Man In The Arena

I found myself thinking today about a blog post I wrote three years ago—Be the (Wo)man in the Arena. For some reason, Roosevelt’s words came back to me with the same force they had the first time I read them.

In 1910, Theodore Roosevelt delivered a speech called Citizenship in a Republic. Buried inside it was a passage that would outlive everything else he said. It became known as The Man in the Arena. And even today, whenever someone comments on someone else—what they did, what they didn’t do, what they could’ve done better—I return to this one idea.

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”