Keep fighting. Push beyond. Don’t give up. Be it self-defense, competition, or anything in life.
If you haven’t heard, in UFC 140 this past weekend, Frank Mir vs. Minotauro Nogueira, Mir won because Norgueira’s arm broke… not sure exactly what happened, looks like joint dislocation (maybe both elbow and shoulder) and not bone breakage, but I can’t find exact medical reports at this time. Either way, it was pretty ugly.
But the details don’t matter. There’s a good lesson to be learned from this.
Never give up.
If you know anything about Nogueira’s career, the man doesn’t give up. He fights until the end, and this was proof. Yeah he finally tapped but only AFTER his arm snapped (the ref saw and immediately stopped the bout anyways). The fight wasn’t over until he couldn’t fight anymore. He kept looking for a way to get out, to escape, to work to his advantage, to turn the fight around, to win.
This is something you have to do with anything in life: don’t give up. You can keep going far longer than you think. Our mind and bodies are programmed to stop well in advance of actual failure as a preservation technique/instinct. You have to learn to push beyond that. It will be uncomfortable, it may not be fun, but it may be what you need in order to succeed, to grow, to improve, to win.
In a self-defense situation, you have to keep going. You get kicked, you get punched, you shot shit, you get stabbed, but you keep fighting. When you’re dead, you’ll be dead and then you can stop fighting. Until that point, you’re not dead and you have no excuse to not keep fighting because you may still make it out alive. Isn’t that the whole point?
Keep fighting. Push beyond. Don’t give up. Be it self-defense, competition, or anything in life.
Stuff From Hsoi 
I disagree. UFC is just a game. Instead of a bruised ego Nogueira has a broken arm. Nogueira now will be out for months and have to rebuild muscle after that. Tap before snap!
On the one hand, I agree with you. I wouldn’t let it go that far myself because, in the context of the sport — which generates income to pay your bills — this is going to put him on the shelf for a long time. Depending upon the extent of the injury, may end his in-ring career. Hard to say, but I’ll defer to his own judgment about his life and his career and how he wishes to carry himself. He knew what he was doing, he made the decision to not tap. My own experiences and in conversations with others, when you get into sparring and sport fighting, you tend to know your limits and have a line drawn as to where you’ll stop. I reckon he had his, and perhaps drew it at a different point than you or I would. His choice. Will it be a regrettable one? only time will tell, and he’s the one that has to live with the decision.
But on the other hand, I disagree… but not in the sport/game context, rather the self-defense and perhaps “everything else in life” context. I still think it demonstrates a key principle of not giving up. The fight will be over when the fight is over and until that point you can and should continue to fight. Too many stories of people getting shot but being determined to survive and they do. And then converse stories of people getting barely wounded by a .22 and falling over dead because they believed “well, I’m shot, I’m dead” and gave right up.