Regardless of your sentiments of Rocky Balboa, this is one of the greatest speeches ever made in cinema history. The underlying message and the theme is so powerful: Nothing will hit you as hard as life, but it’s how you can handle those hits that count. We’ve all had rough outings, bumps in the road, rough patches, and setbacks that hinder our ability to get somewhere in life. But the difference in determining your success is what you are willing to do to overcome those obstacles. Brick walls are there for one reason: to measure how bad you want something. Are you going to let the brick wall stop you from getting where you want to get, or are you going to do everything in your power to try to either climb over it, go around it, or knock it down. We are all tested with difficult circumstances in life, some no doubt greater than others, but we all have a choice. We can choose to let them defeat us or we can move past them, push forward, and do everything in our power to succeed. We have no one else to blame but us if we don’t get to where we want to be in life. That choice is up to us, and our success is a determinant of our desire to go after what we want, and vice versa.