BIGGER THAN THE GAME

“Why high performance shines even when the sun doesn’t?”, “It’s not a setback. It’s a test” – reads the advertisement of one of the major consultancy firms featuring Tiger Woods. The golf wizard dared to excel and showed the world anything is possible – a colored person beating the whites in their own game.

Scout boy Steven Spielberg in his early teens made an amateur movie and charged 25 cents per person to watch it while his sister sold popcorn. With his sheer ‘belief’ and a minimalistic US$ 500 budget, he made movie "Firelight". Firelight didn’t fire, but then the sparks were visible in the movies to follow – E.T. the Extra Terrestrial, Schinder’s List, and Jurassic Park. It’s the constant urge to supersede earlier work and venture into never before crossed boundaries that lead to Spielberg choosing not to do the third sequel of Jurassic Park & focus on a world war epic film ‘Saving Private Ryan’. Saving Private Ryan garnered considerable critical acclaim, winning several awards. The film grossed US$480 million worldwide, making it the highest-grossing film of the year 1998. It's not over yet, the spark still lives on. Speilberg will try to appease millions of Tintin fans with the upcoming project 'The Adventures of Tintin', slated for a release in 2011.

It is also this spark that inspires a truck driver James Cameron to raise the bar for the entire entertainment industry on a whole, through films such as Terminator, Jaws, and Titanic. The visionary is now working on ‘Avator’, a revolutionary 3D movie made using photo-realistic computer-generated characters that will change the movie going experience altogether. The adrenaline Rush in few never dies. It’s inbuilt in their DNA. Only this can explain return of Michael Schumacher to F1 circuit after formally retiring in 2007. Earlier, Lance Armstrong came back strong from testicular cancer to win the prestigious Tour-de-France. ‘Pain is temporary, quitting lasts forever’ is all that Lance Armstrong had to say after the win.

The ‘Yes we can’ Barack Obama, the “Make Mistakes & Learn” Albert Einstein, the “Failure is Opportunity” Henry Ford, the “Anything worth doing is worth 100%” Konosuke Matsushita, and the ‘Why not?’ Bernard Shaw are golden words of the few who DARED TO EXCEL. As the advertisement of that consultancy firm finally reads – “We know what it takes to be a Tiger”. The question is, do you?

(The article was published in the HSBC Corporate Journal)