Armstrong on life
I consider myself someone who reads a fair amount, not necessarily from books, but on the Internet, too. Too much of what I read is technical in nature, or keeping up with current events. A lot of this material is informative, but not nourishing. It makes us smarter, but doesn’t make us better. I won’t stop reading this stuff, because being smart has its advantages; it’s necessary if not sufficient.
However, reading a (nourishing) book on performance psychology recently surfaced this quote by Lance Armstrong that I found compelling. In discussing his experience with cancer, he wrote:
If you asked me to choose between wining the Tour de France and cancer, I would choose cancer. Odd as it sounds, I would rather have the title of cancer survivor than winner of the Tour because of what it has done for me as a man.
I don’t know why I got the illness, but it did wonders for me, and I wouldn’t want to walk away from it. Why would I want to change, even for a day, the most important and shaping event in my life?
The one thing the illness has convinced me of beyond all doubt more than any experience I’ve had as an athlete is that we are much better than we know. We have unrealized capacities that sometimes only emerge in crisis.”
I remembered not much more than we are much better than we know, the rest being easy to fill in. Our goal now should be to determine in what ways are we better than we think we are, to discover where are those opportunities for growth.
We are much better than we know.
