Your Barcelona Is Coming
leadershipsportslife
I’m a student of life, and lessons in leadership show up for me in all kinds of places. Meeting rooms, watching my kid figure something out for the first time, wherever the world decides to teach me something each day. But I’m especially passionate about sports, because competition has a way of stripping things down to the essentials. It teaches you how to lose without losing yourself. How to win without losing your head. How to work when no one’s watching. How to improve when you’re already good. How to play for something bigger than yourself. How to master the parts of you that want to quit before anyone else does.
That’s probably why I’ve been rewatching the current F1 season and keep coming back to one moment. Lewis Hamilton’s win in Barcelona.
686 days.
That’s how long Lewis Hamilton went without a win before his first victory in Ferrari red.
Think about that. A seven time World Champion. The most successful driver in F1 history. He joins the most iconic team in the sport in 2025, and then goes an entire season and then some without even reaching the podium. Not last place. Not mid pack. A legend, invisible on the leaderboard.
31 races. No wins. A season he later called a nightmare.
If you’d looked at Lewis Hamilton in late 2025, you might have said he’d lost it. That the move to Ferrari was a mistake. That the fire was gone.
You’d have been wrong.
Because somewhere in that stretch, a fan shouted something simple to him. Nothing rehearsed, no big platform. Just, “Lewis, remember who you are.”
He held onto it. Not as a magic fix, just as something to return to when it got hard. Then he did the work. A new engineer. Rebuilt trust with the team. Small technical wins, race by race, until the pieces came together. Third in China. Second in Canada. Second in Monaco. Then, finally, Barcelona. First place. 686 days later. When he posted about the win, the caption was just those four words in all caps the fan gave him.
Rafael, what’s your point?
If you’re in the middle of a long stretch of change right now, whether that’s a job search, a new role, a move, becoming a parent, whatever it looks like for you, I see you. It’s discouraging when the results haven’t caught up yet, and it’s easy to let that chip away at how you see yourself.
I don’t think Hamilton’s 31 races were about talent. He had that the whole time. I think they were about everything underneath a big change that nobody sees from the outside: learning a new car, earning trust with people who didn’t know him yet, finding a rhythm that didn’t fit like the old one, all while people openly wondered if he still had it. None of that rebuilds overnight, no matter how good you are. It just takes staying in it long enough for things to settle.
If that’s where you are, in the stretch where nobody can see the results yet, that doesn’t mean they aren’t coming.
Keep refining your plan. Keep showing up. Remember who you are.
Your Barcelona is coming. 😊 🏎️