The Part Nobody Claps For

There's a version of my career that looks incredible from the outside. Eight Olympic medals, three Games, most decorated American Winter Olympian in history. Standing on podiums w/ flags & cameras & the kind of noise that rattles your chest.

That version is real. It happened. But it's maybe 0.1% of the story.

The other 99.9% was friction. Daily, grinding, unglamorous friction nobody filmed & nobody clapped for & nobody particularly wanted to hear about. Waking up before the sun in Colorado Springs to do the same drill for the four hundredth time. Having conversations w/ coaches where they told me things I didn't want to hear. Sitting alone after a bad race trying to figure out whether the problem was physical or mental or both, & not having a clean answer.

That's the part I keep coming back to now, yrs after I stopped competing. Not the medals. The friction.

I think most of us have a complicated relationship w/ friction. We say we want growth, we say we want to get better, we say we want to build something meaningful. But the moment things get uncomfortable — the hard conversation, the missed target, the feedback that stings bc it's accurate — the instinct is to flinch, to smooth it over, to find a way around it instead of through it.

I get it. I did the same thing for yrs.

When I was 14 & 15, I had more talent than discipline. I was winning races but also cutting corners on training, blowing off conditioning work, convincing myself natural ability would carry me through the parts I didn't feel like doing. And for a while it did — that's the dangerous thing about talent without friction, it works just long enough to make you think you don't need the hard stuff.

My dad saw it before I did. That's what the cabin was about — not punishment, not some dramatic intervention, but forcing me to sit w/ the question of whether I was willing to do work that matched my potential. Whether I wanted the process or just the prize.

I chose the process. Not all at once, not in some clean cinematic moment, but slowly, painfully, over months of rebuilding habits I'd let slide. And that choice — not any medal — is the thing that's carried me through every transition since.

How do you use friction instead of running from it?

In short track speed skating, friction is literal. You're on ice w/ seven other skaters in a space the size of a bball court, moving at 30+ mph, & contact is constant — bumping, jostling, positioning. You're always one misjudgment away from a crash that takes out 1/2 the field.

I learned something in that environment I think about every day now. You don't eliminate friction. You learn to use it. Best skaters aren't the ones who avoid contact — they're the ones who absorb it & redirect it without losing speed. They stay in the chaos instead of pulling away from it.

Same thing is true in organizations. Teams that perform at the highest level aren't the ones w/ the smoothest dynamics. They're the ones that know how to have difficult conversations without falling apart. Where people can say "this isn't working" & the response is curiosity, not defensiveness. Where missed targets get examined honestly instead of explained away.

I've sat in rooms where culture was so conflict-averse that everyone smiled through problems until the problems became crises. And I've sat in rooms where tension was welcomed — not bc people enjoyed it, but bc they understood tension was where the real information lived.

Second group always outperformed the first. Not bc they were smarter or more talented, but bc they had a different relationship w/ discomfort (at least that's what I've seen over & over).

There's a version of "embrace the process" that's become meaningless. Shows up on motivational posters & in keynote speeches & it sounds nice & changes nothing. So let me be specific.

Process isn't about loving the grind. I didn't love 5am parking lot sessions in the dark. Didn't love ice baths or film review or the twentieth repetition of a start technique I'd done nineteen times that morning. Work wasn't romantic — it was repetitive, frequently boring, & sometimes felt pointless in the moment.

What process means, at least for me, is detaching your identity from outcomes. Not completely — I wanted to win, badly, every time — but enough that a bad result doesn't shatter you & a good result doesn't define you. Enough that you can lose a race on Friday & show up Monday morning ready to work on the thing that cost you, without spiraling into either self-pity or overcorrection.

The people I work w/ now who struggle most are usually the ones whose entire sense of themselves is built on results. When things go well they feel great, when things go badly they feel worthless, & the whiplash between those two states eats up an enormous amount of energy that could've gone toward getting better.

I've been there. I know what it feels like to tie everything you are to a number on a scoreboard or a quarterly report. And I know what it feels like to slowly, imperfectly, learn to untangle those things. It's not a one-time shift — it's a practice, & some days you're better at it than others.

Something I still do, & I'd recommend it to anyone who runs a team or builds anything. Once a week I ask myself: what's the most uncomfortable thing I've been avoiding? Not the busiest thing or the most urgent — the most uncomfortable.

The conversation I don't want to have. The decision I keep deferring. Feedback I know I need to give but haven't bc it's going to be awkward.

Then I do it. Not bc I want to. Bc the cost of avoiding it is always higher than the cost of doing it, & the gap between those two costs gets wider every week I wait.

The medals are on a shelf somewhere. The friction is still showing up every day. More on that later, probably.

I wrote about this in Zero Regrets — the cost of what competition demands & what it gives back.

Subscribe to Hard Pivot

--AAO