In fifteen years of competitive skating, I hit true flow state exactly ten times.
Ten.
Not ten times per season. Not ten times per year. Ten times total across my entire Olympic career.
I want you to sit with that number for a second.
Everything you've heard about flow makes it sound like something you unlock. Like there's a system. A morning routine. A breathing exercise. Stack the right habits, find the right protocol, and boom—the zone on demand.
I tried everything.
Meditation daily starting at fourteen. Sports psychologists who taught me visualization so detailed I could feel the cold of the ice before I stepped on it. Rituals and trigger words and breathing protocols so precise they bordered on obsessive. Same warm-up, same music, same exact movements in the same exact order before every race.
Thousands of hours of mental preparation.
Ten times in fifteen years.
Here's what those ten times felt like:
Time didn't slow down—it disappeared entirely. I wasn't making decisions anymore. The decisions were making themselves through me. My body knew things my conscious mind hadn't processed yet. Blades on ice, opponents around me, split-second adjustments happening without any sense of me doing them.
Those moments were transcendent. They were magic.
They were also completely unreliable.
This is something I address directly when I give keynote speeches on peak performance. Everyone wants the secret to accessing flow on demand. But the dirty secret of elite performance is this: the transcendent moments are rare gifts. They're not the goal—they're the occasional reward for doing the work when there is no transcendence.
I've worked with leadership teams at companies obsessed with "flow culture" and "peak state optimization." What I tell them usually isn't what they want to hear: you can't build a sustainable organization around chasing transcendence. You build it around people who show up consistently when there is no transcendence.
The other 99% of my career? Thinking. Constantly thinking. Analyzing gaps, adjusting position, managing fear, fighting through the noise in my head. Showing up when my body screamed to stop. Racing when my mind was lying about what I was capable of. Grinding through competitions where I felt nothing special at all.
That's not flow. That's work.
And the work is what won the medals.
In workshops on mental performance with executive teams, I challenge the optimization culture that promises peak states on demand. You don't get to the 1% without showing up for the other 99%. The people who build their careers around chasing magic usually burn out. The people who learn to love the grind are the ones still standing at the end.
This is true in investing too—something I've learned through my work with startups. The founders who succeed aren't the ones chasing breakthrough moments. They're the ones grinding through the 99% of days when nothing feels magical.
Flow is something that happens to you.
Discipline is something you choose.
That's the Gold Medal Mindset—not chasing transcendence, but building the foundation that occasionally allows transcendence to find you.
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.