Ryan Hall: Moral Victory
00:00:00.000 | You talked about moral victory. Can you explain how your morality contributes to
00:00:05.000 | the way you see the value of winning? Sure. I think there's absolutely such a thing
00:00:09.600 | as a moral victory and sometimes people that are trying to manipulate you or
00:00:14.040 | trying to get you to buy something will tell you differently and you know there
00:00:16.900 | is there it goes in two directions. For instance let's say you're a blue belt
00:00:20.360 | and you compete against you know a real black belt and there's plenty of people
00:00:23.600 | running around black belts that are not particularly at this point but you know
00:00:26.360 | let's say for instance you're a blue belt and you compete against a real black
00:00:29.280 | belt the likelihood of you winning is almost zero. However if you go out there
00:00:33.480 | and you try hard and you do your best and again whether you come off the mat
00:00:38.160 | you know a winner which would be very fortunate and unlikely but or you come
00:00:41.440 | off the mat you know on the other side of things if you went after it and you
00:00:45.320 | tried and you you know let's say you had some nerves but you kept that in check
00:00:48.720 | and you fought hard you didn't let it get the better of you you know that
00:00:52.280 | would be in my opinion a moral victory and and there would be nothing wrong for
00:00:56.080 | recognizing it as such. Now that's not the same thing as an actual physical
00:00:59.080 | victory but there's nothing wrong with saying let's say your your opponents 260
00:01:04.320 | pounds and you're 120 and you tie they get the decision hey you know I mean
00:01:09.720 | remember that happened to me at the quarterfinal or not the quarterfinal
00:01:12.200 | rather in the the third round at the absolute in the worlds in 2008 you know
00:01:16.500 | and you know it was against a heavyweight or super heavyweight and
00:01:19.360 | ended up 0-0 and I wasn't happy about losing by any stretch of the imagination
00:01:22.040 | but looking back I'm like okay well you know generally speaking if you end up
00:01:25.720 | level considering that I have all of the resources you don't that is you know you
00:01:30.680 | definitely performed a little bit better than I did now at the end of the day you
00:01:33.600 | know wins and losses do matter and you do want to try to make sure that I'm not
00:01:37.520 | shooting for the moral victory I'm shooting for the actual victory but
00:01:40.640 | every now and then it's very very important to keep in mind that you know
00:01:43.680 | am I just asking myself am I conducting myself in a way that I respect that
00:01:47.600 | hopefully other people of value or respect and also a way that I believe is
00:01:51.360 | going to produce actual victory and actual positive results in a long run as
00:01:55.520 | well I think it's important to recognize that because sometimes you'll see people
00:01:58.920 | get very frustrated let's say for instance if I box against people that
00:02:01.920 | are much more experienced than me all the time you know I'm not going to win
00:02:05.320 | that anyone that tells you differently has is either not training with people
00:02:09.480 | that are very good or be they have no idea what they're talking about but what
00:02:14.120 | I can say is hey did I do a little bit better today and better doesn't mean
00:02:17.040 | that I did I land more punches necessary was I more under control was I more able
00:02:20.720 | to kind of keep my keep my focus and execute what I wanted to execute and if
00:02:24.920 | the answer to that is yes you know I'm moving in the right direction so as far
00:02:28.600 | as I'm concerned there's all sorts of different types of moral victory but it
00:02:31.200 | would be the the same thing as you know let's say for instance you know Fedor
00:02:34.880 | slaps your mother you got to hit him you have to he's going to kick the shit out
00:02:39.600 | of you almost certainly but you have to hit him it would not be it would be a
00:02:43.640 | technical like well I didn't get hurt so that's a win if you ran away but that
00:02:48.560 | would be the opposite of the moral victory in that case trying your best
00:02:51.520 | and losing would still be I would say the honorable thing to do so what you're
00:02:54.760 | saying is sometimes you have to pay the price for a moral victory absolutely but
00:02:58.320 | the reality is is that martial arts it doesn't just teach us about how to beat
00:03:01.880 | someone up or technique or this or that that's really not the core of the
00:03:04.460 | martial arts the core of the martial arts is heart discipline dedication
00:03:07.960 | focus and if you have those things they'll always be people better than you
00:03:11.400 | and they'll always be people lesser than you but that's not the only metric by
00:03:15.000 | which you can judge performance or judge a person
00:03:18.920 | [BLANK_AUDIO]