As she stays up well past her bedtime night after night, fueled by a late afternoon Starbucks caffeine kick and sheer determination, Jane has been pondering what lessons we, as businesswomen, can learn from the Olympic Games. Watching a 41-year-old Dara Torres win two silver medals and watching a 38-year-old Constantina Tomescu win gold in the marathon assures us one is never too old to succeed. (38 and 41 in the sports world are equivalent to 58 and 61...or maybe 68 and 71...in the real world). One learns that years of toiling in obscurity can sometimes pay off in the biggest way.
On the other hand, hard work is not always a guarantee of success (although Jane believes that every athlete who has reached the Olympics certainly has reason to feel quite proud). The missteps of a gymnast who fails to mount the balance beam correctly or a riflest who shoots too early (names will not be mentioned so as not to rub salt in sodium–laden wounds) are just two microcosms of what happens to all of us during our professional careers.
After all, everyone makes mistakes. But at least in our professional careers, millions of people aren't watching. Nevertheless, it is how we, and the athletes, react to the bobbles and the misfires that defines whether we are champions or losers. Do we react with grace or with the determination to do better next time? Or do we fling our proverbial bronze medals to the ground and just give up?
It is hard to imagine that for so many of these athletes, years and years of hard work and training come down to two hours or two minutes or even 20 seconds every quadrennial. Can you imagine, dear reader, if success in your field, after an eternity of education and years of hard work, came down to such a wee time frame? Could you perform under the pressure? Given that perspective, it does make the daily pressures that we, as businesswomen, deal with seem a little easier and the miscues we see during the Olympics all the more understandable.
