Teens winning Olympic Gold; motivating or depressing?
Did anyone else watch the Olympics recently and wonder; what the hell have I been doing with my time? As if a showcase of amazingly dedicated athletes winning gold wasn’t enough, watching children take out gold makes me think back to my own childhood and shake my head. Australian Keegan Palmer winning the gold in skateboarding joining a fair list of Australians aged eighteen or under having won gold at Olympic games, including the likes of Shane Gould (at 15) and Ian Thorpe (at 17).
And there are plenty younger; Chinese diver Quan Hongchan won gold in the diving in Beijing at just fourteen years of age. The youngest of all time (for an individual gold medal) was an American Diver Marjorie Gestring who won individual gold at the age of 13. And if you consider any medal, then in Tokyo we saw Kokona Hiraki of Japan (12) and Sky Brown of Britain (13) win Silver and Bronze respectively in the skateboarding.
Twelve? WTF! Were you inspired, or did you feel like shoving your head under a pillow and going to sleep? I mean, I did reasonably well as a youngster, good grades at school, playing AFL competitively enough. But at aged 12 I was about as close to a gold medal as a toad is from taking out the world’s cutest pet award. And then I look at my own boys who, again are doing well at the things they work at, but at 15, 12 and 6 I’m wondering if I’ve seriously let my older two down and need to hire a team of super coaches and personal trainers to get my youngest in shape for the Los Angeles 2028! I mean, he’ll be thirteen by the time that swings around, so possibly past his prime, but still might scrape one in!
The reality is that we are surrounded by remarkable things done by youngsters every day, and I’m not just talking sports here. Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani girl at the age of 15 campaign for the right for girls to attend school. Even when shot in the head for speaking out, she survived, healed and went straight back to campaigning. Greta Thunberg, who at 17 became the face of the fight against climate change, gaining worldwide support and momentum and taking on some of the most powerful leaders of the world. Or the group of Australian teenagers who, in 2021, won a landmark court case ruling that the Environment Minister had a duty of care to protect young people from climate change. And Austin Russell, who at 26 is ancient compared to those earlier mentioned, but in 2021 became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire on the Forbes list. A billionaire at age 26! Meanwhile at forty I’m still juggling mortgages and bills!
Photo by DS stories from Pexels
With such amazing feats of sport, wealth and social justice, it can be easy to get down, throw up the hands, grab a beer and a comfy spot on the couch and tune out to the footy for the next fifty odd years. But what we need to remember is that we are in a world with nearly eight billion people. Remarkable things will happen constantly with this sort of scale, along with a bunch of horrific and tragic things. Add to that satellites, mobile networks, video phones and a little thing called internet, and we are almost guaranteed to hear about these remarkable (along with the horrible) things on a daily basis.
Whether we take that as a blessing or a curse is a choice each of us make. We can choose to be inspired by the achievement of others, set our own goals and work hard to achieve the things we want to achieve, no matter what our age. Or we can choose to applaud and celebrate these amazing feats and be content with our own successes, no matter how modest they might be. Or we can let ourselves get down by becoming frustrated by the achievement of others, overwhelmed with jealousy at their achievements, and resentful at the things we feel we haven’t been able to achieve. This headspace will guarantee that we fail; that we blame others for our shortcomings and spiral into a negativity.
It is also easy to overlook the huge effort that typically goes with these great achievements. The grueling hours, days, weeks, years spent in the pool or on the track, training. The late nights working on projects that will earn big dollars. The courage to stand up in the face of intimidation or threat of violence and do what is right. It’s also worth remembering that most if not all of these people would not have just woken up one day and decided their goal was to do what they became famous for. They would have found something they enjoyed, or were passionate about, and pursued it, setting increasingly bigger goals along the way.
I guess the moral is that success is a product of both mind and effort. The amount of effort we put in will enable the opportunity to be successful. But our headspace will ultimately decide whether we see our efforts as successes, or overlook them because we are too focused on the amazing efforts of others.
Photo by Anna Shvets from Pexels
So, whether your six and aiming for a gold medal at Los Angeles 2028, or 40 and wondering where the years went, or 75 and not feeling satisfied with your life so far, take some time to think about what your goals actually are. Because the main reason lots of us might feel like we haven’t achieved anything is because we haven’t really thought about what it is we want to achieve. Your goals need to be something you enjoy and/or something you are really passionate about. So put some serious though into it, and then set some goals that are challenging but achievable. And be prepared to work hard to achieve them. When you do, celebrate a little, then set some slightly more challenging goals and go after them. See how far you can get.
And if you feel yourself getting de-motivated by the amazing feats of teenagers, remember Sir Thomas Moore who in 2020 at the age of 100, raised almost £33m pounds for Health charities in Britain. Because both the youngest and oldest of us can do amazing things, if we are prepared to work for it.
What goals have you set, or seen others around you achieve?