Win or Die Trying.

Win or die trying. When a Spartan mother sent her son to war, she handed him his shield and said: with this, or on this. Come home carrying it, or be carried home upon it. There are only two outcomes. Victory, or death. What's missing is the third option, the one most people live their entire lives inside: running. This is a film about how to stop quitting, told through 2,500 years of philosophy and art: Caesar crossing the Rubicon, Demosthenes in his underground room, Seneca, Epictetus, Lao Tzu, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Miyamoto Musashi, the Bhagavad Gita, the Hagakure, Socrates, Plato's chariot, Confucius and Diogenes. Why people give up, and how to become the kind of person who doesn't. "ἢ τὰν ἢ ἐπὶ τᾶς" (with this, or on this). A Spartan mother to her son, as recorded by Plutarch. SOURCES Plutarch, Sayings of Spartan Women, Sayings of Spartans and Life of Demosthenes · Suetonius, Life of Julius Caesar · Seneca, Letters, On Providence and On the Shortness of Life · Epictetus, Discourses and Enchiridion · Tao Te Ching · Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics · Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, The Gay Science and Daybreak · Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings and Dokkōdō · Bhagavad Gita · Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure · Plato, Apology and Phaedrus · Heraclitus, fragments · Confucius, Analects · Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers · Tertullian, Apologeticus ARTWORK Public-domain paintings and prints from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, SMK - National Gallery of Denmark, the Rijksmuseum, the National Gallery of Art and Wikimedia Commons. Image credits (CC BY 4.0, creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons): - An Alchemist Seated at a Furnace, Turning Away in Thought (oil painting), Wellcome Collection - Léopold Lowenstam after Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Sculpture in Ancient Rome (etching), Wellcome Collection - Hans Olde, Portrait of Friedrich Nietzsche, Museum Neues Weimar. Photo: Dguendel - Curt Stoeving, Por