What motivated you to choose a career in sports and tec? Were you inspired by the fear of doing what you wanted, and this seemed a more comfortable path? Or was it precisely the opposite: this career was your dream, and it took you the courage to pursue it?
And regardless of your motivation, have you ever realized how brave it is to face the expectations of hundreds, thousands, even millions of athletes, fans, and stakeholders who want their glorious sports moments delivered right?
Delivering tec in sports events, especially in major ones like Olympic Games and World Cups, is all about courage. At Legacy Sport, we love what author Ryan Holiday, a specialist in the ancient philosophy of Stoicism, says about this topic.
According to him, the courage journey starts when we recognize and face our fears. It continues when we find the courage to go beyond those fears. And it finishes with expressing the heroic qualities that allow us to do something for the greater good, even without guarantees that we will enjoy the fruits of our actions.
There are many fears to face when delivering a tec project for a major sports event. It starts with scale: budgets are huge, and money must be spent responsibly and sustainably. The technology deployed in a venue has many layers, involving many providers, logistics, and cabling.
Missing one detail can make all go wrong because everything is interconnected in tec. If we don’t get the Intercom right, for instance, teams in the venues cannot communicate internally, and you mess with the whole delivery of the competition.
There are also interaction fears. Teams are extensive and international, and you need to rely on people who have often just met, usually figuring out language and cultural barriers. If there are bad leaders or nasty teammates, there is often no time to work them out before you do the job – you need to figure this out while doing the work.
Then, there is the fear of the unpredictable: there are so many variables and teams involved in a sports event delivery that even if you do your part right, you need to trust that everybody else will be the same. We also expect that the weather, the political context, and many other elements out of our control will be in our favor to let the competition happen.
Once we have accepted these fears, courage is the step toward navigating the storm. Even when circustmances don’t make us sure if things will happen as we wish, we connect with our inspiring image of athletes at their best, communities or nations getting together, and spectators rejoicing. And we do our best work.
We then turn problems into challenges, and we learn from them. They become sources of thrill. We use attentive listening to understand everybody’s needs, feelings, and perspectives. We draw from our expertise and intuition to create solutions, some of which may become innovations that will be our legacy in sports.
In life, we have no guarantee of how things will unfold, but we can guarantee our best response to what happens. That are multiple examples where things went wrong in competitions. Thankfully, there are many more where things went well, even excellent. Whatever the case, it is the mix of our thrill, expertise and courage that will make excellency, even if most people won’t notice since we’re in the backstage.
That’s the heroic part of working in tech and sports: we do our work for the greater good of athletes and the the spectators they inspire, knowing they will mostly feel the effect of our work, but not see our faces and know our names. But we keep similing as we see how much sports move this world and knowing we have our part in making this happen.
What is important enough in your work and life to awaken your courage? How courage moves you to do what you do?
TEC – HEART – SPORT is our latest series of articles explaining the mission, vision, and culture that Legacy Sport shares with its community and the world. See below for a summary of each topic we will explore during the series.
Thrill
Expertise
Courage
Humanism
Empathy
Advocacy
Respect
Transparency
Sustainability
People
Olympism
Relationships
Transformation
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