It is August 16 2008. The Beijing Olympics are on. Michael Phelps has already won six gold medals. Now he’s on the quest for the record equaling 7th, The 100 meters butterfly. The record for the seven individual goals in a single Olympics was held for 36 years by Mark Spitz. The race starts and Michael Phelps is facing stiff competition from Milorad Cavic, a Serbian. As the race goes on. Michael is slightly falling behind. And then in the last lap, something miraculous happened!! Michael surges ahead and wins by one hundredths of a second. This is the closest finish in the history of the sport. In fact, so close the Serbian team lodged a protest with the Olympic Committee. The Olympic Committee stops, does not give the result and starts looking at underwater footage shot at 1/10,000th of a second per frame. And then after evaluation declares Michael Phelps as the winner, Michael Phelps gets to seven goals and equals the record set by spitz. And then of course, like then goes on to win the eight and break the record. This was an incredible achievement. But what makes it even more incredible is what happened 10 months earlier on the 20th of October 2007. Michael Phelps was on its way to practice and while getting onto a his friends car, he slipped on a patch of ice and broke his wrist X-rays revealed a small crack and a short procedure later, a cast was put with the cast in place and with doctor’s orders not to use it for the next couple of weeks. Clearly practice was out of question. Initially Phelps was devastated. He went and told his long term coach Bill Bauman, it’s over. I’m finished. In fact the media pundits started talking about whether they’ll be able to win those seven gold medals that he was planning to. In fact, some of the headlines even read there is no way they will even go to the Olympics. But very soon, Michael Phelps’ natural competitive instincts took over and he went to the swimming pool. And while all his Olympic teammates were doing full laps, Michael Phelps took a kickboard and used his Kicks his legs to swim laps on and on in the swimming pool. All the kicking further strengthened Michael Phelps’ kick. Which indeed was already a killer Kick. It was almost as you know, a fish growing more gills and then it was this that really helped him win that that race because when experts did our analysis of slow motion replays of the race, what they saw was in the last five meters of the 100 meter butterfly in Beijing, Milorad was dragging his legs while Michael Phelps used one kick to go in touch the wall by 1/100th of a second. And that made all the difference. What a powerful story. Where in business can you use this story? Well, I can think of three. First is that we will all face adversities but how we deal with adversity is really going to decide what impact that adversity has. The second is very often what looks like Big Trouble might just be a blessing in disguise. And when you’re telling the winning team do not rest on their laurels and keep trying to get even better, because only a small amount of difference can make a difference between success and failure. Business Points ( Tags ) #Blessingindisguise #businessstorytelling #dealingwithadversities #donotrestonlaurels #smallamountofdifference #success #storybank #storytelling
