It was a big weekend for sports. The 2026 Olympics kicked off, and we had the Super Bowl.

While I’m always into the Super Bowl, this year I find myself more into the Winter Olympics than usual.

Part of it was Lindsey Vonn’s story. While she tragically crashed and had to be helicoptered off the slope, that wasn’t really the point. At 41, 10 days out from rupturing her ACL while training, she decided to compete anyway.

She showed true grit in a world where too many people take the easy way out.

But watching Women’s Downhill Skiing, you see that Vonn isn’t the only one. All of the Olympians competing have overcome great odds, sacrificed everything, and shown incredible physical and mental toughness to be where they are today.

It Takes Work to Be Great

It shows the kind of work you need to do for greatness. There are no shortcuts to glory.

You can’t ChatGPT your way into the Olympics. You can’t Claude Code the necessary experience to compete. You can’t OpenClaw your conditioning.

And that’s the reason I’m into the Olympics more this year than usual. It’s a celebration of what human beings can accomplish when they work hard.

That’s not to say they don’t use technology. They have technologically improved gear. I’m sure they use AI to help them analyze courses and their techniques.

But AI does not, and cannot, do the work for them.

We’ve seen the effects of PEDs on athletes. Russia is banned from competing. Baseball players who probably deserve to be in the Hall of Fame have an unofficial lifetime ban, as they’ll never get voted in.

To achieve greatness, you have to actually perform.

Time and Space Creates Opportunity

Now, I’m under no illusions that anything I do will be Olympic-level glory. But that’s not the lesson we should take away here.

It’s that we need to do the work to stand out. And to do that, we need to create the time and space.

We need to move away from the instant gratification of ticking a box on our to-do list, in favor of the lasting gratification of completing something worth doing.

How do we do that?

We use technology to help us…not to do the work for us.

We automate repetitive tasks. We use AI to find patterns in the data and pose interesting questions to us. We use it to put the polish on the final product, not create the product for us.

By taking everything off of our plate except our most high-leverage work, we move from “too busy” to having the time and space to excel.

To focus on being Olympic-caliber in whatever we do…not just another average solopreneur who’s trying to take shortcuts, wondering why they haven’t advanced.

That will help us truly stand out.