Today's Wisdom - Winter Olympians, Flappy Bird and Ignatius of Loyola

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Watched the Winter Olympics this week and thought, "I could totally do that"? Lie on a sled, sweep some stones with a fancy broom, how hard could it be? I’ll admit, I have been, so I did some digging. Unlike the Summer Games, where kids join swim teams at five, the Winter Olympics is a haven for second-act athletes. Few people grow up in households where launching yourself off a mountain is a weekend activity. Instead, the Winter Games depend on talent transfer programs and a sophisticated system of athletic poaching that hunts for raw ability in unexpected places.

Most Olympic bobsledders, for instance, started as elite track sprinters or college football players. National teams scout for explosive power, the strength needed to sprint on ice while pushing a 400-pound sled. If you can run a 10.5-second 100 meters but aren't quite fast enough for the Summer Games, a recruiter will hand you a helmet and tell you your new career is "pusher." For gravity-driven sports like skeleton (sliding headfirst) or luge (sliding feet-first), discovery happens through recruitment combines. With only sixteen world-class sliding tracks on the planet, you can't just practice locally. Organizations like Team USA hold open tryouts testing your bravery-to-skill ratio, searching for a specific trait: the ability to keep your heart rate low under crushing g-forces. If you don't panic when your chin is two inches from ice at eighty miles per hour, you've passed the first test. Biathlon is perhaps the hardest sport to stumble into as it requires the cardiovascular engine of a marathoner and the steady hands of a surgeon. Most elite biathletes come from European military skiing programs, where they spend a thousand hours a year learning to shoot accurately while their heart pounds at 180 beats per minute.

So which sport could you realistically compete in as an adult? Curling is your best bet. Unlike bobsled or skeleton, which demand world-class athleticism and access to rare facilities, curling thrives in local clubs across Canada, Scotland, and the U.S. Midwest. It's often a legacy sport passed down through community leagues, where Friday night games blend chess-like strategy with social bonding. The barrier to entry is surprisingly low: decent balance, strategic thinking, and willingness to join a recreational league. Many Olympic curlers didn't pick up a stone until their twenties. For the extreme pursuits like bobsled, skeleton and luge you'll need speed, exceptional cold tolerance, and complete disregard for self-preservation. If you possess that rare combination, there's likely a national team somewhere currently searching for your phone number.

If you pitched the story of Dong Nguyen as a screenplay, every studio would reject it for being too unrealistic. In 2013, a 28-year-old Vietnamese developer living with his parents programmed a simple game over a single holiday weekend. He used free ad monetization, hoping to make a few hundred dollars a month. The game, Flappy Bird, sat untouched in the App Store for eight months. Then, something inexplicable happened as with zero marketing spend, it went viral. Within weeks, it topped the charts in 102 countries, hit 50 million downloads, and started generating $50,000 per day in pure revenue.

At that moment, Nguyen was making $18 million annualized from a project he built in three days. Most founders would have spent that money on growth hackers or a private island. Instead, he killed it, not because Apple forced him or because Nintendo sued him. Nguyen felt he had designed a simple game for people to play while relaxed, but it had become an addictive product that was ruining sleep and productivity for millions. He famously tweeted that he could not take it anymore and pulled the plug the next day.

The aftermath was pure chaos. People began listing phones with the game pre-installed on eBay for nearly $100,000 and fans even sent him death threats demanding he put it back. Through it all, his only response was that he would still make games, but he refused to compromise his peace. Even a decade later, in 2024 and 2025, when a third-party group snatched up his abandoned trademark to relaunch the game with crypto and blockchain elements, Nguyen broke a years-long silence only to clarify that he had not sold the rights and did not support their new vision. Every founder in Silicon Valley talks about putting mission over money, but almost all of them eventually cave to the pressure of investors or the allure of a billion-dollar exit. Dong Nguyen is the rare exception who actually did it. He turned down every acquisition offer, walked away from $1.5 million a month, and chose his independence over a throne in the tech world.

The story of Ignatius of Loyola is one of the most dramatic psychological pivots in history. Before he was a saint, Ignatius was an ambitious Basque soldier obsessed with courtly romance and military glory. In 1521, during the Battle of Pamplona, his life as a nobleman-warrior ended abruptly when a French cannonball shattered his leg. During a grueling and primitive recovery, which included having his bone re-broken because he didn't like the way it looked under his leggings, he had nothing to read but religious texts. By the time he could walk again, the man who dreamed of earthly conquest had decided to conquer his own mind instead.

Ignatius spent the next year in a cave in Manresa, where he underwent a profound spiritual crisis. It was here that he developed the Spiritual Exercises, a rigorous four-week mental training program. Unlike the meditative traditions that sought to empty the mind, Ignatius taught his followers to use their imaginations intensely, visualizing scenes, smells, and sounds to process their emotions and decisions. This "active" form of spirituality was designed to help people find divinity in their daily work, rather than escaping to a monastery. It remains one of the most influential psychological frameworks in the Western world, predating modern cognitive behavioral techniques by centuries.

In 1540, Ignatius founded the Society of Jesus, better known as the Jesuits. He structured the order with military precision and a radical new mandate: instead of living in secluded cloisters, Jesuits were sent to the far corners of the globe as teachers, scientists, and diplomats. This focus on rigorous education led them to become the premier intellectuals of the Catholic Church. By the time Ignatius died, the Jesuits had established a global network of schools and were famously serving as astronomers in the Chinese imperial court and explorers in the Americas. The legacy of Ignatius of Loyola is found in his insistence that the intellect and the spirit are not enemies. He believed that seeking the truth in science, art, and philosophy was a way of honoring the creator. Ignatius proved that a single moment of total failure, the literal shattering of his old life, can become the foundation for a global movement that values the disciplined mind as much as the devoted heart.

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Until next time... A Little Wiser Team