Life Lessons from the Olympics

I love the Olympics and look forward to them especially the summer Olympics. You can always count on the Olympics to bring out every feeling in the book. Sports also teach wonderful life lessons about endurance, perseverance, goodwill, respect, tragedy.
Tragedy: Sad to say, we’ve seen tragedy. A suicidal man stabbed and killed the father-in-law of U.S. volleyball coach whose wife was a former U.S. women’s Olympic volleyball player. Good news is the mother-in-law’s condition has been upgraded from critical to stable. The U.S. men’s volleyball team had a moment of silence before the match against Venezuela in which they won in five sets.
I had to deal with tragedy last year when my father had a stroke in April 2007 and passed away in December 2007. Freelancers can’t prepare for every situation, but they can adapt and accept. I let my clients know of my limited availability and they respected it.
Endurance: In the 400m relay, the U.S. swim team overcame a half-body deficit in the final leg against France’s strongest swimmer to win the race at impossible odds — or so people thought. The French swim team needs to work on sportsmanship. Apparently, they spat into the U.S. lane and trashed talked. The U.S. team stayed cool and let their swimming do the talking.
Freelancers may not deal with something that big, but they overcome illness and other unexpected events to make their deadlines and accomplish almost impossible tasks. For me, I lost two major clients during the dot com crash. At that point, it was either quit freelancing (it was a side career at the time) or forge ahead.
Perseverance: U.S. women’s gymnastics team started off unlucky. Samantha Peszek sprained her ankle in warm-ups leaving the team with four gymnasts for floor, vault, and balance beam. They couldn’t make mistakes. But they did. Two gymnasts fell on the uneven bars. Despite the disappointing start, the team still made the finals and players made it to individual event finals.
Lone freelancers must persevere often. They’re responsible for their own marketing, accounting, and other non-writing or non-freelancing tasks. If something comes up in their lives to interfere with their work, they push on to keep clients happy while taking care of personal business. My son’s medical program takes up much of my time forcing me to adjust my writing schedule. While stressful to deal with working and blogging less, I know this too shall pass and I’ll return to my groove.
What Olympic-like experiences have you encountered? Anything along the lines of respect, goodwill, or other adjectives?