The 2024 Olympics are ending. Here are some life lessons to remember.

Have you had a good Olympics? I have. I'm watching the women's breaking semifinals right now (don't tell me who won!), and I've been loading up on table tennis, badminton, beach volleyball, swimming, and some of the mind-blowing track-and-field events.

It's great entertainment. And a glorious celebration of athleticism, competition, and world peace. But there's even more to it than that. Because many of the authors we've featured in the Next Big Idea Club have drawn lessons from the world of sport that we can apply to our own lives, businesses and relationships, even if we'll never be as coordinated as a Simone Biles.

So this week on the Next Big Idea Daily, we decided to feature book bites that celebrate the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, books by or about athletes, sharing the wisdom gained in competition, and how we can apply it in our ordinary, non-Olympic lives.

First up, we heard from an honest-to-goodness Olympian. Alexi Pappas ran the 10K distance in the 2016 games in Rio. She’s also a filmmaker,? and an award-winning writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Runner’s World, Women’s Running, Sports Illustrated, The Atlantic, and Outside. She wrote a remarkable memoir about overcoming obstacles like her mother’s suicide and her own depression, finding female role models, and becoming what Alexi calls a “bravey” -- a person with the courage to chase after goals despite what life throws in the way. The book is called Bravey: Chasing Dreams, Befriending Pain, and Other Big Ideas and our curator Adam Grant calls it “an arresting debut by a gifted writer.” Hear Alexi Papas on how to become a "bravey."

Now, you may have noticed a few wrinkles in the games this year. I mean literal wrinkles. Andy McDonald is representing England in skateboarding at age 50, which is pretty radical. Zhiying Zeng made her Olympic debut at 58, playing table tennis for the nation of Chile. And the oldest athlete out there this year is 65-year-old equestrian Juan Antonio Jiménez, riding for Spain. So if you think the Olympics is a young person’s thing -- well it mostly is. But the participation of these geezers is testament to the fact that the body and mind can stay sharper longer than most of us realize. Until recently it was thought that older athletes should probably stick with golf and maybe pickleball. But new research suggests that people of just about any age can enjoy and sometimes even excel at a wide variety of physical activity, including some extreme sports. In Gnar Country: Growing Old, Staying Rad , author Steven Kotler explores this new frontier, even as he puts his own aging body on the line by trying to become an expert skier in his fifties. Steven is a New York Times-bestselling author, an award-winning journalist, and the Executive Director of the Flow Research Collective, where he studies human performance. Hear Steven share some of his big ideas.

Did you catch Katie Ledecky’s record-breaking swim, or Simone Biles leading the US gymnastics squad to yet another gold medal? Well let’s take a moment to reflect on the fact that women like these were never intended to be part of the Olympics. No women were. According to the founding organizer of the modern Games, Pierre de Coubertin, “Women have but one task, that of the role of crowning the winner with garlands... In public competitions, women’s participation must be absolutely prohibited. It is indecent that spectators would be exposed to the risk of seeing the body of a woman being smashed before their eyes.”

Well, we’ve been taking that risk? -- and handling it just fine thank you -- more and more lately, as the rise of women in athletics is undeniable, and it’s changing the face of sports, culture, and the economy. Macaela MacKenzie tells this story in her new book Money, Power, Respect: How Women in Sports Are Shaping the Future of Feminism . Micaela is a journalist and a former senior editor at Glamour magazine.. Her work has also been featured in Elle, Bustle, SELF, Marie Claire, and Women’s Health, among many other publications. Listen to Macaela share her big ideas.

It turns out one of the key things Olympic champions have to teach us is toughness. But toughness might not be what you think it is. Whether you call it toughness, resilience, or grit, most of us think the way to accomplish difficult things is to bear down and power through. But our model is broken, and new research shows there’s a smarter path to success in sports, business and relationships. Bestselling author and sought-after performance coach Steve Magness explores this terrain in the book Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness. Steve has coached dozens of runners, including Olympians, and our curator Malcolm Gladwell says his book is “a must-read for parents and coaches and anyone else looking to prepare for life's biggest challenges."? Here’s Steve to share 5 of his big ideas.

Finally we brought back one of our Next Big Idea Club favorites, author Alex Hutchinson . Alex is a National Magazine Award-winning journalist who writes a regular column for Outside magazine. He’s a former physicist, and he’s also someone who knows his way around a track, having been a middle- and long-distance runner for the Canadian national team. Alex brought together all his interests in the 2018 book Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance . It’s a book that became a New York Times bestseller, and was beloved by our Next Big Idea Club curators as well. Malcolm Gladwell said “this book is amazing” and Adam Grant said it? “makes the case that we’re actually underestimating our potential, and reveals how we can all surpass our perceived physical limits.” Here’s Alex to share some of his big ideas.

Let me know what you've learned from the Olympics in the comments below. The summer games may be wrapping up, but you can access life lessons from great athletes and other champions any time you need them right here . And by the way, if you're interested in having these and thousands of other big ideas right in your pocket, download the Next Big Idea app .