Never Say Die

I was watching an MTV special on completive eating. It focused on a few of the competitors, particularly Takeru "Tsunami" Kobayashi--6-time winner of the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest.

During one of the segments, he went to a restaurant and ate twenty-one pounds of pasta and other food. Looking at him eat made me gag. As with most people, I was impressed with how much food he could fit in his stomach.

What really inspired me though was when he talked about throwing up. (Throwing up is illegal in competitive eating.) He said that he always hits a point he feels like he is going to throw up. The trick is to not throw up. If you don’t throw up, it trains your mind and body to deal with the problem. If, on the other hand, you do throw up, it causes your body to get used to throwing up when it hits that point. This leads to always throwing up.

This reminded me of Mystery and how he said approach anxiety never goes away. (ie even he gets nervous before approaching a girl).

The difference between successful and unsuccessful person is not that one has less problems to overcome, but instead that the successful person has trained himself to hammer past those problems.

It’s easy to say that Kobayashi is a better competitive eater than me because he has a bigger stomach, but that’s not the case. He feels the same gag reflex that I feel. His need to barf is no greater than mine. The difference between him and me is that he has trained his body and mind to never let that gag reflex take over. He has trained himself to not accept failure

If you’re faced with a problem and you always take the easy way out, you will have trained your mind and body to always do the easy thing. But if you never accept failure, you will have trained your body and mind in the opposite, and success will surely follow.