Working hard becomes a habit, a serious kind of fun.
-- Mary Lou Retton
For more about Mary Lou Retton, keep reading....
About the Quote
There are times when we work hard because that is what is expected of us. It is an expectation which is placed on us from the outside, from other people. Most of the time it takes place within the context of force or compulsion of threat. Even if we do our best as we work hard under these circumstances, the end result may not be what it should be.
Ideally, when we work hard at something, it should be because we enjoy what we're doing. Even if we work for a slave driver, we wouldn't care because we're doing what we love to do. Expectations of us come from within, from ourselves. We look forward to reaching our limits and then pushing them forward before we push past them. We look for opportunities to set records, even if no one else would vever know what we did.
Some (More) Information about Mary Lou Retton
The 1984 Los Angeles Summer Games suffered from the boycott of Warsaw Pact/Communist Bloc nations. This was in retaliation for the boycott imposed on the 1980 Moscow Summer Games by the United States and allied nations in response to the 1979 entry of the USSR into Afghanistan. This meant that many of the world's best competitors didn't attent the Olympics in Los Angeles.
However, one Communist Bloc nation attended the 1984 Los Angeles Games: Romania. The gymnastics team was among the best in the world at the time.
At the same time, the world wasn't used to seeing that caliber of skill and talent from American gymnasts. That is, until 1984. The women's gymnastics team would be led by coach BΓ©la KΓ‘rolyi, who had defected from Romania to the United States in the years after he coached Nadia ComΔneci to a Gold Medal at the 1976 MontrΓ©al Summer Games.
These were the circumstances around the Gold Medal won by Mary Lou Retton in 1984. There is the chance that she would have won the Gold Medal anyway had USSR sent its best team to Los Angeles, but we will never know for certain.
-- Source
Post Details
- Index4INDEX image made by @magnacarta using MS Paint.
- Quotes I use for Index4INDEX are stored in an Excel 2007 spreadsheet. Recently I added database functionality for limited searching.
Other Quotes by Mary Lou Retton
- Index4INDEX Card 275: Mary Lou Retton 5
- Index4INDEX Card 269: Mary Lou Retton 4
- Index4INDEX Card 259: Mary Lou Retton 3
- Index4INDEX Card 247: Mary Lou Retton 2
- Index4INDEX Card 233: Mary Lou Retton 1
Other Recent Quotes
- Index4INDEX Card 280: Marcus Aurelius 5
- Index4INDEX Card 279: Shannon Miller 6
- Index4INDEX Card 278: Napoleon Hill 2
πππππππππ
Sign up to become a Keyboard Warrior
Do you like posting short bursts of text? Do it 240-characters at a time at LeoThreads.