Every Second Counts: Book Review

“There are parts unknown with regard to human performance & those are the parts when it is just about pain & forfeit. How do you make yourself do it? You remind yourself that you’re fulfilling your obligations to get the best from yourself, and that all achievement is born out of sacrifice.”

There are few books that you read. Then there are few books that leave you inspired. They sow in you a seed of striving for what you really want from life. And that experience of suffering is like the experience of exploring of finding something unexpected & revelatory.

This extract of Lance Armstrong’s life journey is exactly what you’d want to read to count & live every second as it occurs. The book starts with Armstrong’s robust comeback in 1999 when he stunned the world by winning the Tour De France (an annual multiple stage bicycle race primarily held in France) after combating testicular cancer for over 18 months.

Armstrong makes a good example of an excellent manager by tackling the issues of balancing work & home situated 8000 km apart.

Armstrong shares details of making it back as an athlete, a survivor, and father to three kids, and a person to heed advice from by cancer patients. This book is a deep acknowledgement of the fact that even being cancer ridden for a couple of years, its reminiscence stays forever. He gets into the intricacy of his philosophies of training, competing, winning & failing.  He establishes a fact that working as a team, believing in oneself, having faith in others and supporting each other till the end and beyond, makes you a different, better person.

He also recounts the work done by him, jointly with his supporters, for the Lance Armstrong Foundation he set up following his miraculous recovery and his techniques of connecting with the cancer patients through his tales of cancer survival. Moreover, he unfolds his experience of working with the fire-fighters of New York after the 9/11 attacks that left the world with a ghastly impact.

Every Second Counts is a book that will give you an explicit and a perspicuous picture of the person Lance Armstrong is and of the momentous challenges he meets. It is a story you’d want to retell and recommend it to others.