Your Skills Are More Portable Than You Think

After the Vancouver Games in 2010 I remember sitting in my apartment & having this thought that felt both obvious and devastating: I have no idea how to do anything else.

I was 28. I'd spent my entire conscious life on a 111-meter oval of ice.

I could read body language of eight skaters moving at 35 mph in a space the size of a bball court. I could visualize a race so thoroughly I'd feel the temperature of the ice under my blades before I ever stepped on it. I could regulate my heart rate, manage fear, make split-second tactical decisions at speeds where a wrong lean means you're in the wall.

None of which, as far as I could tell, had anything to do w/ running a business, making an investment, or having a conversation in a boardroom that didn't start w/ "so, what's it like to be an Olympian?"

I was wrong about that. Took me yrs to realize how wrong.

Here's what I didn't understand at 28 that I think about constantly now in my advisory work -- the skills I'd built on ice weren't skating skills. They were human performance skills that happened to express themselves through skating. And the moment I stopped thinking of them as "athletic abilities" & started seeing them as capabilities, everything opened up.

Visualization is a good example. I started doing mental rehearsal seriously when I was 14 or 15 -- full sensory, first-person. Not watching myself skate but BEING myself skating. I could feel hardness of the ice under my blade, hear crowd noise warping as I came out of a turn, feel the specific burn in my quads on lap seven. I visualized thousands of scenarios, including ones where I got pushed into the wall or fell.

I rehearsed recovery before I needed it.

When I started working in business -- first as an investor, then advisory roles -- I realized I was doing the exact same thing. Sitting down before a meeting or a pitch & running through scenarios in my head. Not just what I wanted to happen, but what could go wrong. Same skill, different arena.

How do athletic skills transfer to business?

Competitive analysis was even more direct. In my late teens I spent an entire summer in my basement in Federal Way, watching tape of Dong-Sung Kim, Fabio Carta, Marc Gagnon, Saturo Terao -- studying their acceleration patterns, their tendencies on turns, the micro-tells that revealed what they'd do before they did it.

That obsessive pattern recognition, the willingness to study your field until you see things other people miss -- it's exactly what good investors and advisors do. Vocabulary changes but the underlying muscle is identical.

I think this is where most people get stuck during transitions. You look at your resume & you see job titles and domain-specific credentials. I looked at mine and saw "went fast, turned left."

It's almost funny now but it wasn't funny then. I felt like I was starting from zero bc I was measuring myself by what I'd done rather than what I'd built.

The distinction matters. What I'd done was win eight Olympic medals in short track speed skating. What I'd built was the ability to learn obsessively, perform under extreme pressure, recover from failure quickly, read situations in real time, & maintain discipline over decades.

Those aren't skating skills. They travel.

I've seen this play out w/ so many people since then -- backed companies founded by former athletes, military officers, musicians, people w/ non-traditional backgrounds who built extraordinary capabilities in one field & redirected them. The thing they share isn't industry expertise. It's transferable intensity. They know how to work, how to learn, and how to compete, and those three things turn out to be more valuable than any specific credential.

Something I do now when working w/ executives or teams going through transitions -- I ask a version of this question: what are three things you do almost effortlessly that other people find difficult?

Most people rush past it or give generic answers. "I'm a hard worker." "I'm a good communicator." Those aren't capabilities, those are labels.

I push deeper. Can you walk into a room full of tension & immediately feel the power dynamics? That's pattern recognition. Can you take a complex problem & intuitively see the 2-3 moves that matter most? That's strategic compression. Can you stay calm when everything around you is on fire and people are looking to you for direction? That's pressure regulation.

Real, portable, deployable skills.

I spent time after retiring believing my old skills didn't apply in my new life. If I'd kept believing that, I'd still be sitting on the couch wondering what to do. Instead -- & this took longer than I want to admit -- I started mapping what I'd built rather than what I'd achieved. Capabilities rather than credentials.

That mapping is what I wrote about in 𝘏𝘢𝘳𝘥 𝘗𝘪𝘷𝘰𝘵. Not a playbook for how to go from Olympic athlete to businessman. More like an honest accounting of what transfers & what doesn't, and how to stop selling yourself short during the messy middle of reinvention.

The thing nobody tells you about career transitions is you're not starting over. You're just changing the arena. The discipline you developed through 10,000+ hrs of focused practice? It travels. The pattern recognition you built across thousands of repetitions? Travels. The ability to perform when you're exhausted & unmotivated & nothing feels magical? That travels too.

I spent 15 yrs going in circles on ice and every single lap is still w/ me. Not as nostalgia -- as equipment. And whatever you've been doing for the last five, ten, twenty yrs built equipment too.

Take inventory. You might be surprised what's already in there.

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--AAO