The Will to Succeed

Motivation is the reason or reasons one has for acting or behaving in a particular way according to Google. The three milers in The Perfect Mile attempt to achieve the four-minute mile, and they each have different forms of motivation. There are two milers that achieve success because their motive impelled them to prevail. What is motivation?

Some forms of inspiration are driven from defeat. The Garden City’s football team’s catalyst before their football game was, “Having lost to the rival Red Devils in each of the past two seasons was motivation enough for Garden City, Which rolled to a 68-20 victory that ended by the 45-point mercy rule late in the fourth quarter”(Whitson 1). Having lost two seasons in a row by the same team, caused each player to exert themselves to their highest capability to vanquish the Red Devils. The Lubbock tennis team, just like Garden City, was defeated, but the Lubbock tennis team lost at regional finals. “’Last year we fell short and lost in the finals of the regionals to Wichita Falls Rider, and basically we started working for this very thing at that point last year,’ Dotson said”(“Finding Motivation No Problem” 1). Their melancholy was used as fuel to ignite triumph that upcoming year. In the book The Perfect Mile, Bannister embraced this concept when Neal Bascomb said, “Bannister had stepped up his training. His failure in Helsinki had left him with a need to redeem himself- to deal with ‘unfinished business’”(Bascomb 88). “But the sting from his devastating loss at the Olympics had driven him to continue running and to seek the four-minute mile as evidence that his approach to sport still had merit”(Bascomb 242). Bannister desired to have satisfaction with his achievements and wanted to close o...

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...he could prove himself worthy of breaking the four-minute mile barrier. Anger benefited in Santee’s case and Shanahan’s life. “There was no score when Tkachuk, only 22 at the time, caught Shanahan with a high-stick, opening his lip. ‘It was an accident, but I know he was (ticked) off,’ Tkachuk said recently. The first (goal), I shot it and it deflected off a couple of their defensemen and went in”(Rutherford 2-3). Shanahan’s anger facilitated his team to win the game because he expressed his anger by being competitive and aggressive on the ice.

Motivation comes in all different forms, and it depends on how a person perceives it. Motivation can be anything, and affects each person differently. A person can have multiple ways of inspiration that encourage them to succeed. A person has to be at the right place in the right time, and it’s just a matter of finding it.