Pyrros Dimas – Triple Olympic Gold Medalist

Pyrros Dimas, Greek weightlifter, who single handedly started the medals revolution for his country at the games.

After his final appearance in the 2004 Sydney Olympics where he won the bronze, he left his shoes on the stage as a symbolic gesture of leaving it for someone else to fill. The gold medalist, after seeing Pyrros being greeted to the podium by a roaring cheer by his fans and countrymen, had this to say about the great champion “Th guy you see there is not a bronze medalist. He is a three time Olympic champion. For 12 years he lifted his country back to respectability in a competition that it created. Now it is time for his country to lift him.”

On Why a Boy Breaks Up

On Empathy

In the 1990s, a new type of cell was discovered in a lab in Parma, Italy. The researchers had isolated a particular neuron in a monkey and it fired off whenever the monkey went for a peanut kept at some distance from it. The experiment was done repetitively with the same results. However, to their surprise the same neuron also fired when the a human went for the peanut instead of the monkey. Even if it was someone else, the monkey felt the hunger of that person. This discovery revealed a fascinating insight into our social nature. So when you flinched at the teacher slapping a kid hard or cried at a heart rending theater performance, ‘mirror’ neurons were connecting you to fellow human beings providing a level of intimacy that even words cannot express.

Yet, I witnessed today that ego at times can not just balance out but can also trump this feeling. At times honesty and compassion are not rewarded but brushed away with utter disregard for the problems of another person. At times our mental faculties mysteriously fail to give us ‘intelligence’ which in Latin means “To understand”. And that sometimes the truth isn’t enough, sometimes people deserve more, sometimes people deserve to have their faith rewarded.

On ‘Experts’

Its just one of those words like ‘Happiness’ that is devalued as soon as one becomes conscious of its being, of its attainment. Why does one want to add these 5 letters “expert” to one’s personal bio? And here I’m specifically talking about self-proclaimed subject experts. In my understanding, an expert is someone who has acquired and imbibed relatively greater knowledge on a particular subject compared to the larger population. But what is often ignored is the fact that there is always a scope to push the boundaries of any field of subject and there is a large unknown area waiting to be uncovered, explored and brought to light. And my contention is that once a person has psychologically accepted one’s self as an “expert” (and this opinion is reinforced through social acceptance), the machinery of progress stops functioning. From that point on, all of one’s efforts are directed towards upholding and maintaining that profile or underlining superiority and as a result there is a lack of will to proactively discover or create better, simpler and more elegant solutions.

Haven’t we seen this time and again with cultures, societies, kingdoms, companies and businesses decaying, stagnating, ending and becoming redundant because they failed to ask questions of themselves before everything else. What do you think?