Motivational Quotes

My high school baseball coach loved quotes. On almost a daily basis, just after everyone had gotten loose, the whole team would gather in the dugout and wait for instruction. Just before instruction was given some random quote would be read a loud to the team and I suppose the idea was to give us something to think about to keep us from simply going through the motions. I practiced with the varsity my freshman year so I had four solid years of daily quotes during baseball season. I remember one:

"Don't piss down my back and tell me it's raining." - Coach Mike Greene.

This quote is clearly not motivational unless you need to be motivated not to lie to people. Maybe it's my personality and natural cynicism but hearing the words that someone else said in a completely unrelated context has never done anything for me.

My father is also a lover of quotes and over the course of my lifetime I can't think of how many times he's said one or tried to use one to make a point. Again, I remember one:

"Excuses are like assholes. Everybody's got one and they generally stink." - Dad.

Now I'm sure my father isn't the original author of such insightful words but his voice saying them rings out in my head almost anytime I hear someone explain why they failed at just about anything. But again, it's not really motivational.

What I have always found to be a great motivator is challenging myself to overcome whatever barrier might be in front of me. Going into my senior season of high school baseball our team thought we had a shot to win the district title. We were returning almost all of our starters from the year before and we only lost 3-4 games. The local papers that covered our district saw it otherwise. I cut out every single article I could find that predicted we'd finish 3rd, 4th or even middle of the pack in some cases and hung those articles up in the locker room directly above my locker. We ended up having one of the best seasons our high school ever had and lost in the regional tournament because of home town officials on a series of plays that sometimes still wake me up from nightmares.

When I was younger I used the motivation of someone telling me I couldn't throw to work on that aspect of my game. I didn't remember his exact words but when I got home I wrote, "Your arm is your weakness" on a piece of paper and hung it above my bed on the ceiling. I woke up every morning and read those words. It'd piss me off on a daily basis but motivate me to work on it. At some point the motivation changed from gaining arm strength to simply trying to make Mr. Thompson (One of the best baseball minds I've ever met.) eat his words.

My Senior year of college I decided I wanted to do an Ironman triathlon. My friend Chris Durlak told me I couldn't do it. I'm not sure he really doubted me, but I used that as motivation to get myself out of bed to train. Later when I started planning my bike trip around the US he openly said he wasn't going to be my doubter on this one.

Recently I read an article in a cycling magazine that discussed just how easy it is for people to talk about winning, or even say they want to win races, but very few of those people are willing to actually do what it takes to win. Put in the proper training hours or even make themselves hurt to the point that is often necessary during the race itself. The idea of winning is nice. The suffering and sacrifice it often takes to make it happen just isn't worth it for most.

So I guess different people are motivated by different things. Still, I can't fathom how reading the great words of Einstein can possible get people excited to do something better than they would otherwise. I need doubters. I need there to be someone that I can prove wrong. Oddly enough, sometimes I find that person is myself.

So, I'll leave you with this. It's the best I can remember of what I used as my favorite quote in an athlete bio I had to fill out for a triathlon team I used to be on.

"If you need motivational words to get up, turn to google." -Landall.