To Quit Or Not To Quit!

Nastia Liukin was 18 when she won five medals in the 2008 Olympic Games, including a gold medal for the women’s all-around gymnastics competition.

The athlete, television personality and NBC Sports analyst, now 30, credits her parents, world champion gymnasts Valeri Liukin and Anna Kotchneva, for much of her success.

Liukin’s parents moved from Russia to the U.S. when she was two years old; they ran a Texas gymnastics studio and encouraged their young daughter to find activities she was passionate about, gymnastics or not.

“They really wanted me to find my own happiness and identity,” Liukin told Today Parents, recalling that her mom encouraged her to try piano lessons, but Liukin cried on the way to lessons because she wanted to be in the gym. “I think pretty early on they realized truly how much love and passion I had for gymnastics and when they saw that, they weren’t going to take that away from me.”

Still, Liukin recalls there were days — when dealing with an injury or finding the sport difficult — she would tell her mom she wanted to quit.

“She would always say, ‘That’s totally fine. You can quit, but not today.'” said Liukin. “She would make me go back to the gym the next day and the next day until I had at least one good day. Then she’d say, ‘OK, now you can quit, we’ll enroll you back in the public school and find another activity you want to do.'”

“I would always be like, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, I never said I wanted to quit.'” Liukin continued. “Basically the moral was you can never quit on a bad day and I think it’s super important because especially as kids — or even me now as an adult — sometimes you go through things in life and it’s not going your way and you want to give up, but you can’t quit on a bad day. It’s so important to instill that in your kids.”

This was written by Terri Peters.

Obviously, there are no formulas when it comes to things like this but we do feel that it is not wise to quit on a bad day!