'Mom and Dad, I'm going to break all of Michael Phelps's records'

The Olympic Games in London were inspirational. We witnessed truly breathtaking athletic achievement. It was thrilling to watch the drama of record-breaking victories and heartbreaking defeats in the crucible of international competition, as the best-trained, most dedicated athletes in the world performed for an audience of hundreds of millions.

And London wasn’t the only recent venue in which awesome accomplishments were celebrated. On Aug. 6, NASA’s Curiosity, a one-ton, car-sized scientific exploration machine, descended safely to the surface of Mars after a 255-day, 127-million-mile journey from Earth.

It doesn’t seem possible that mortals can run 100 meters in less than 10 seconds, like Usain Bolt and his competitors did. Or that people not much different from us can do the math and engineering required to build a scientific-instrument-filled spacecraft, launch it, get it to Mars, and direct it to descend from cables to land on the Red Planet’s surface and transmit data back to Earth.

So what can the Olympics and the Curiosity teach us and our children?

Perhaps the best lesson is that the very few who rise to those heights of achievement began their ascents long ago. Bolt’s 100-meter final was over in a flash, but he began running it years before the starter’s gun fired. Likewise, the triumphant march to the awards podiums for swimmer Michael Phelps, gymnast Gabby Douglas, soccer star Alex Morgan and the dozens of other American medalists began when they were children, along a path they walked every day of their lives, a path lined with hard work, focus, pain and sacrifice.

Olympic gold medalists and NASA scientists — like world-class musicians, entrepreneurial geniuses, artists and writers — must see their particular passion clearly and be single-minded in pursuing it. They must commit to the relentless quest for excellence, and they must be prepared for all the disappointments along the way — the defeats, the injuries, the seemingly unsolvable problems.