The Reps Nobody Counts

My dad used to wake me up at 3:30 in the morning to skate in an empty parking lot in Federal Way, Washington. I was maybe 13, 14. It was dark, it was cold, & I had a miner's headlamp duct-taped to my helmet so I could see where I was going. My dad sat in his car timing my laps on a clipboard while I went in circles on inline skates, over & over, working on crossovers & edge technique & all the foundational stuff that would eventually translate to ice.

Nobody saw those sessions. There was no coach there, no team, no one filming it for content. Just me & my dad & a parking lot & the sound of polyurethane wheels on asphalt at an hour when the rest of the world was sleeping.

I think about those mornings more than I think about any medal I've ever won. Not bc they were romantic — they weren't, they were boring & repetitive & I definitely didn't want to be there some of those days. But bc they taught me something about compounding that I've spent the rest of my life trying to explain to people, & it's this: the work that changes everything almost never feels like it's changing anything while you're doing it.

Why does the most important work feel like nothing is happening?

The thing about compounding that doesn't fit on a poster: it's invisible. Not just to other people — to you.

You don't feel it happening. You don't get a notification that says "congrats, today's session moved the needle by 0.03%." You show up, do the thing, go home, & do it again tomorrow, & the cumulative effect only becomes visible months or yrs later when you look back & realize you're in a different place than where you started.

Reps that matter most are the ones you can't point to individually. Not the breakthrough session where something clicked, not the race where everything came together — those are the ones we remember bc they feel significant. But they were built on hundreds of forgettable sessions where nothing notable happened, where work felt like work, where the only thing distinguishing that Tuesday from the previous one was that I showed up for both of them.

I didn't make the 1998 Olympic team. I was 15.

And instead of some dramatic turning point, what happened was much quieter & much slower. I went back to training. Examined my habits honestly — maybe for the first time — & I didn't like what I saw. I'd been coasting on talent & expecting results to follow without putting in the invisible work talent needs underneath it.

The rebuild took months. Not a montage, not a single pivotal moment — months of showing up & doing the boring foundational stuff I'd been skipping. And nobody counted those reps. Nobody tracked them. Nobody was going to give me credit for doing crossover drills at 4am in an empty rink when I could've been sleeping.

But those were the reps that made 2002 possible.

I think the reason most of us don't compound is bc compounding requires faith in a delayed payoff. You have to do the work now & trust it'll matter later, even though there's no immediate evidence it's working. That goes against every instinct we have in a culture that rewards speed & visibility & measurable output.

I've worked w/ founders who can't stay on a strategy for six months bc they're not seeing results fast enough. Executives who abandon habits after three weeks bc "it's not making a difference." Sales teams that quit a prospecting approach after one bad week instead of giving it a full quarter to produce data.

And I get it, bc I've done all of those things myself. The pull toward something visible & immediate is real.

Sending ten more emails feels productive. Taking a meeting feels productive. But none of that is the same as the deep, slow, unglamorous work that compounds — the strategy session you do alone w/ no audience, the skill you practice when nobody's tracking your progress, the honest conversation w/ yourself about whether your daily actions match your stated priorities.

That second category is where the leverage lives. And it's also where most people quit, bc it doesn't give you anything to show for it in the short term.

Something I didn't understand until I was well into my 30s: the reps don't just build skill. They build identity. Every time you show up for invisible work — the session nobody sees, the practice nobody tracks, the discipline nobody rewards — you're making a small deposit into a version of yourself that operates differently than the version that skips.

It's not about toughness or grinding through pain. It's about what you rehearse becoming who you are. The person who shows up on days they don't feel like it is fundamentally different from the person who only shows up when motivated, & the gap between those two people gets wider w/ every rep.

I was the second person for most of my teenage yrs. Talented, inconsistent, waiting for inspiration before I'd put in real effort. And the shift didn't happen in one moment — it happened across thousands of decisions, most of them tiny, most of them made at 4am in a parking lot when the only person who knew whether I was giving everything was me.

Something I ask myself regularly, & maybe it's useful for you too. If I kept doing exactly what I did today, every day for the next yr, where would I end up? Not where I hope to end up or where my plan says I'll end up — where would today's actual behavior, repeated 365 times, take me?

Sometimes the answer is good. Sometimes it's not. And the days when it makes me uncomfortable are the most valuable, bc at least I'm seeing clearly enough to course-correct before compounding goes the wrong direction.

Compounding doesn't care about your intentions. It only counts what you do. Reps you skip compound too, in the other direction.

My dad couldn't have known what those parking lot sessions would turn into. I certainly didn't know. But he showed up w/ the clipboard & I showed up w/ the headlamp & we did the reps, & the reps did the rest. I'm still learning that, honestly.

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

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--AAO