Go After That Thing That You Want

The Will To Win

If you want a thing bad enough
To go out and fight for it,
Work day and night for it,
Give up your time and your peace and
your sleep for it

If only desire of it
Makes you quite mad enough
Never to tire of it,
Makes you hold all other things tawdry
and cheap for it

If life seems all empty and useless without it
And all that you scheme and you dream is about it,

If gladly you’ll sweat for it,
Fret for it, Plan for it,
Lose all your terror of God or man for it,

If you’ll simply go after that thing that you want.
With all your capacity,
Strength and sagacity,
Faith, hope and confidence, stern pertinacity,

If neither cold poverty, famished and gaunt,
Nor sickness nor pain
Of body or brain
Can turn you away from the thing that you want,

If dogged and grim you besiege and beset it,
You’ll get it!

– Berton Braley

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Natalie du Toit (born 29 January 1984) is a South African swimmer. She is best known for the gold medals she won at the 2004 Summer Paralympics as well as the Commonwealth Games, and she became the first swimmer with disability to compete in regular Olympic Games (at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.)

Limitless

Aristotle is claimed to have said once something like this: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit.”

How many times do you tell yourself that something is too hard, that you’re not going to make it, that you’re not strong enough or anything like that?

Well, I’ll tell you that there are not many limits to what you can achieve about your life and yourself if you really set your mind and will into it. Let’s see some examples here, and I am pretty excited about those because it really motivates me to see the human ability of overcoming difficulties.

Aimee Mullins was born without her fibular bones. She had both of her legs amputated below her knees when she was about a year old. That would have definitely made her life somewhat harder than the average people’s lives, and maybe you’d feel pity for her as your first impression. Well, think again.

Aimee Mullins is a champion sprinter who has set world records at the 1996 Paralympics in Atlanta; she is also an actress, fashion model and activist, and in 2008 she was the official Ambassador for the Tribeca/ESPN Sports Film Festival. She once said about her disability: “From an identity standpoint, what does it mean to have a disability? Pamela Anderson has more prosthetic in her body than I do. Nobody calls her disabled.”

Here she talks at TED about how her legs allow her to go beyond her regular limits.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQ0iMulicgg

So, that’s not just one person’s achievement; on Youtube, a young boy named Max Runham has near 500 subscribers and over 18,000 views of his videos playing the guitar, and he sounds really good to me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAHhKw-mPbo&feature=plcp&context=C455e5d5VDvjVQa1PpcFN9t1RAxyPdqNZiDJpz4OXxvGrS6mv6HQ8%3D

When I was a kid, people used to say that in the future we would be able to build prosthetic devices that enable nerves to feel and control artificial limbs, just like in science fiction movies. Thanks to those who worked really hard and believed in it, that is a near reality as the article below shows. How many people do you think have ever said that it was never going to be possible?

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-02/new-neural-interfaces-can-bring-electric-feel-artifical-limbs

No matter how hard you fall, what difficulties you find along the way, life is always going to be what you do about it; you are going to be forged and measured by what you overcome to succeed. If there is something indomitable, that is human spirit. Have you been looking at yours lately?