How Long Did Usain Bolt Take To Win The 100 Meters Gold ?

How long did it take Usain Bolt to win the 100 meters sprint Gold Medal in the Olympics?

The obvious response is 9.58 seconds.

The less obvious but more profound answer is twenty years. Twenty years of waking up every day and showing up for four or five hours of training- this is the time Usain Bolt took to get himself ready to win the Gold Medal.

The sum of all the hundred-meter times that Usain Bolt may have run to win the Gold Medals may have been less than 10 minutes in aggregate, but the success he saw came from the close to two decades of intense effort and practice.

The result may feel like the blink of any eye compared to the systematic preparation and effort that went in.

This is a common feature of achievement of any sort. The result that we see is like the tip of the iceberg. Everyone gets excited by the sexy outcome, but no one gets to see the years of sweat and toil that happen in the background. More importantly, achievement takes time.

Usain Bolt is just an example. All of us have our version of winning the 100 meters dash in our lives. How are we approaching the goal? What is the planning, the preparation, or the practice we are putting in to achieve the goal?