15 Lessons on Excellence The Olympics Keep Teaching Us

And how we can benefit from them in our own lives

The 2026 Winter Olympics have been extraordinary. The Games presented an incredible showcase of talent, effort, and the human spirit. A big part of the reason they hit so hard is that in an increasingly numbed-out world, we’re starving for mastery, mattering, and aliveness.

I’ve spent the last twenty days closely watching and writing about the Games—from Mikaela Shiffrin, Federica Brignone, and Alyssa Liu’s incredible comeback, to Ilia Malinin’s devastating misstep, to the dominance of Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo and Norway more broadly.

Though I’m in the business of long-form writing, many people have asked me to summarize the key lessons and distill them into bite-sized chunks of wisdom: What have been the best stories? Why do the Games make me feel so alive? How can I take the inspiration I am feeling and build on it? What do the Games have to teach all of us about greatness?

What follows are 15 lessons on excellence that the Olympics keep teaching us, and how we can benefit from them in our own lives.

1. Show up. Show up. Show up. If you repeatedly put yourself in a position to win, you increase your surface area for luck, and eventually the chips fall your way. We cannot control when the universe will gift us the latticework of variables that will bring out our best. All we can do is keep showing up and putting ourselves in a position to receive it.

2. Surround Yourself Wisely. Nobody reaches the top alone. Nobody. The people you surround yourself with shape you. Choose wisely.

3. Mental toughness isn’t the absence of nerves or robotic stoicism; it’s feeling what you’re feeling and doing it anyway. Even the best experience anxiety. It doesn’t make you less than. It makes you human. The goal isn’t to eliminate these feelings. It’s to get better at accepting them and taking them along for the ride.

4. Outcomes do matter (especially at the highest level), but the way you get the best outcomes is by fully embracing the process. As the five-time Olympic bobsledder Kaillie Humphries told me, “the bigger the goal, the smaller the steps.”

5. When you care deeply, you get the best out of yourself. But you also make yourself vulnerable. It requires courage and guts. It’s worth it. The things you care about risk breaking your heart, but they also fill your life with texture, meaning, and deep satisfaction. “I hope if you take away anything from my journey it’s that you have the courage to dare greatly,” said Lindsey Vonn after her crash. “Life is too short not to take chances on yourself. Because the only failure in life is not trying.”

6. Be yourself and go all the way. It’s good to learn from other people, but don’t mimic them. Embrace your authenticity. Don’t fight against yourself. Know who you are and use it to your advantage.

7. Having fun is one of the greatest competitive advantages there is. You can be serious, give something your all, and have fun at the same time. “That’s what I’m f***ing talking about. That was so much fun,” were the first words figure skater Alysa Liu uttered after her comeback gold medal performance. Intensity and joy can coexist.

8. Competing means wanting to win, but it also means rising up together. The best rivals are those we respect deeply. They make us better.

9. You don’t need to like failure, but you’ve got to accept it’s an inevitable part of pushing your limits. “I blew it,” said Ilia Malinin after his devastating misstep in Figure Skating. Sometimes it’s that simple. Failure sucks. Learn from it what you can. And then keep going.

10. Work and craft can be a central part of your identity, but you perform your best when it’s not the only thing in your life. When you fuse your entire sense of self to a single thing it makes you fragile. Build your identity house with more than one room.

11. Good things take time. Most breakthroughs follow plateaus. So much of success simply comes down to staying in the game. This isn’t to say you don’t make adjustments along the way (you do). But you’ve got to commit to a long time horizon. Not days; not weeks; not months. But years and decades.

12. Dig where your feet are. Pressure, expectations, and past experiences are real, but the more you can drop into the moment, the better you perform. “I came here for the skiing,” said Mikaela Shiffrin. “To take away the noise and just be simple.” You can’t help but carry a whole lot with you as you approach the starting gate (both literal and metaphorical). Once the gun goes off, you just need to focus on running the race you are in.

13. The best way to gain confidence is by giving yourself evidence. Put in the reps. Trust your training. "I gave everything, I had no regrets... I trusted my plan, I trusted the work that I put in with my team and just went for it," remarked Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo after winning his fifth gold at the 2026 Games.

14. Take on big challenges and do hard things. It is immensely fulfilling and satisfying. It makes you feel alive.

15. You’re only on the podium for a minute. The top of the mountain is narrow. All the life is on the sides. Set big goals. But then make sure you climb in the right way.

I hope you found this list resonant. Please share it with your favorites, and let me know if I’ve missed anything.

If you found it valuable and want to go deeper, check out my new book, The Way of Excellence, where I explore all these themes and more in great detail. Get a copy here.