloved author Katherine Paterson, with brand-new bonus materials including an author's note by Katherine herself and a foreword by New York Times bestselling author Kate DiCamillo. Jess Aarons has been practicing all summer so he can be the fastest runner in the fifth grade. And he almost is, until the new girl in school, Leslie Burke, outpaces him. The two become fast friends and spend most days in the woods behind Leslie's house, where they invent an enchanted land called Terabithia. One morning, Leslie goes to Terabithia without Jess and a tragedy occurs. It will take the love of his family and the strength that Leslie has given him for Jess to be able to deal with his grief. Bridge to Terabithia was also named an ALA Notable Children’s Book and has become a touchstone of children’s literature, as have many of Katherine Paterson’s other novels, including The Great Gilly Hopkins and Jacob Have I Loved. Full Read Online Open Here >> telegra[.]ph/Free-PDF-Bridge-to-Terabithia-Free-Download-09-17

Heath knew me when I was a gangly little girl with bloody kneecaps and prairie grass in my hair. He'd seen me sobbing and weak and shaking with helpless rage. He knew my pressure points. He knew how to provoke me. Garrett had never known me as Kat Shaw from Nowhere, Illinois. I could leave her behind, as abruptly and heartlessly as Heath had left me. With Heath, I could be myself. But with Garrett, I could be someone better. And if Heath wanted to see me again? He could watch me on television winning goddamn gold medals with Garrett Lin.

Nora felt something inside her all at once. A kind of fear, as real as the fear she had felt on the Arctic skerry, face to face with the polar bear. A fear of what she was feeling. Love. You could eat in the finest restaurants, you could partake in every sensual pleasure, you could sing on stage in São Paulo to twenty thousand people, you could soak up whole thunderstorms of applause, you could travel to the ends of the Earth, you could be followed by millions on the internet, you could win Olympic medals, but this was all meaningless without love.

Every Olympian wants to win a gold medal. Every candidate wants to get the job. And if successful and unsuccessful people share the same goals, then the goal cannot be what differentiates the winners from the losers.22 It wasn’t the goal of winning the Tour de France that propelled the British cyclists to the top of the sport. Presumably, they had wanted to win the race every year before—just like every other professional team. The goal had always been there. It was only when they implemented a system of continuous small improvements that they achieved a different outcome.

Whatever the case, it works for him. He loses a wife, and wins another quickly. He loses a fish collection, and rebuilds a bigger one. He is promoted to higher and higher offices. The awards and medals start clattering in, for teaching, for ichthyology, for contributions to higher ed. An odd alchemy of delusion right before your eyes. Little lies transmuting into bronze, silver, gold. Forget millennia of warnings to stay humble; maybe this is just how it works in a godless system. Maybe David Starr Jordan is proof that a steady dose of hubris is the best way of overcoming doomed odds.

billionaire Jeff Hoffman recently spoke at one of the Quantum Leap Mastermind retreats that my business partner, Jon Berghoff, and I cohost, and of the many takeaways that I wrote down, the following stood out most: “You can’t win a gold medal at more than one [sport].” Let that sink in for a minute. Most Olympic athletes spend their entire lives focused on developing themselves to be best in the world at one thing. And remember what we learned in the last chapter, that when you choose and commit to one mission, achieving your other goals will become more probable, because you will be living in alignment with your highest priority.

He would forever be known as Jesse Owens, not by his given name. He would go on to win four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, becoming the first American in the history of track and field to do so in a single Olympics and disproving the Aryan notions of his Nazi hosts. It made headlines throughout the United States that Adolf Hitler, who had watched the races, had refused to shake hands with Owens, as he had with white medalists. But Owens found that in Nazi Germany, he had been able to stay in the same quarters and eat with his white teammates, something he could not do in his home country. Upon his return, there was a ticker-tape parade in New York. Afterward, he was forced to ride the freight elevator to his own reception at the Waldorf-Astoria. “I wasn’t invited to shake hands with Hitler,” he wrote in his autobiography. “But I wasn’t invited to the White House to shake hands with the President either. I came back to my native country, and I could not ride in the front of the bus. I had to go to the back door. I couldn’t live where I wanted. Now, what’s the difference?” It would take the arrival of millions of more migrants and many more decades of perseverance on their part and on the part of protesters for human rights before they would truly become accepted.

It’s not proper, Julia. Why can’t you understand that? I’m not going to buy it.” “So you will only buy me a dress that you like even if I hate it?” I should’ve known shopping with Amá would be a mistake. “Yes, that’s right.” “I can’t believe this. Why do you always do this? Why can’t I wear what I want? It’s not like I’m wearing a pair of Daisy Dukes and a see-through tube top.” “Remember, you’re not the boss here. Why are you always making everything so difficult? Why aren’t you ever happy? I try to do something nice, and this is how you act? Dios mío, who would have guessed I would have such an ungrateful daughter?” Amá is highly skilled in the art of guilt trips. She could win a gold medal.

My beautiful wooden leader with your heartful of medals made of wood, fixing it each time so you almost win, you long to be bandaged before you have been cut. My love for you is the love of one statue for another: tensed and static. General, you enlist my body in your heroic struggle to become real: though you promise bronze rescues you hold me by the left ankle so that my head brushes the ground, my eyes are blinded, my hair fills with white ribbons. There are hordes of me now, alike and paralyzed, we follow you scattering floral tributes under your hooves. Magnificent on your wooden horse you point with your fringed hand; the sun sets, and the people all ride off in the other direction.

While the party of Obama has little in common with that of JFK, for a better comparison, try exploring the Communist Party USA’s website (CPUSA.org), and you’ll be stunned at the resemblance between it and today’s Democratic Party. You might also take a moment to thoughtfully reflect on the Democrats’ candidates who in recent decades were either elected, or nearly elected, as president: Bill Clinton, a serial sexual predator; Al Gore, by many accounts a raving lunatic; John Kerry, who betrayed his fellow Vietnam vets and his country;10 Barack Obama, a deceitful, America-hating, Far-Left radical; and Hillary Clinton, accurately described by Pulitzer-winning New York Times columnist and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient William Safire as “a congenital liar.”11 Whatever

I’m so stressed that a weird Olympic-style commentary starts up in my head. And here we have Zelah Green, the fourteen-year-old champion of rituals, attempting the afternoon toilet-touching event for the first time … I take my first faltering step towards the rim. And she’s approaching the target, booms the voice. Steady approach, good footwork … My right hand, naked and trembling, is now hovering over the inside of the toilet. Will she set a new world record? screams the voice. Will Zelah Green take the gold medal for bravery and/or total stupidity? ‘I’m going in!’ I say. I skim the curved cool surface of the bowl with the fingertips of my right hand and jump back as if I’ve been electrified. And she’s done it! shrieks the commentator. Zelah Green wins the gold medal for toilet touching!

However, after 1930 Liddell never competed again in public in a major athletic meeting. Did he ever regret missing the 1928 Olympics and the chance of winning at least another gold medal? Did he lament trading fame and glory for a life of obscurity and hardship? He gave clear and unequivocal answers to these questions when interviewed in Canada at the end of his first furlough in 1932. ‘Are you glad you gave your life to missionary work? Don’t you miss the limelight, the rush, the frenzy, the cheers, the rich red wine of victory?’ probed the interviewer in rather florid prose. ‘Oh well, of course it’s natural for a chap to think over all that sometimes,’ replied Liddell. ‘But I’m glad I’m at the work I’m engaged in now. A fellow’s life counts for far more for this than the other. Not a corruptible crown, but an incorruptible one, you know.

A fascinating study done by Professor Vicki Medvec reveals the relative importance of subjective attitudes over and above objective circumstances. Medvec studied Olympic medalists and discovered that bronze medalists were quantifiably happier than silver medalists. Here's why: Silver medalists tended to focus on how close they were to winning gold, so they weren't satisfied with silver; bronze medalists tended to focus on how close they came to not winning a medal at all, so they were just happy to be on the medal stand. How we feel isn't determined by objective circumstances. If that were the case, silver medalists would always be happier than bronze medalists because of objectively better results. But how we feel isn't circumstantial. It is perceptual. Our feelings are determined by our subjective focus. Your focus determines your reality. The outcome of your life will be determined by your outlook on life.

You know better than I,” he said, “that all courts-martial are farces and that you’re really paying for the crimes of other people, because this time we’re going to win the war at any price. Wouldn’t you have done the same in my place?” General Moncada got up to clean his thick horn-rimmed glasses on his shirttail. “Probably,” he said. “But what worries me is not your shooting me, because after all, for people like us it’s a natural death.” He lais his glasses on the bed and took off his watch and chain. “What worries me,” he went on “is that out of so much and thinking about them so much, you’ve ended up as bad as they are. And no ideal in life is worth that much baseness.” He took off his wedding ring and the medal of the Virgin of Help and put them alongside his glasses and watch. “At this rate,” he concluded, “you’ll not only be the most despotic and bloody dictator in our history, but you’ll shoot my dear friend Ursula in an attempt to pacify your conscience.

You could eat in the finest restaurants, you could partake in every sensual pleasure, you could sing on stage in São Paulo to twenty thousand people, you could soak up whole thunderstorms of applause, you could travel to the ends of the Earth, you could be followed by millions on the internet, you could win Olympic medals, but this was all meaningless without love. And when she thought of her root life, the fundamental problem with it, the thing that had left her vulnerable, really, was the absence of love. Even her brother hadn’t wanted her in that life. There had been no one, once Volts had died. She had loved no one, and no one had loved her back. She had been empty, her life had been empty, walking around, faking some kind of human normality like a sentient mannequin of despair. Just the bare bones of getting through. Yet there, right there in that garden in Cambridge, under that dull grey sky, she felt the power of it, the terrifying power of caring deeply and being cared for deeply. Okay, her parents were still dead in this life but here there was Molly, there was Ash, there was Joe. There was a net of love to break her fall.

Suddenly, he wanted some credit for it. He wanted someone to thank him for not crapping on the institution of love. He wanted someone to thank him for not being yet another dilettante. He wanted someone to thank him for quitting poetry. He wanted some great poet to thank him for quitting poetry instead of desecrating it with his amateurishness. He wanted some unborn child to thank him for not conceiving her and not leaving her a hope chest full of mawkish villanelles. He wanted some sort of organization of martyrs to give him an award. He wanted to be decorated for not putting up a fuss. He wanted to be the president of forgettable people. He wanted there to be a competition for the least competitive person, and he wanted to win that competition. He wanted some sort of badge or outfit or medal or key or hat. He wanted to be asked to stand. He wanted to be considered. He wanted to be considered in earnest before being ignored. He wanted all the insane and beautiful and passionate people in the world to take one moment of silence in gratitude for the ones who had ceded them the stage-- he, the unread poet, the sacrifice, the schoolteacher-- he wanted one goddamned moment of appreciation.

I work in theoretical computer science: a field that doesn’t itself win Fields Medals (at least not yet), but that has occasions to use parts of math that have won Fields Medals. Of course, the stuff we use cutting-edge math for might itself be dismissed as “ivory tower self-indulgence.” Except then the cryptographers building the successors to Bitcoin, or the big-data or machine-learning people, turn out to want the stuff we were talking about at conferences 15 years ago—and we discover to our surprise that, just as the mathematicians gave us a higher platform to stand on, so we seem to have built a higher platform for the practitioners. The long road from Hilbert to Gödel to Turing and von Neumann to Eckert and Mauchly to Gates and Jobs is still open for traffic today. Yes, there’s plenty of math that strikes even me as boutique scholasticism: a way to signal the brilliance of the people doing it, by solving problems that require years just to understand their statements, and whose “motivations” are about 5,000 steps removed from anything Caplan or Bostrom would recognize as motivation. But where I part ways is that there’s also math that looked to me like boutique scholasticism, until Greg Kuperberg or Ketan Mulmuley or someone else finally managed to explain it to me, and I said: “ah, so that’s why Mumford or Connes or Witten cared so much about this. It seems … almost like an ordinary applied engineering question, albeit one from the year 2130 or something, being impatiently studied by people a few moves ahead of everyone else in humanity’s chess game against reality. It will be pretty sweet once the rest of the world catches up to this.

When I first started to run the Jingu Gaien course, Toshihiko Seko was still an active runner and he used this course too. The S&B team used this course every day for training, and over time we naturally grew to know each other by sight. Back then I used to jog there before seven a.m. — when the traffic wasn’t bad, there weren’t as many pedestrians, and the air was relatively clean—and the S&B team members and I would often pass each other and nod a greeting. On rainy days we’d exchange a smile, a guess-we’re-both-havingit-tough kind of smile. I remember two young runners in particular, Taniguchi and Kanei. They were both in their late twenties, both former members of the Waseda University track team, where they’d been standouts in the Hakone relay race. After Seko was named manager of the S&B team, they were expected to be the two young stars of the team. They were the caliber of runner expected to win medals at the Olympics someday, and hard training didn’t faze them. Sadly, though, they were killed in a car accident when the team was training together in Hokkaido in the summer. I’d seen with my own eyes the tough regimen they’d put themselves through, and it was a real shock when I heard the news of their deaths. It hurt me to hear this, and I felt it was a terrible waste. Even now, when I run along Jingu Gaien or Asakasa Gosho, sometimes I remember these other runners. I’ll round a corner and feel like I should see them coming toward me, silently running, their breath white in the morning air. And I always think this: They put up with such strenuous training, and where did their thoughts, their hopes and dreams, disappear to? When people pass away, do their thoughts just vanish?

For years before the Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps won the gold at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, he followed the same routine at every race. He arrived two hours early.1 He stretched and loosened up, according to a precise pattern: eight hundred mixer, fifty freestyle, six hundred kicking with kickboard, four hundred pulling a buoy, and more. After the warm-up he would dry off, put in his earphones, and sit—never lie down—on the massage table. From that moment, he and his coach, Bob Bowman, wouldn’t speak a word to each other until after the race was over. At forty-five minutes before the race he would put on his race suit. At thirty minutes he would get into the warm-up pool and do six hundred to eight hundred meters. With ten minutes to go he would walk to the ready room. He would find a seat alone, never next to anyone. He liked to keep the seats on both sides of him clear for his things: goggles on one side and his towel on the other. When his race was called he would walk to the blocks. There he would do what he always did: two stretches, first a straight-leg stretch and then with a bent knee. Left leg first every time. Then the right earbud would come out. When his name was called, he would take out the left earbud. He would step onto the block—always from the left side. He would dry the block—every time. Then he would stand and flap his arms in such a way that his hands hit his back. Phelps explains: “It’s just a routine. My routine. It’s the routine I’ve gone through my whole life. I’m not going to change it.” And that is that. His coach, Bob Bowman, designed this physical routine with Phelps. But that’s not all. He also gave Phelps a routine for what to think about as he went to sleep and first thing when he awoke. He called it “Watching the Videotape.”2 There was no actual tape, of course. The “tape” was a visualization of the perfect race. In exquisite detail and slow motion Phelps would visualize every moment from his starting position on top of the blocks, through each stroke, until he emerged from the pool, victorious, with water dripping off his face. Phelps didn’t do this mental routine occasionally. He did it every day before he went to bed and every day when he woke up—for years. When Bob wanted to challenge him in practices he would shout, “Put in the videotape!” and Phelps would push beyond his limits. Eventually the mental routine was so deeply ingrained that Bob barely had to whisper the phrase, “Get the videotape ready,” before a race. Phelps was always ready to “hit play.” When asked about the routine, Bowman said: “If you were to ask Michael what’s going on in his head before competition, he would say he’s not really thinking about anything. He’s just following the program. But that’s not right. It’s more like his habits have taken over. When the race arrives, he’s more than halfway through his plan and he’s been victorious at every step. All the stretches went like he planned. The warm-up laps were just like he visualized. His headphones are playing exactly what he expected. The actual race is just another step in a pattern that started earlier that day and has been nothing but victories. Winning is a natural extension.”3 As we all know, Phelps won the record eight gold medals at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. When visiting Beijing, years after Phelps’s breathtaking accomplishment, I couldn’t help but think about how Phelps and the other Olympians make all these feats of amazing athleticism seem so effortless. Of course Olympic athletes arguably practice longer and train harder than any other athletes in the world—but when they get in that pool, or on that track, or onto that rink, they make it look positively easy. It’s more than just a natural extension of their training. It’s a testament to the genius of the right routine.

It’s experience that has value, not possessions. We desire possessions because we think they’ll make us happier, but extensive research shows that once our basic survival needs are met, increased possessions don’t boost happiness levels. Meditation gives us the option of going straight to happiness and skipping the intermediate step of possessions. Acquiring them takes a lot of work and time, and all that effort can take us out of flow. We can spend a 40-year career amassing the possessions and money that we believe will give us happiness in retirement. Skipping the amassing stage and going straight to bliss gives us the end goal at the beginning. We win the gold medal before the contest even begins. Play doesn’t happen in an imaginary future in which our lives are perfect. Play happens now. We can become billionaires of happy experiences, the bank vaults of our minds overflowing with joy. That’s the only currency that counts. We’ve then acquired the end state without going through the intermediate state of getting stuff. We’ve loaded the dice, so that any and every roll produces bliss.

It’s experience that has value, not possessions. We desire possessions because we think they’ll make us happier, but extensive research shows that once our basic survival needs are met, increased possessions don’t boost happiness levels. Meditation gives us the option of going straight to happiness and skipping the intermediate step of possessions. Acquiring them takes a lot of work and time, and all that effort can take us out of flow. We can spend a 40-year career amassing the possessions and money that we believe will give us happiness in retirement. Skipping the amassing stage and going straight to bliss gives us the end goal at the beginning. We win the gold medal before the contest even begins. Play doesn’t happen in an imaginary future in which our lives are perfect. Play happens now. We can become billionaires of happy experiences, the bank vaults of our minds overflowing with joy. That’s the only currency that counts. We’ve then acquired the end state without going through the intermediate state of getting stuff. We’ve loaded the dice, so that any and every roll produces bliss. Why not live like that every day? DEEPENING PRACTICES Here are practices you can do this week to integrate the information in this chapter into your life: Releasing the Suffering Self: That’s the theme of this chapter’s companion meditation. Use the link below to listen to this free 15-minute meditation each morning. Play the “Name Your Demon” Game: Give the selfing part of yourself a funny personal name, or ask it what its name is and write down the answer. One woman christened hers “Sticky.” Another, “Yuggo.” This exercise separates you from identification with the demon, and reminds you that you’re in control. Make the Subject-Object Shift: Whenever you find your mind wandering during meditation, simply thank your DMN by name (e.g., “Thanks, Yuggo!”) and then move your attention back to Focus. Mindfulness App: As a way of becoming mindful, enroll in the Harvard wandering mind study by using the link below to download the smartphone app. Time in Nature: Spend time in nature at least three times this week. Write those times in your calendar now, and treat them as seriously as you’d treat a doctor’s appointment. This exercise in self-care is a way of centering your mind and nurturing yourself. Journaling: In your new personal journal, write down the insights you have this week. Notice the way your mind works in meditation, and describe it in your journal. Just a few words are enough, like, “Had a hard time getting to a good place this morning. Lots of mind wandering, but I settled down in 15 minutes.

Then, in the corridors outside, in the noisy confusion of leave-taking, a boy had thrown an arm about Keating’s shoulders and whispered: “Run on home and get out of the soup-and-fish, Pete, and it’s Boston for us tonight, just our own gang; I’ll pick you up in an hour.” Ted Shlinker had urged: “Of course you’re coming, Pete. No fun without you. And, by the way, congratulations and all that sort of thing. No hard feelings. May the best man win.” Keating had thrown his arm about Shlinker’s shoulders; Keating’s eyes had glowed with an insistent kind of warmth, as if Shlinker were his most precious friend; Keating’s eyes glowed like that on everybody. He had said: “Thanks, Ted, old man. I really do feel awful about that A.G.A. medal—I think you were the one for it, but you never can tell what possesses those old fogies.” And now Keating was on his way home through the soft darkness, wondering how to get away from his mother for the night.

I define failure as an outcome that deviates from desired results, whether that be failing to win a hoped-for gold medal, an oil tanker spilling thousands of tons of raw oil into the ocean instead of arriving safely in a harbor, a start-up that dives downward, or overcooking the fish meant for dinner. In short, failure is a lack of success. Next, I define errors (synonymous with mistakes) as unintended deviations from prespecified standards, such as procedures, rules, or policies.

Why did silver-medaling Olympic competitors in the study feel as if they’d failed, while their bronze-medaling counterparts felt a measure of success? Psychologists say it’s caused by “counterfactual thinking”—the human tendency to frame events in terms of “what if” or “if only.” The silver medalists, disappointed at not having won gold, framed their performance as a failure relative to winning gold. Those who came in third place framed the result as a success—they earned a medal at the Olympics! They were acutely aware of how easily they might have missed the chance to stand on the Olympic podium in glory and not come home with a medal at all. The bronze medalists had reframed their result—from a loss to a gain. That simple—and scientifically valid—reframe gave them joy instead of regret.

The goal of all this athleticism wasn’t to win medals or even gain fitness. It was, like everything else with the Stoics, a way to practice virtue—specifically the virtues of self-discipline, courage, and endurance.

from Berlin for much of August, but Jesse Owens, a little-known son of Alabama sharecroppers, made history at the games. He sprinted and leaped for four gold medals and received several stadium-shaking ovations from viewers, Nazis included. When Owens arrived back in the states to a ticker tape parade, he hoped he had also managed to change Americans’ racist ideas. That was one race he could not win. In no time, Owens was running against horses and dogs to stay out of poverty, talking about how the Nazis had treated him better than Americans.13

You could eat in the finest restaurants, you could partake in every sensual pleasure, you could sing on stage in Sao Paulo to twenty thousand people, you could soak up whole thunderstorms of applause, you could travel to the ends of the Earth, you could be followed by millions on the internet, you could win Olympic medals, but this was all meaningless without love.

Because too often our view of success is about some external bullshit idea of achievement – an Olympic medal, the ideal husband, a good salary. And we have all these metrics that we try and reach. When really success isn’t something you measure, and life isn’t a race you can win. It’s all . . . bollocks, actually .

Why should we care so much about a mere £700,000? Let’s be clear on this point: Vote Leave’s scheme was the largest known breach of campaign finance law in British history. But even if it wasn’t, elections, like a 100-meter sprint in the Olympics, are zero-sum games, where the winner takes all. Whoever comes first, even if it’s by just a few votes or milliseconds, wins the whole race: They get to sit in the public office. They get the gold medal. They get to name your Supreme Court justices. They get to take your country out of the European Union. The only difference, of course, is that if you are caught cheating in the Olympics, you get disqualified and lose your medal. There are no discussions of whether the doped athlete “would have won anyway”—the integrity of the sport demands a clean race. But in politics, we do not presume integrity as a necessary prerequisite to our democracy. There are harsher punishments for athletes who cheat in sport than for campaigns that cheat in elections.

Because too often our view of success is about some external bullshit idea of achievement – an Olympic medal, the ideal husband, a good salary. And we have all these metrics that we try and reach. When really success isn’t something you measure, and life isn’t a race you can win. It’s all . . . bollocks, actually . .

On the outside, I appear calm and detached to a fault. That’s how I got the reputation as a snarky diva, defense mechanism or not. My resting bitch face could win a gold medal at the Olympics. This dickhead has nothing on me.

And . . . and the thing is . . . the thing is . . . what we consider to be the most successful route for us to take, actually isn’t. Because too often our view of success is about some external bullshit idea of achievement – an Olympic medal, the ideal husband, a good salary. And we have all these metrics that we try and reach. When really success isn’t something you measure, and life isn’t a race you can win. It’s all . . . bollocks, actually . . .

morality is an illusion, ethics is an intellectual exercise. All that matters is sides: our side, their side. Sides are everything. All I want is for our side to win, no matter what, no matter how bad we have to be. .. Morality’s just the winning side awarding itself a medal.

The boy’s first day of school in the North, he was assigned to a grade lower than the one he’d been in where he had come from, and the teacher couldn’t understand his southern accent. When she asked him his name, he said he was called J.C. The teacher misheard him and, from that day forward, called him Jesse instead. So did everyone else in this new world he was in. He would forever be known as Jesse Owens, not by his given name. He would go on to win four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, becoming the first American in the history of track and field to do so in a single Olympics and disproving the Aryan notions of his Nazi hosts. It made headlines throughout the United States that Adolf Hitler, who had watched the races, had refused to shake hands with Owens, as he had with white medalists. But Owens found that in Nazi Germany, he had been able to stay in the same quarters and eat with his white teammates, something he could not do in his home country. Upon his return, there was a ticker-tape parade in New York. Afterward, he was forced to ride the freight elevator to his own reception at the Waldorf-Astoria. “I wasn’t invited to shake hands with Hitler,” he wrote in his autobiography. “But I wasn’t invited to the White House to shake hands with the President either. I came back to my native country, and I could not ride in the front of the bus. I had to go to the back door. I couldn’t live where I wanted. Now, what’s the difference?

You could eat in the finest restaurants, you could partake in every sensual pleasure, you could sing on stage in Sao Paulo to twenty thousand people, you could soak up whole thunderstorms of applause, you could travel to the ends of the earth, you could be followed by millions on the internet, you could win Olympic medals, but this all was meaningless without love.

An Olympic gold medal wrestling coach once told me that there are two principal types of athletes, those with talent and those with work ethic, and the greatest possess both.

Games and sports is about fun and making you a better person not a bitter person. Sports is about developing your character and spirit . It is not just about winning medals or trophies, but it is also about winning people's heart, love , support and respect.

whether flying or on the bus, is to wear compression clothing. Either go for below-the-knee stockings or full-leg tights, but ensure they’re medical grade and offer a graduated fit. They help blood return to your heart and stop your legs feeling bloated and heavy. Wear them for the whole journey and remove them once you arrive.

He began teaching me the basics of technique but put equal emphasis on the mental game. He taught me that the vital key was the ability to let go of the outcome. You must be able to repeat the best version of your shot as many times as you can, exactly the same way. Any shot where your try harder, which he referred to as the 'fancy shot' will throw off your technique. Even if you're down to the last arrow to win the gold medal you have to think of it as just another shot, rather than trying for an extra good shot. You can't be invested in the outcome. Just take the shot.