In the current Winter Olympics, Lindsey Vonn was a feel-good story about 41-year-old ski racer making a remarkable comeback from partial knee replacement surgery and retirement from the sport in 2019. She even won two downhill events during the 2025-26 ski season prior to the Olympics. But she crashed just 13 seconds into her Olympic downhill run.
Vonn was airlifted off the mountain with a fractured leg, a devastating end to her comeback attempt. But in her Instagram post the next day, she wrote something that captures a fundamental truth about how we should approach both business and life: “Similar to ski racing, we take risks in life. We dream. We love. We jump. And sometimes we fall.”
We all take risks in life. In your business life you put yourself out there and it doesn’t always work out the way you hoped. You dream, you jump, and sometimes you fall, not achieving your goals or dreams. You work for years building something, only to watch it not materialize the way you envisioned.
But that’s also the beauty of life. The fact that you can try. Vonn understood this when she came out of retirement months before the Olympics, knowing full well the risks involved in downhill skiing, let alone at the age of 41. She wrote that her Olympic dream “did not finish the way I dreamt it would,” but added something more important: “I have no regrets. Standing in the starting gate yesterday was an incredible feeling that I will never forget. Knowing I stood there having a chance to win was a victory in and of itself.”
That’s the point most people miss. Standing at the starting line, knowing you have a chance, is a victory. Most people never even get there because they’re too afraid of failing, not realizing they’ve already failed by choosing not to compete. Having the courage to dare greatly means understanding that the outcome isn’t the only measure of success. It’s about knowing you showed up, you gave your best, you took the shot. It’s about knowing that you miss one hundred percent of the shots you don’t take.
Life’s too short not to take chances on yourself. You’ll miss some. You’ll fall short sometimes. And when you do, it’s going to hurt. But you’ll also know that you put yourself on the line and that you refuse to let fear make your decisions for you. The professionals and business owners who accomplish meaningful things aren’t the ones who never fail. They’re the ones who fail and keep going anyway. So, if you’re sitting there thinking about something you want to do but talking yourself out of it because it might not work, stop. Take the risk. Dare greatly. Because the only failure in life is not trying.
As always, this post and others can be found on my blog, Business Law Guy.