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I kept all eight Olympic medals in my sock drawer for almost a decade.
Not in a display case or on a shelf. Buried under socks in a dresser drawer I barely opened.
This wasn't humility. It was something stranger and deeper than that.
I was deathly afraid of becoming the guy who lost his hunger after he won a few gold medals. Someone who used to train insane but now lived a comfortable life and was fat and out of shape—both mentally and physically. I never felt that the trophies needed to be visible so people could understand that I matter.
I'd seen that guy. I'd competed with that guy. He scared me more than losing ever did.
So I made a rule: hide the winnings. If I never looked at the medals, they couldn't define me.
For almost ten years, I protected myself from my own accomplishments.
Then COVID happened.
I was home for months. Nowhere to go. No one to perform for. Just me and my dog and an amount of quietness I hadn't experienced since that cabin in Washington when I was fifteen.
One afternoon, for no particular reason, I opened that drawer.
Eight medals. Three Olympics. Almost 20 years of my life compressed into metal and ribbon.
I held them. Actually held them. And I realized something that stopped me:
I had never processed any of it properly.
I'd won and moved on. Won and moved on. So terrified of ego that I never let myself feel what I'd done.
This is what I call "The Humility Trap"—and it's a concept I explore in motivational talks with high-achieving audiences. Avoiding pride can become its own form of pride. Running from your accomplishments can become its own kind of ego. The refusal to acknowledge what you've built can be just as limiting as over-identifying with it.
I've seen this pattern in successful founders and executives I advise. The ones who can't accept compliments. Who deflect every acknowledgment. Who are so afraid of becoming arrogant that they become something equally problematic: disconnected from their own achievements. This prevents them from building on what they've done because they won't even look at it.
In keynote speeches on achievement and success, I challenge the assumption that humility means hiding. That's not humility. It's just arrogance wearing a different costume. True humility is honest assessment—neither inflating nor deflating.
When I work with leadership teams on recognizing and building on success, I help them distinguish between healthy grounding and unhealthy denial. Staying hungry doesn't require pretending you haven't eaten. You can acknowledge the meal and still want more.
There's a difference between staying hungry and refusing to acknowledge what you've built. There's a difference between maintaining drive and denying yourself the right to feel proud of what that drive created.
I still don't display them prominently. That's not me.
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.
Took me a decade and a pandemic to figure out the difference between staying humble and being afraid of my own shadow.
Don't make the same mistake.
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.