Adopting a gold medal mindset puts business on path of success

The most watched movie in my house is Cool Runnings. The story was so inspirational it was made into a Disney movie. It was the country’s first ever appearance at the winter Olympics.

Jamaica’s Bobsled Team came out medal-less, but certainly won the hearts of Olympic viewers at the 1988 Calgary games.

Some 28 years after a group of Jamaicans captured imaginations at the Calgary Winter Olympics, the Olympics are still looking to inspire a new generation.

During the same year, Robert Wangila “Napunyi” has the distinction of being the only African ever to win an Olympic gold medal in boxing at the Seoul Olympics. He is the only Kenyan to have won Olympic gold in a sport other than athletics.

He was born in Nairobi on September 3, 1967. Wangila was well known as “Roba” in the Jericho neighbourhood where he grew up. He started his boxing career with the Kenya Breweries boxing club after earning a job there as a truck driver. By 1986 he was already considered the best welterweight boxer in Kenya at age 21.

Before the Seoul Games, Wangila, an employee of Kenya Breweries, was ranked an outsider in the Olympics medal bracket. But the then 21-year-old pugilist upset the formbook to beat Frenchman Laurent Boudaouni to lift the gold medal.

Why am I all so excited about the Olympics? It is because during the 1988 Olympics I was a 10-year-old Class Four pupil.

But the memories have never left me. I was impressed with the athletes’ strength to push themselves and fight till the end. They taught me that sometimes we just need to fight off the pain, take a deep breath and finish the race.

Our efforts won’t always give us the “gold medal” but finishing the race would give us peace.

Most of the Olympians devote their life to make it to the games but things do not always go as planned. It is easy to get discouraged when we have put our hearts into something but we should keep trying.

The Olympics teach us that we should learn from our mistakes, ask for feedback and be humble. As Hellen Keller said: “Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet.

Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.”

Many future entrepreneurs learn important lessons about life while playing sports. Lessons about teamwork, winning and losing gracefully, and the importance of good leadership are all learned from the athletes.

But it is easy to forget these lessons in our day-to-day business lives.

However, watching the Olympics reminds us of those lessons. I would like to mention three that can help us as entrepreneurs.

The first lesson is that the strongest will often prevail in the Olympics. Just in the same way, many businesses will face immense challenges on the road to success. However, they will also be presented with opportunities to overcome these challenges.

Capitalising on your chances is a matter of being dedicated and sacrificing for the greater good of the business.

When you suffer an inevitable setback, you can not let yourself succumb to doubts. You have to pivot, hone in on the strengths that have carried you so far, and overcome adversity with perseverance.

The second lesson is on perseverance. An old saying goes, “The race is not always to the swift, but to those who keep on running.”

In business and on the field, success goes to the person who gets back up every time he’s knocked down. Even small failures do not stop him. He keeps trying, day after day, year after year.

And of course there is the lesson on exercising good judgment. Olympic athletes often must make split-second decisions that make or break an entire career.

In the same way, while an entrepreneur often has more time to carefully weigh out each decision, his judgment must be sound. A successful business is often the result of a series of good decisions over many years.

As you can imagine, my kids and I can not wait for the Olympics to start. With gold, silver and bronze medals at stake and bragging rights for the taking. Because the Olympics are much more than just games.

Within each event, on every team, and in every individual athlete, there are shining examples of what it means to be a successful small business owner in the world today.

Mr Waswa is a management and HR specialist and managing director of Outdoors Africa. E-mail: [email protected].