something to learn from competitive sports

During a symposium of my company, we had three speakers with a completely different background. I especially liked one of them, Toni Innauer, which most probably only Austrians do know. He was a quite famous ski jumper in Austria and then became one of the most successful trainers.





He told us different stories, trying to link competitive sports with general life situations and business. One of these stories hit me. Be it in sports, or be it in life general the following curve is definetely true:




The more effort you put into something, the more you train, the better you get. And this normally equals with being successful, in whatever area you are training.

But at a certain time more effort doesn't mean more success. Due to either external factors (like others that are getting better) or even internal factors (like being to focused on something, not having the required loseness) suddenly more effort means less success.

And this is the time when most of the people get frustrated. Understandably. The difficulty here is to understand that this phase of less success is just another natural step on becoming more successful, on getting better. Making the best out of this - and I don't want to call it failure, because it isn't - is the secret to success.