I was terrified of becoming That Guy.
You know who I mean. The former athlete who lingers around the edges of the sport, telling the same stories, wearing the old gear, showing up at events hoping someone will recognize them and ask about the glory days. The one who peaked at 27 and spent the next 40 years trying to recreate a feeling that's never coming back.
That fear lived in my chest for years before I retired and it got louder every day after. Because when you've spent your entire life being introduced as "Olympic champion Apolo Ohno" and then competition ends and nobody's introducing you anymore, the emptiness where your identity used to be is deafening.
I talked about this on the Rich Roll podcast and it was one of the first times I'd said it out loud. The fear wasn't about missing skating.
I missed it, sure, but that wasn't what kept me up at night. What kept me up was the question of who I was without it. Strip away the medals, the training schedule, the competitions, the identity built and reinforced every day since I was 13, and what's left?
I didn't know.
If you're a high achiever, some version of this fear is probably living in you too. Fear of failure. Fear of being found out. Fear that the thing you built your identity on could disappear and take you with it. This post is about that fear - what it actually is, why the most successful people carry the most of it, and what to do with it.
Michael Phelps said something that stuck with me when I heard it: "The only thing I saw was a swimmer. I never saw myself as a human being." That's 23 gold medals talking. Most decorated Olympian in history admitting he'd never developed an identity outside the pool.
I understood that. My entire sense of self was organized around being a speed skater.
Every morning I woke up knowing exactly who I was, what I was supposed to do, how to measure whether I was doing it well. Competitive sport gives you all of that for free - purpose, routine, feedback, belonging, a scoreboard that tells you exactly where you stand. And then one day it just stops.
People describe retirement from sport like a transition. That word is way too gentle.
A transition implies you're moving from one thing to another, like there's a bridge and you just need to walk across it. What it feels like is the floor disappearing. Total freedom that feels exactly like falling.
You go from a life where every hour is accounted for - training at 6am, recovery at 10, film at 2, competition prep at 4 - to a life where nobody needs you to be anywhere and nothing is scheduled and the question "what do I do today?" has no obvious answer. For someone who's been operating inside a rigid structure for two decades, that kind of openness isn't liberating. It's paralyzing.
Here's the strange math of achievement: the fear doesn't shrink as the resume grows. For a lot of people it grows with it.
Psychologists have a name for one version of this - impostor syndrome, the persistent feeling that your success isn't really earned and that sooner or later everyone will figure it out. A systematic review published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine looked at dozens of studies and found impostor feelings reported by anywhere from 9% to 82% of the people studied, in men and women alike, from students to late-career professionals. The same review found those feelings travel with anxiety, depression, burnout, and worse job performance and satisfaction. This isn't a quirky confidence problem. It's a weight people carry into every room.
And notice who it shows up in: employed, credentialed, accomplished people. The fraud feeling isn't evidence you're failing. It's practically a side effect of operating at a high level, because high achievers are the ones who tied their worth to a performance in the first place.
That's the fear every high achiever hides. It wears different outfits - fear of failure, fear of being exposed, fear of becoming That Guy - but underneath it's the same question I couldn't answer when I retired: if I'm not the performance, who am I?
The medals never answer it. I had eight of them, more than any American winter athlete in history, and the question still kept me up at night. If accumulating proof worked, the most decorated people would be the most secure people. Ask around. They're not.
I see this same pattern everywhere now. Founders who sell their company and then don't know what to do with themselves when the all-consuming work of building is gone. Executives who retire from a 30-year career and realize their entire social life was their colleagues, their entire identity was their title. Parents whose kids leave for college and suddenly the role that organized their whole life is no longer needed in the same way.
Common thread is always the same - we build our identity around a role, and when the role changes or ends, we experience something that feels a lot like grief.
Because it is grief. You're mourning a version of yourself that doesn't exist anymore, and nobody gives you permission to feel that because from the outside your life looks fine. You're healthy, you're accomplished, you have options. What's the problem?
The problem is having options and having identity are different things. You can have unlimited freedom and still feel lost if you don't know who you are without the structure that used to define you.
I'm not going to pretend I figured this out quickly or cleanly. It took years. There were stretches after retiring where I felt untethered in a way I wouldn't wish on anyone, and I made plenty of mistakes trying to fill the void with activity and busyness instead of sitting with the discomfort of not knowing who I was becoming.
What eventually helped was stopping the search for a replacement. I kept trying to find "the next thing" that would give me the same sense of identity and purpose skating had, and the harder I looked for it the more frustrated I got because nothing matched. Nothing was going to match. That's like trying to find a second first love - the intensity of that initial thing is unrepeatable, and chasing the feeling is a trap.
The shift happened when I started asking a different question. Instead of "what replaces skating?" I started asking "what interests me right now?" Not what should interest me, not what would look impressive on a bio, not what would recreate the adrenaline and structure of competition. What pulls me in when nobody's watching and nothing's at stake.
That question led me to speaking, to advisory work, to investing in founders building things I care about, to writing and thinking about performance in ways that go beyond sport. None of those things individually replaced skating. Together they created something new - a life organized around curiosity instead of competition, around contribution instead of scoreboard.
If you're carrying some version of this right now, here's where I'd start. Nothing here requires quitting anything. It requires about an hour, spread across seven days.
This past February I was at the Milan Cortina Winter Games - not as a competitor, but covering them as a correspondent for Yahoo Sports.
Understand what that setup looks like from inside my old fear. A retired skater, back at the Olympics, hanging around the sport he used to dominate. On paper that's the That Guy starter kit.
It didn't feel that way at all, and the reason matters. I wasn't there to relive anything. I was there with a job to do - a craft I'd built in the years since retiring, asking questions instead of answering them, translating the sport for people instead of performing it. The old identity was present, but it was an ingredient, not the dish.
And walking those venues, I kept seeing athletes at the other end of the pipeline - some finishing their last races, weeks away from the exact cliff edge I stood on in 2010. I know what's waiting for some of them, the deafening quiet after the structure ends. What I'd tell them is what took me years to learn: the fear of losing the identity is real, but the identity was never the medals. It was the capacity to commit fully to something hard. That transfers.
I spent years trying to find something that would make me feel the way skating made me feel, and the breakthrough was realizing that's the wrong target. You're not supposed to feel the same way again. You're supposed to feel something new, and the newness is the whole point.
If you're in the middle of some version of this right now - career change, retirement, identity shift, any moment where the thing that defined you is no longer the thing that defines you - the disorientation you're feeling isn't a sign something's wrong. It's a sign you're growing into a version of yourself that doesn't exist yet, and that version needs space and time and patience to take shape.
This is the territory I work in now - the mindset work I do with organizations is largely about this exact fear, because every leadership team is full of high achievers quietly asking the same question I was. Naming it in a room full of successful people is always the moment the room changes.
The fear of becoming That Guy never fully goes away. But it gets quieter when you stop trying to go back and start getting curious about what's ahead. I'm still figuring it out, honestly (at least for me that's the only way I know how to say it).
I go deeper on this in Hard Pivot - the messy, honest version of what reinvention looks like when there's no playbook. And if this hit close to home, the Hard Pivot newsletter is where I write about it every week. Join me there.
--AAO
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