Houston’s four-time Olympian Ruben Gonzalez is one of the leading motivational and inspirational business speakers in the United States. At 21, he took up the sport of luge because he wanted to compete in the Olympic Games. Gonzalez figured the high injury rate would prompt many athletes to quit the sport and afford him a better position to realize his dream of joining the U.S. team. After enduring two difficult years of training where he crashed on 80% of his runs, he began to see progress in the third year. By year four he had achieved a top-50 world ranking, earning him a ticket to the 1988 Olympics in Calgary. 

          Hispanic inspirational speaker Gonzalez has now competed in four Winter Olympics spanning four different decades.

        When a high-speed accident on the final training run at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver cost Nodar Kumaritashvili of Georgia his life, Gonzalez wasn’t surprised by how the lugers responded – a tribute to their resilience. “In business and in life,” Ruben said, “when bad things happen, you need to bounce back quickly. Become relentless. When you do, success is just a matter of time.”

        And in his keynote “The Courage to Succeed” the unstoppable Ruben Gonzalez notes the correlation between business and an Olympic sport like the luge: In both, success comes from being mentally tough and willing to pay the price, and more important, knowing how to learn from your mistakes.

        “At the end of every luge run we debrief with the coach, watch videos of our runs, and see how we can be faster next time,” Gonzalez says. “In business, you need to measure everything so that you can analyze how to be more effective, more productive, and more profitable in the future.”

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