This past weekend, I listened to a sermon about “own[ing] the podium,” which was the goal of the Canadian athletes heading into the Vancouver Olympics. The main question raised by the rabbi was this: What happens Monday morning, the day after the Olympics end, when the cameras go away and the world’s attention moves on to something else?

Life goes on, and you can either choose to live in the past, standing on that same podium over and over again, or you can move forward with new ambitions and new podiums to strive for.

The rabbi used Mark Spitz and Eric Heiden as contrasting examples. Mark Spitz, who won seven gold medals in swimming at the Munich Olympics, remained metaphorically stuck in 1972. Every four years, when the summer Olympics rolled around, Mark would reappear in ads, television interviews, and the speaker circuit. Reliving the past became the cycle of his life. Thirty-eight years have passed since the Munich Games, but Mark Spitz is still in 1972, figuratively speaking, standing on that same old podium.

In contrast, Eric Heiden, who won five gold medals in long track speed skating at the 1980 Winter Olympic Games, stepped down from the podium and left 1980 and his world records behind. He attended Stanford University, graduated with a medical degree in 1991, and is now an orthopedic surgeon. Eric was the team physician for the U.S. Olympic Speedskating Team for the past three Winter Olympics games, he opened a sports medicine-based practice at The Orthopedic Specialty Hospital in Murray, Utah, and he was one of doctors that assisted U.S. speed skater J.R. Celski recover from the serious injury he suffered during the US Olympic trials in 2009.

The lessons of this sermon also apply to business. When I began my career at Motorola in 1990, it had only been two years since the company had won the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. When I left Motorla six years later, the company was still reliving that moment, standing on that podium, showing off its medal to customers and the world. But Motorola had ceased to “walk the talk” by then. Ramping up production and getting product out the door had shoved quality and employee training to the side. Minutes before I turned in my employee badge, I sent an email to the CEO and a handful of others titled “A Voice in the Desert” where I highlighted the hypocrisies that I saw. To my surprise, a Motorola HR executive tracked me down a few months later at my new employer and we discussed the content of my email. But that was the beginning of Motorola’s long and painful decline. Eight years after winning the Malcolm Baldrige Award, Motorola was still clinging on to 1988, even though the rest of the industry had moved on and the company itself had strayed from what had gotten it to the podium in the first place. This was a mistake Motorola would repeat several more times in the years that followed (e.g., Motorola reached the podium again with the hugely-successful RAZR phone, but the company stayed stuck on that podium while its competitors moved on to 3G smart-phones and ultimately eroded Motorola’s market share in the industry).

And now, history has repeated itself with Toyota.

It’s been twenty years since Womack’s “The Machine That Changed the World” vaulted Toyota to fame for its Toyota Production System and its commitment to waste reduction and quality. The Lean manufacturing revolution was born and countless companies have since followed in Toyota’s footsteps. But as Toyota’s CEO recently admitted in his comments about the recalls, the company had sacrificed quality for growth. Toyota’s place on top of that quality podium was just an image of its past, retold over and over again by the press, academics, and the company itself, to the point where many involved confused the past with present reality.

We should all strive to own the podium in both our personal and professional lives. But once we reach the top, we must recognize that life goes on, that staying on top is not about standing still, but about responding to new challenges and realities with ongoing determination, discipline, and sacrifices. And we must also recognize when to step down and chase gold in new directions.