About excellence and cultural shock

Today's run was special because it happened at the Olympic Park in Atlanta, Georgia! as I was running I took a few moments to think about some the extraordinary achievements that happened here 13 years back. There were two runs that stood out, both performed by an extraordinary individual Michael Johnson. As I was thinking back watching his 200 and 400 m world records in Atlanta I realized that there are achievements that one doesn't need to be an expert to appreciate or an expert to tell that they are extraordinary. Michael Johnson achievements in Atlanta 13 years back are of that nature. Please press this link to watch his run again, I just did. What made these moments super special were that they happened during Olympics. An incredibly good example for how the world is coming together through competition, that is really the paradox pf sport, that it unites through competition. I believe Olympics is an incredible event and organization, but my mind keeps asking the question: what could the role of Olympic also be? It is not of the scope of this post to elaborate on that question, but as it is recurrent in my life, I will come back to it.

Sports helps articulate excellence... other examples of the same nature as Michel Johnson are, Sergey Bubka, Jonathan Edwards...it inspires me to watch these performances because they are all examples of how excellence is supposed to be looking like. Now, these are all examples from the sport world, but the question we all needs to ask ourselves is what we can learn from these, I believe a lot!

My day in Atlanta was about reconnecting to Excellence, but also respecting the work President Obama has ahead of him. After having been shocked by the size and the amounts of cars, I started to ask a few Americans about their thoughts on global warming. The answers I got, was "there is something like global warming going on that they are trying to fix"...? what about green cars, could you think of driving such? "green cars, what do you mean with green cars?" This is my first time in the US,and it happen to be my 40th country I am working in or visiting. Even though I didn't expect, but i did experience a cultural shock here today and I will try to allow it to sink it and see if i can put words on it during the days to come.

Until next exchange
emanuel