Lance Armstrong on dealing with Pain.
Submitted by Erik Vermeulen on Fri, 2010-06-04 13:23
“Pain is temporary. Quitting lasts forever.” Lance Armstrong
Pain and pleasure are the only true motivators in life. As normal human beings we take actions to either avoid pain or experience pleasure. But some people seek out pain as a means to an end.
It is as inevitable as tomorrow’s sunrise that there will be time any event and in training, that you suffer – both mentally and physically. Lance Armstrong’s words have become a strong anchor for me when this happens. In both business and sport.
When Armstrong coined this phrase, he explained that quitting when things get tough would be taking the easy way out. Once you’ve quit (as he could have during chemotherapy) you can never un-quit. You can never go back to that exact moment in the race, that exact moment in time to find out what would have happened if you didn’t quit. The pain however is temporary. At the top of this hill, around the next corner, when you reach the finish line, the pain will stop. It will end. It will soon be dulled by the feeling of victory, anaesthetized by the sense of accomplishment.
