What I learned from the 2024 Olympic Games
Inspired by one of my idols, my UCLA MBA classmate Kerry Edelstein’s LinkedIn post about leadership take-aways from the Olympics, here are my own observations:
Your best people give others acclaim. The moment when Simon Biles and Jordan Chiles bowed to Rebeca Andrade when Andrade won the gold showed not only their admiration and appreciation for another champion but also their giving spirit. To me, that’s what makes the photo iconic.
Come from behind victories are still victories. My son and I listened to the last quarter of USA Basketball’s game versus Serbia. They came back from a 17-point deficit to win. What do you call a game that you almost lost and saved at the last moment? A win. We can all take a lesson from their hard work under duress to remind ourselves, as the old saying goes, “It’s ain’t over ‘til it’s over.”
Never count yourself out. My hero of the games was Evy Leibfarth, who won bronze in whitewater canoe. She missed the kayak singles final and then came in twelfth of twelve to qualify for the canoe finals. As the person with the slowest time in the trials, she had to go first in the finals. She gave it her strongest effort and then watched as only two of the remaining eleven finalists beat her time. Remember that when you are fretting about slowing growth!
Don’t swim in the Seine. If it looks like a cesspool, smells like a cesspool, and feels like a cesspool, it’s probably a cesspool. Don’t let someone tell you they spent $1 billion to clean up the cesspool. Look in the water.
(Thumbnail image courtesy Tom Page, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic)