A life lesson

It is said that its always best to turn your failure into a new success story, making it a new chapter of life. That’s exactly what Chris DeJong did.

In 2008, he qualified for a spot on the Team USA for the Beijing Summer Olympics, competing head-on with Michael Phelps. He was ranked number 5 on the world backstroke scorecard. But he lost to Phelps by three-tenths of a second, effectively ending his Olympic dream.

That was the end of his swimming career; he was 24 then. Today, he has turned into an entrepreneur. He runs the Big Blue Swim School, a business he co-founded in 2012 that offers swimming lessons for kids. The school currently operates five locations in and around Chicago and over the next 10 years, his aim is to have 400 locations across USA.

DeJong says that if he had gone on to win the medal at the Olympics, he might never have turned into an entrepreneur. He attributes his success to an important lesson that swimming taught him, “Getting up after a disappointment is just as important in competitive swimming as it is in business.Like with swimming, success in business is also measured by your perseverance."