When Getting What You Wanted Still Isn't Enough

My dad raised me alone in Seattle. Yuki Ohno, Japanese immigrant, hair stylist, working 12-hr shifts at his salon while figuring out how to keep a kid fed & out of trouble w/ no extended family in the country. He drove me to skating competitions across the Pacific Northwest on weekends bc that's what I'd latched onto, and he got me into the Lake Placid Olympic Training Center at 13 bc he believed I could be something before I did.

His approval was the thing I wanted more than anything in the world. More than medals, more than podiums, more than whatever version of success I was supposed to be building. I just wanted to see his face & know I'd done something worthy of everything he'd sacrificed.

So I chased it. 4am sessions when my body was screaming. Friendships I let dissolve. Teenage experiences I skipped entirely. Three Olympic Games, eight medals, most decorated American winter Olympian in history -- and every single one of those milestones had his face somewhere behind it. The thought of him watching. The thought of him proud.

And then I got it.

There's a moment nobody warns you about. You spend years, sometimes decades, running toward something, & when you arrive the ground doesn't feel the way you imagined it would. You expect completion, peace, some kind of permanent exhale where all the sacrifice suddenly makes sense and the account balances out.

What I got instead was a kind of disorientation that scared me more than any race ever did.

My dad looked at me w/ pride that was unmistakable & unconditional. I had it -- the thing I'd been chasing since I was a kid standing in his salon watching him work, wanting to be worth the bet he'd placed on me. It was right there in his eyes and I could feel it all the way through.

And it wasn't enough.

Not bc his approval didn't matter -- it mattered more than I can put into words. But bc I'd built my entire operating system around the pursuit of it, and now the pursuit was over. Engine that had driven me through every painful training session & every brutal competition had nowhere to go. I'd organized my whole life around earning something I'd finally earned, and the question that hit me in the quiet afterward was terrifying: now what?

What happens when the thing you chased your whole life arrives?

Through my speaking & advisory work, I've spent enough time around high performers to know this isn't unique to me.

Founders chase a number, an exit, a valuation milestone that's supposed to validate everything they've put in. Wire hits and the number is real and they feel... hollow. All that sacrifice, all those missed dinners and strained relationships and 80-hr weeks, and the finish line wasn't what they imagined.

Executives chase the title, the corner office, the board seat. They get it & the first Monday morning after feels exactly like the Monday before -- except now there's nothing left to run toward.

External motivation is real fuel, it works, it can carry you for years & push you further than you thought possible. But it has a shelf life. At some point the external thing you've been chasing either arrives or it doesn't, and either way you're left standing there w/ yourself asking what drives you when nobody's watching and there's nothing left to prove.

I won eight medals running on my dad's approval and I don't regret a single one. That fuel was real & it was mine & it got me to places I couldn't have reached any other way. But the medals couldn't replace what I was missing -- a relationship w/ myself that didn't depend on anyone else's validation to feel whole.

What changed for me wasn't some dramatic overnight transformation. It was slow & kind of unglamorous, honestly. I started asking a different question.

Instead of "am I good enough for him?" I started sitting w/ "am I becoming who I want to be?" -- and those two questions lead to very different lives.

The first question keeps you running on someone else's track. You can win every race on that track & still feel lost bc the destination was never yours. The second puts you on your own track, which is scarier bc there's nobody else to define what winning looks like. But it's the only track where the running itself feels like enough.

I still want my dad to be proud of me. That never goes away and I wouldn't want it to. But I stopped needing it to function. The difference between wanting someone's approval & needing it is the difference between carrying a gift and dragging a chain.

You can honor where you came from without being imprisoned by it. You can carry someone's love without carrying their expectations as the only thing keeping you upright.

If you've been chasing something for a long time -- approval, a title, a number, a version of success someone else defined for you -- it might be worth pausing long enough to ask whether you're still running toward it or just running bc stopping feels like losing.

Those are very different things.

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

I write about this kind of thing in Hard Pivot, my free newsletter.

--AAO