What 15 Years of Going in Circles Taught Me About Leverage

There's a moment after you retire from elite sport where you sit down and try to explain what you do now, and the honest answer is: I used to go in circles fast, and now I'm figuring out the rest.

I don't mean that as self-deprecation. I won 8 Olympic medals in short track speed skating across three Winter Games -- Salt Lake City, Turin, Vancouver. I trained for 15+ yrs at a level most people can't imagine, and I'm proud of every single one of those mornings I showed up at 4am when no one was watching.

But here's what I didn't understand until the medals stopped coming & arena lights turned off & the endorsement calls started to slow down:

Every bit of it required me to physically be there.

Every race, every podium, every appearance -- my body in the building, my legs on the ice, my face in the room. The second I stopped showing up, the whole machine stopped producing. No residual, no compounding, no leverage.

I'd spent a decade and a half doing the most intense, highest-quality work I could possibly do, and all of it was a trade. My hours for outcomes, my body for medals, my presence for paychecks.

I didn't have language for this at the time. I just knew something felt off. I'd look at my medals & feel genuine gratitude, and then I'd look at my bank account & my calendar & realize I was starting from scratch at 28 w/ a famous name and no recurring revenue.

Meanwhile I started meeting people in business who'd built differently. A founder whose software company generated revenue whether they were in the office or on a beach in Portugal. An author whose book kept selling copies yrs after they'd written the last word. An investor whose money was working around the clock in ways that had nothing to do w/ how many hours they spent at a desk.

They'd created things that kept producing after they walked away from them.

I'd created... memories. Awards in a case. Stories I could tell on stages.

That's not nothing. But it's not leverage either.

What's the difference between building and trading?

The distinction I eventually landed on -- and this is something I think about almost daily now -- is the difference between building & trading.

When you trade, you exchange your time & energy for a result. Transaction ends when you stop. A surgeon trades. A consultant trades. An athlete trades. The work can be extraordinary, world-class, life-changing for other people -- and it still evaporates the moment you're not doing it.

When you build, you create something that continues producing value beyond your direct involvement. A system, a product, a piece of intellectual property, a team that operates without you in the room.

I was the greatest trader of hours I knew. I could extract more value per hour of training than almost anyone alive. But I was building nothing that would outlast my hamstrings.

I see this everywhere now in the work I do w/ executives & founders.

The sales leader who's the top performer on their own team -- closing the biggest deals, personally handling the hardest accounts -- and they're proud of it, and they should be, but they're trading. If they get sick for three weeks, revenue drops. They haven't built a machine. They ARE the machine.

The founder who can't take a vacation bc the company falls apart without them. They built a job, not a business -- a very impressive, very well-paying job that requires their presence every single day.

The executive who's been grinding for 20 yrs and has a great title, great salary, and zero assets that produce income while they sleep. They traded their way to a comfortable life, & comfortable is fine, but it's not freedom.

I'm not judging any of these people. I was them. I was the best version of them -- literally the most decorated US Winter Olympian in history -- and I still had to start over when the trading stopped.

What changed for me was asking a different question before committing to anything.

Not "is this worth my time?" but "does this keep working after I stop?"

Simple filter, ruthless. Speaking engagements? Pure trade -- I show up, deliver, get paid, done. But if that keynote becomes a framework an organization implements across 500 people long after I've left the building, that's closer to building. If the talk leads to an advisory relationship where I help shape strategy that compounds over yrs, that's building.

Investing in health & performance companies where equity grows independent of my daily involvement? Building. Writing books that sell copies while I'm sleeping? Building. Creating content that reaches people I'll never meet? Also building.

I didn't figure this out at 22. I figured it out closer to 30 after burning through the most productive yrs of my athletic life without creating a single asset that compounded. That's the expensive lesson -- not that trading is bad, but that trading alone is a trap no matter how good you are at it.

The math is brutal & I think most people avoid looking at it directly.

There are roughly 5,800 waking hours in a year. Even if you're worth $1,000/hr -- which would put you in rare company -- you max out at $5.8M. That's the ceiling on trading. And it requires every single one of those hours to hit it.

Meanwhile a piece of software, a book, a business system, an investment -- these things don't care what time it is. They don't need your legs or your lungs or your smile.

I'm not saying everyone needs to become an entrepreneur or investor. I'm saying the question is worth asking no matter what you do: what percentage of your effort right now is building something that lasts vs. trading hours that evaporate?

If the answer is 100% trade and 0% build, you might be exactly where I was at peak of my career -- winning by every visible metric and building nothing underneath.

Fifteen years is a long time to learn the thing you're best at might not be the thing that sets you free. I don't regret a single lap. But I wish someone had handed me this question at 20 instead of 30.

So I'm handing it to you now: are you building something, or are you trading for something?

--AAO

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