You know what Olympic training never included?
Notifications.
No pings. No Slack messages. No email alerts. No social media feeds competing for my attention every thirty seconds. Just the ice, the clock, and the work.
I didn't realize how valuable that was until I retired and entered the "real world."
Suddenly I had a phone buzzing constantly. Multiple inboxes. People who expected instant responses. Calendars that filled themselves. A thousand tiny interruptions every single day, each one feeling urgent and important.
Within months, I couldn't focus for more than ten minutes without checking something. My brain felt scattered in a way it never had during fifteen years of training. I'd sit down to work on one thing and find myself cycling through tabs, checking email, doom-scrolling—anything but the task in front of me.
I thought maybe I was lazy. Maybe I'd lost my discipline. Maybe I had some undiagnosed focus problem.
Here's what I eventually figured out:
My brain wasn't broken. My environment was broken.
This realization transformed how I approach corporate workshops on focus and productivity. When I work with teams on peak performance, the first thing we audit isn't their habits—it's their environment. Are they trying to build deep focus in a space designed to destroy it?
Fifteen years of training had wired me for deep focus. Single task. No interruptions. Hours of concentration on one thing. That's what my brain knew how to do.
Then I threw it into an environment designed for the exact opposite. Constant fragmentation. Endless inputs. Novelty every few seconds. And my brain—like any system—started adapting to its environment.
The more fragmented my attention became, the more I craved fragmentation. Sustained focus started feeling uncomfortable.
I've seen this pattern in every organization I've advised. Leaders who believe they have a discipline problem when they actually have an architecture problem. Their environment is engineered for interruption, and they blame themselves when they can't concentrate. It's like trying to sleep in a room full of flashing lights and then diagnosing yourself with insomnia.
In team training sessions on sustainable high performance, I have people reconstruct the conditions that allow their best work. For me, that meant: Phone in another room. Notifications off entirely. One task at a time. Protected blocks where nobody could reach me.
Basically: recreating the conditions I had on the ice.
When I advise executives on building high-performance cultures, environmental design is where we start. Not with motivational speeches or accountability systems—with the actual structure of how work happens. The most disciplined person in the world can't outwork a broken environment.
The question isn't whether you can focus. You probably can.
The question is whether your environment allows you to.
Most people are trying to build deep focus in an environment designed to destroy it. Then they blame themselves when it doesn't work.
Change the environment first.
See what your brain can actually do when you stop sabotaging it every thirty seconds.
About Apolo Ohno: Apolo Ohno is a sought-after keynote speaker and leadership advisor known for translating elite performance principles into practical leadership behaviors. His work focuses on authentic leadership, executive presence, and the Gold Medal Mindset - helping executives and teams perform with clarity under pressure, communicate with conviction, and lead with credibility when the stakes are high. In his keynotes and workshops, Apolo helps leaders identify the unseen patterns, narratives, and habits that quietly limit performance, then replace them with a repeatable system for focus, resilience, and decisive action.