The Olympics, an event that was the zenith of conversation a couple weeks ago, has been pushed into the distant past. No one really cares that Lysacek made history by winning men’s skating gold, or that Kemkers’ coaching mistake cost Switzerland a gold. In fact, I don’t even care.
No, when I think about the Olympics, I don’t recall the medal count, or who won this and that, or who was supposed to win something and failed. Instead, I remember the amazing perseverance and motivation those athletes had.
I agree that the whole cliché of ‘Olympians must be role models’ is a lot of idolization spewed out by the media, but every exaggeration starts with a seed of truth.

Those snowboarders and skaters and skiers and curlers and hockey players and lugers have a sense of motivation and determination that really is something spectacular. With the lack of those two attributes currently plaguing even simple tasks, such as finishing a lab report, I watched the Olympics with complete jealousy.
The fact that some athletes would spend another four years trying to be the best at one solitary sport was unbelievable to a mind that couldn’t commit to a homework assignment for more than 50 minutes. Why were these people able to stick with one sport, even after failing a thousand times, and still be able to continue training with some sort of enjoyment?
Some athletes had gone to the Olympics three times, 12 consecutive years, and still they came back, even when they had already won gold. That amount of time and that amount of persistence just boggled my mind.
I would sit in front of the television, listening to the NBC commentators talk about how much dedication and hard work so and so put in to get to this moment, and it got to a point where I didn’t even care if the particular athlete actually placed in finals or not; I would be too busy staring at the screen, at the little person crouched on top of a foggy white hill or somewhere, trying to telepathically steal their determination.
Each time one of the “Go World, Visa” commercials came on, I would actually listen and try to figure out the secret to such amazing perseverance. And, this is going to sound very lame, but I started doing homework in front of the television, not so I could catch every moment of the Olympics, but because I really believed that being in the television presence of these individuals might possibly motivate me to finish homework and stop procrastinating.
Now, I see the obvious logical fallacy in my whole “homework in front of the TV actually boosts productivity” theory, but that just shows how obsessive I became.
Well, it’s been two weeks and I have yet to figure out how those amazing athletes, who are indeed in the same species as I am, are able to push back the curtain of procrastination and frustration to become the best in the world at just one thing.
Maybe I’ll never be able to dedicate myself to one task at one time, and with a world that prides itself on the ability of multi-tasking, I might never be able to capture the same single-minded perseverance of those Olympic athletes.
But the Olympics left me with a shining example of determination, motivation and persistence that I can always look back upon and wonder at their incredible mindset. Although I have not managed to grasp the exact lesson I was supposed to learn from that example (which translates to: I still procrastinate), this Winter Olympics in Vancouver left an impression of awe and yearning for the ability to apply my mind to something so wholeheartedly.
And that’s as good a start for a teenager trying to find the inner power to resist procrastinating as any.