Haijme no Ippo is one of my favourite anime (and TV shows) of all time, and it’s a boxing anime.
One of the main characters, Ichiro Miyata, is the son of a world-class boxer whose career ended suddenly one day, during a fight that he was supposedly dominating.
Ichiro says that his father’s opponent, who was physically stronger but technically much inferior, just landed a lucky punch out of nowhere.
But the Miyata Sr. countered back:
In boxing, there is no such thing as a lucky punch.
Any real punch has some force behind it, which means that the person who threw it was still in the fight.
That person had not given up on winning yet.
A weak ass punch from a fighter who has already “quit” could never knock out a world class boxer.
I think this is one of the most life-changing dialogues I’ve ever seen in any work of fiction.
How much of success in life depends on simply staying in the fight? Whether it’s business, or sport, or relationships / marriage, or anything like that?
How many people have made breakthroughs by simply sticking it out and doing the work beyond the point that most people consider a “lost cause” — and then being told someday that they got lucky?
