How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.
Interpretation
Your mindset during failures influences your future successes.
This quote highlights the significance of one's attitude and perspective during setbacks. A positive and resilient mindset when confronted with defeat not only shapes the process of recovery but also affects how quickly one can achieve success in the future. It suggests that maintaining a constructive outlook can expedite the journey to victory after experiencing loss.
In practice
In a motivational speech addressing athletes about resilience.
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
The fact that you can only do a little is no excuse for doing nothing.
Rarely are opportunities presented to you in a perfect way. In a nice little box with a yellow bow on top. 'Here, open it, it's perfect. You'll love it.' Opportunities -- the good ones -- are messy, confusing and hard to recognize. They're risky. They challenge you.
It's absolutely wrong that I don't want guys to challenge me. And the people who say that aren't in the room.
There were so many fellows ranked over me I couldn't just whoop them all. I had to out-shadow them by talking.
There's nothing I would retire for, so I won't retire.
I couldn't disappoint people. I did not want to fail and exhaust myself, because I was the kind of runner who trained so little that I couldn't race again within another 10 days.
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