The Sock Drawer

I kept all eight Olympic medals in my sock drawer for almost a decade.

Not a display case, not a shelf, not even a closet where I might accidentally see them. Buried under socks in a dresser I barely opened.

And I told myself this was humility.

It wasn't.

What it actually was -- and this took me yrs to understand -- was fear dressed up as discipline. I was deathly afraid of becoming the guy who peaked, the one who won a few golds & then coasted. Someone who used to train insane but was now soft and comfortable and mentally checked out. I'd competed against that version of people my entire career & it terrified me more than losing ever did.

So I made a rule for myself: hide the winnings. If I never looked at the medals, they couldn't define me. If I never acknowledged what I'd done, I'd stay hungry.

For almost 10 yrs that logic held. I protected myself from my own accomplishments like they were something dangerous, something that could infect me w/ complacency if I let them get too close.

Then COVID happened.

I was home for months. Nowhere to go, no stage to perform on, no audience to project strength toward. Just me & my dog and a kind of silence I hadn't experienced since that cabin in Washington when I was fifteen, the one where my dad sent me to train alone for an entire summer.

One afternoon -- and I genuinely don't remember why -- I opened that drawer.

Eight medals. Three Olympics. Close to 20 yrs of my life compressed into metal & ribbon.

I held them in my hands. And something I wasn't prepared for started happening.

I realized I had never processed any of it.

I'd won and moved on, won and moved on, so scared of ego that I never once let myself sit w/ what those moments meant. The sacrifices behind each one, the relationships I'd strained, the version of myself I'd pushed past every physical & psychological limit to become -- I had stuffed all of it into a sock drawer and told myself that was the mature thing to do.

Is hiding your wins actually holding you back?

I think a lot of us do some version of this, maybe not w/ medals but w/ whatever we've built. The promotion we downplay, the company we grew but won't take credit for, the yrs of grinding we brush off bc acknowledging them might make us seem soft or satisfied or -- worst of all -- done.

There's this idea that staying hungry requires pretending you haven't eaten. That drive & acknowledgment can't coexist in the same person. I bought into that for a long time, partly bc the culture around elite sport reinforced it and partly bc I didn't know another way.

But here's what I've come to understand (at least for me): refusing to look at what you've accomplished isn't humility. It's fear wearing a different costume. And it's limiting in ways that aren't obvious until you're deep into it.

When I work w/ leadership teams & organizations now -- founders, executives, sales teams running at full speed -- I see the same pattern everywhere. People who can't accept a compliment. Who deflect every acknowledgment.

Who are so terrified of becoming arrogant that they become something equally stuck: completely disconnected from their own wins. And when you're disconnected from what you've built, you can't build on it. You're starting from zero every day bc you won't let yourself stand on the foundation that's already there.

I think the distinction I was missing for all those yrs was between honest assessment & denial. Staying grounded doesn't require pretending the ground doesn't exist.

You can hold a medal, remember what it cost, feel something about it -- and still wake up the next morning ready to work. Those aren't competing impulses. They might actually feed each other.

The pursuit is where the real satisfaction lives, not in the achievement itself. I wrote about that in Hard Pivot & I believe it deeply. But the pursuit gets hollow if you never pause long enough to acknowledge the milestones along the way. You end up running and running and running w/ no sense of where you've been, an endless forward motion fueled by a fear you stopped questioning a long time ago.

I still don't display my medals prominently. That's not me & probably never will be.

But I don't hide them anymore either.

I know where they are. I've held them. I've let myself remember what they cost & what they represent -- not as proof that I matter, but as evidence the work was real.

Took me a decade and a pandemic to figure out the difference between staying humble & being afraid of my own shadow. I'm still sitting w/ that one, honestly.

--AAO

I wrote more about the gap between external success & what's actually going on inside in Zero Regrets. And if you want the weekly version -- unpolished, no highlight reel -- that's Hard Pivot.