Start With A Win - Seeking Progress Over Perfection with Olympic Champion, Apolo Ohno

Episode Date: October 28, 2020

In this episode of the Start With A Win podcast, our guest is Apolo Ohno, an 8-time Olympic medal winner, Dancing with the Stars champion, author, motivational speaker, and philanthropist. Apolo's high levels of achievement derived from his childhood by the foundations laid by his father. As a single parent, Apolo’s dad wanted to make sure Apolo was enrolled in plenty of activities and applied the right mental energies to those endeavors. He taught Apolo discipline and work ethic within a growth mindset, emphasizing that he had control over his own effort and consistency. At the age of 12, Apolo watched short track speed skating on television for the first time, and he knew almost immediately that he wanted to get into the sport. Short track speed skating takes place on a 111-meter track with 5-7 athletes on 1.1mm wide skate blades reaching speeds of 35-40 miles per hour and experiencing 2.5-2.7 G’s of pressure at each turn during a race that lasts about 40 seconds. Apolo says that there are hundreds of thousands of variables that could affect each race, so there is great volatility in the outcomes. Speed skating taught Apolo the importance of being adaptable, responding instead of reacting, seeking progress over perfection, and overcoming mental barriers, lessons that he has carried with him into all aspects of his life. When he was 14, Apolo set a goal to go to the Olympics and become the greatest speed skating athlete. While he didn’t fully understand the requirements and sacrifices that would be a part of that process, those ultimate goals drove every daily task and routine he instituted from that day forward. Along the way, he learned the necessity of absorbing inspiration and motivation from all available sources, pushing to see his own potential, and switching on the high-performance mechanism on demand. On a daily basis, Apolo evaluates his final goals, reverse engineers what it will take to reach those goals, and sets milestones for monthly, weekly, daily, and hourly timeframes as necessary. He says that stress and pressure create beautiful things and that pushing past self-sabotage and shifting established paradigms are crucial parts of the growth process.Join us on the next episode for the conclusion of our conversation with Apolo! Connect with Apolo:https://www.instagram.com/apoloohno/https://twitter.com/ApoloOhnohttps://www.facebook.com/ApoloOhnoOfficialhttps://apoloohno.com/Connect with Adam:https://www.startwithawin.com/https://www.facebook.com/REMAXAdamContoshttps://twitter.com/REMAXAdamContoshttps://www.instagram.com/REMAXadamcontos/Leave us a voicemail:888-581-4430

Every day is filled with choices. You're here because you're choosing to start with a win. Get ready to be inspired, learn something new, and connect with the win nation. Coming to you from Remax World Headquarters in Denver, Colorado. Adam Conto, CEO here with Start With The Win. And I have on the other end of the virtual monitor here, producer Mark. How you doing, buddy? So good. I love it. I love it. I was a little intimidated to dance today because we have our guest who happens to be, you know, one of the champions of Dancing with the Stars. You know, so this is gonna be a fun show. Are you excited about this? Yeah, I'm so stoked. Let's go ahead and bring him on. All right. Well, I am honored to introduce Apollo Ono, the retired short track speed skating competitor with an eight-time Olympic medal winning. I mean, this guy is the epitome of how do you focus? How do you create a champion within yourself through your efforts?

Apollo is the most decorated American Olympian at the Winter Olympics, inducted into the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame in 2019, best-selling author and speaker. I mean, this guy is one heck of a public speaker, and he's on a life mission to help you become your best in health, work, and life. So I'm excited to introduce Apollo. Oh, by the way, I mentioned he's also the season four Dancing with the Stars champion, and he's also a great philanthropist, just to name a few more accolades. So, Apollo, welcome to the show. How are you doing, my friend? Thank you. Well, I'm doing good. I'm doing really, really good this morning. It feels good, Adam. I love the dancing of the intro.

You know, I've never seen that while you participated. Oh, thank you. Thanks for, uh. You got to move the body, which is good. I like that. That's it. We, we, we start strong. We start with a smile and, uh, I'll tell you what, this is, it's a fun show.

We're honored to have you on here because I love to, um, really kind of reverse engineer, kind of take apart how, uh, the life of a champion, how somebody who has created massive success in different aspects of their life, how did you get there? Things of that nature. So we're honored to have you. You really are a champion, a multiple champion, and have an amazing story. I've done a lot of studying on your history here. And I want to start with the early beginnings because there's always a great way to understand somebody's success by understanding how they foundationally created that. So can you tell us a little bit about your childhood and what impressions, changes, things like that, challenges you had that led to further steps in your life?

Well, the challenge that I had as a kid were actually the fact that I would just get in my own way a lot of the time. And so my father noticed really early on, I grew up in a single parent household, and he noticed that I just had this incredible amount of energy that was, I would say, seemingly uncontrollable at times. And so he did what any parent would possibly think of and try to enroll me into all of these activities pre-school and then after school as he possibly could, so that I essentially, I would be tired out by the time I got home. And the reality is that I wasn't. And so he saw that I had a natural propensity towards particular sports. And swimming was one of those things.

I had played all traditional American stick and ball sports. And then at the age of 12, I saw this sport of short track speed skating that caught my eye, caught my father's eye. We watched it during the Winter Olympics. I saw it again when I was 14. And that began this path towards just trying it for fun. And then you say the challenges when I was a kid, it was really, I think just channeling and honing in and kind of providing these guardrails for that energy and for that unique talent that I had.

And then kind of, as my father would say, he was there to not just not hold my hand, but kind of push me in the right direction. Because, you know, I think when you when you show the skill level that we had, and the directional, I think just it was almost like a magnet. It wasn't clear to me at all times that this was something that I was going to do for the rest of my life. So luckily, my father was there to kind of provide those guardrails as I was this ping pong ball, just going back and forth towards that end goal, which was eventually to make the Olympic team. So your father, and I know you mentioned this a few times in your stories, your writings, your speeches, things like that, had this incredible discipline and work ethic.

And it sounds like he was able to take that really immense strength and take your energy and combine those things together. Is that a fair statement? Yeah, definitely a fair statement. But also my father was one who, in all of the kind of raising lessons that he gave me when I was younger, he focused a lot on, Apollo, don't forget that you have control over the effort level, over the commitment, over the dedication that you put towards something. He made it also very clear that I wasn't going to be able to win all of the races or win everything that I was doing in my life. But he was really, really, really focused on concentrating on the effort level and concentrating on the consistency of what I was putting forth. And at the time, I didn't know what he was doing.

But now we've got books like Growth Mindset and Carol Dweck. My dad was doing all of that stuff. He was never patting me on the back and saying, great job. You're so good at skating. Instead, he was saying, wow, that was fantastic. You must have worked. So tell me what was going on through your head. And this is at the age of 12 and 13 years old. And then always asking me questions, or when I would have questions asked to him, he would then pose a question back to me, which would create this introspective loop of, can I be more? Can I do better? How do I do the self-analysis? This is at a really, really young age. And so he started that seed quite early,

which I think actually proved to be something that was extremely beneficial later on in my career because that became very consistent in its habit-forming mechanism. And so let's take this into the short track speed skating. I mean, first of all, can you, I mean, I look at like short track speed skating is like NASCAR inside. It is like super intense, you know, person on several people type competition. I mean, this is, this is something that you're kind of like this gladiator in the ring type situation with these folks. Can you describe what short track speed skating is to everybody so they can kind of picture that in their mind? Short track speed skating. If you've never seen this sport, imagine an ice hockey rink,

an Olympic sized ice hockey rink, just like all NHL players play in. We skate in the middle of that ice hockey rink on a 111-meter track with four to five to six other athletes on the ice at the same time. Everyone's passing each other. We're going 35 to 40 miles an hour on a piece of metal that is 1.1 millimeters thick and we're racing. And it's not really always about who, you know, in long track speed skating or track and field, you know, you kind of stay in your own lane. In short track speed skating, you pass and you maneuver. There's lots of strategy.

And technically there's not supposed to be a lot of conflict between the athletes in terms of contact but there always is obviously because you know we're racing on such short kind of millimeter like precision so the sport is it's nuts and your term of looking like nascar that's how it's been described as nascar on ice many many times and for anyone who's ever actually seen the sport live it doesn't't look, it looks impossible. It actually looks fake because these athletes are leaning over at these impossible angles on one leg, pulling like 2.5 to 2.7 G forces, which to give you context is like doing like a 500 pound one legged squat repeatedly in each corner. Um, and that's, you know, those are

called pivot. That's called doing a pivot in each corner. So the sport is fun. The sport, I tell you, has taught me so much about life, especially after I retired. And people are like, well, what do you mean? Like, you know, like you wore like basically skin tight outfit and you raced around in circles for your whole life. Like, how does that have any correlation to business or to life now? And I'm like, oh, but on contrary, you must realize that short track speed skating is one of the most volatile sports in the world. Meaning you can run the same race four different times and potentially get four different winners. And you can prepare a lifetime for that one particular moment in your life, in your career. And that race is 40 seconds long,

in which 1.3 billion people are watching around the world, and now you have to be absolutely perfect. So all of the thousands and hundreds of thousands of variables of change that are outside of your control, they all seem to happen the day of that Olympic Games. And the things that you know that possibly were on the other end of the spectrum in terms of actually happening and the chance of that happening somehow happened. The bus breaks down on the way from the Olympic village all the way to get to the ice rink. Now you're an hour late where you're supposed to be on time for your warmup and you have to figure out and pivot and adapt and reinvent the way that you think about how to prepare for that day. And then you combine that with my first medal. I'm sorry if this story is a little bit

long, but my first medal was actually a silver medal. And it's my favorite medal. And people would often say, well, why is that? You won gold, but why aren't those the best? And I say, the reason why that silver was so important is because it was the combination of so many different events in this country's kind of timeline, but also in my life. And so I was supposed to win a race. I was like literally 10 feet away from the finish line. I was knocked down. I was in the pads, cut myself, scrambled, got myself up onto my feet, threw my skates across the finish line, and I was able to capture and win the silver medal. And most people would say, well, doesn't that feel like the gold was taken away from you, like that athlete who fell into you? And I think there's one side of our psychology that says yes, but the other side is, well, there's some things I just can't control in my

life, right? And just like life, just like what we've seen through COVID and all these other different types of challenges that we're all facing, those things are seemingly outside of your control. And so your ability to respond versus react in a way that maybe you are preconditioned to that won't greatly suit the outcome that you desire, your ability to respond in the way that will give you the progress that you actually seek. And while we're all seeking for perfection, because that's how many alpha like to live their life, the reality is the real value, I think,

is in seeking progress over perfection. And it's that progress, as you spoke to me, kind of off mic before we started recording, about creating those micro-w wins on a consistent basis. And that is empowering. That is powerful. And that metal in the silver medal in short track speed skating, to me is the metaphor for life. You can prepare your entire life for something. You feel like this was your destiny and you were meant to be. And then the snap of a finger, something happens where you don't get what you thought that you deserved and you don't get what you thought that you wanted. And now it's up to your brain and up to you as a person to re-identify with what is important

and how to carry on, how to carry forward and how to reinvent yourself so that you can still create high performance mechanisms throughout your life. And you don't live a life filled with sorrow and doubt and regret because that's easy. That's an emotional response that we all have as human beings. That was my first initial response to receiving the silver. I'm a diehard competitor. I'd rather chop off my own fingers

than lose a race. So for me not to get something that I felt like I deserved required a reconfiguring and a rewiring of the perception of what just happened. And then that in its essence allowed me to reestablish a mind frame and a mindset to say, you know what, this is an incredible opportunity. This was given to me for reasons that maybe I can't potentially explain right now. And that is powerful. That is the essence, I think, of the human experience. Truly amazing. This is a function of you setting a direction and making these little movements every single day in your life. When did you know? I mean, you talked about your father and you watching this short track speed skating going, this is really a cool sport. When did you think, I want to be the best in the world at this? And when did you set the Olympics as your goal? I

mean, how did that process go? Well, the Olympics as my goal began quite early, probably when I was about 14, 15 years old. I didn't understand what it was going to require of me physically and mentally in order to achieve that goal. But my father, his old always told me that he saw talent and he saw in me very early. Even before I started skating, he thought that I was going to do something spectacular. And I think many parents believe that of their child.

My dad was very adamant and really tried to kind of set the stage, so to speak, to prepare me. So, you know, the Olympic path is one that until you go through it and you live it, there's many different types of living and experiencing the Olympic journey. And not all of them are the same. They're all unique. Some athletes are completely acceptant of the fact that say, not all of them are the same. They're all unique. Some athletes are completely acceptant of the fact that say, I'm okay just making the Olympic team. I'm not trying to win Olympic medals. I just want to make the team. Some athletes just say like, I just want to make the team, but I'm okay being a part of the national team. Someone asked me when I was 17

years old, what do you want people to say when you leave the sport and I wrote this down and it's actually at um The ice rink near the university of utah I wrote this down during one of our kind of we would get together as a team and We would kind of write out these goals and I wrote down I want to be remembered as the greatest athlete to have ever Skated on this ice. I didn't know what I was saying But I think subconsciously there was something there that was hungry to do something extraordinary. Now, extraordinary meaning nothing that I had seen done by my peers at the time. It wasn't that extraordinary.

I just wanted to just, I wanted to push the envelope and I wanted to see what the potential was. And the more that I read and the more people that I talked to, the environment that I was around, whether it was the wrestlers or the other athletes in the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, I was able to just suck up some of that incredible inspiration and motivation from them to hear from them about how they've dedicated their life, how they didn't make two Olympic teams back to back. So eight years of training, they still didn't accomplish their goal, but they were still there grinding and pursuing and pushing and trying to figure out ways in which to accomplish that. And I thought that was really powerful.

So the path of the Olympic realm, it's beautiful and it's really hard. And it's not until you peel back that curtain, as we see in all industries, right? We always look to that person, whether it's in real estate, whether it's in construction, development, residential, commercial, whatever that is, we always look at that person and say, man, that guy or that woman is just, they're crushing it. I want what they have. And whenever you see them, maybe they've got this beautiful smile and energy that is infectious about them. But what you don't know is the pain that was required as the entrance fee to get to that point. It's not always easy

and it takes time and the Olympic path is no different and there's a price to pay. And every human being has the ability to switch that high performance mechanism inside their head. I didn't know. It took me many failures, Adam, many, many failures to recognize the talent that I had and to stop self-sabotaging and to actually allow and surrender myself to the work and the stoicism ethical beliefs that I believed in both in the sport and outside to be able to pursue something 100% wholeheartedly. It sounds like a little bit like a project called the hard pivot, right? Yeah. I mean, this is an open letter that you're working on or that you are pursuing to help people. And this is some amazing insight from somebody who set a goal and then put these

daily activities into place. And frankly, a lot of people don't have the ability to recognize that fact. And you recognized it, whether or not you knew it as a young man and started putting those things into place. So how did you know what you needed to do on a daily basis in order to go achieve greatness? I think when you're in the fight, that's what I like to call it. When you're in the fight and you set these goals, these goals seem audacious. They seem big. They seem somewhat impossible. And as an Olympic athlete, we set our goals four years in advance. And we look at it every quarter, every competition, every month, every week, every day, every training session, every hour, we look at those things and we deconstruct them and we reverse engineer. So if I know that today is, let's just call it 2006, and I just finished an Olympic Games, the goal setting process begins after I have already committed to the next Olympic competition,

which would be in four years. And then we would reverse engineer. Well, what is my goal? My goal is to X, Y, and Z. What is it going to take? At what body weight? At what training environment? At what altitude?

At what levels of performance are going to be required? And if this is where I'm skating today, how do I be here? Because the sport will evolve and it will revolutionize using technology, new athletes, et cetera. And along that path and journey, when you set forth those goals, how do you know those goals are too crazy and maybe not crazy enough? There's a fine line. And so something that I read very early on was reach for what is unreachable. So as we set goals for ourself, it's great. We thrive on the micro-wins. We need them. We have to taste them. That's why this whole thing around this pandemic has been so challenging because we don't get that interaction with human beings on a day-to-day basis as much as we used to. We're socially designed that way. And now we're doing

everything digitally, which is also okay, but getting the nod, getting the smile, getting the disagreement, getting all those things, we don't have them. Same thing with my coaches. And when we were competing, I needed to set something for my four-year goal that seemed impossible at the time, right? It seemed a little bit too much out of reach. And it forced me to hold up what I call the radically transparent mirror. And it's not until you're willing to do that, to look at yourself, to A, accept yourself, right? Because that's the first form of, I think, self-love and understanding that you're not perfect, you're going to make mistakes, but you don't have to stay stagnant in your preconditioned belief or system or the way that you've lived your life.

You are an ever-growing, powerful person with the right type of commitment and light switch to go on to say, you know what? Enough. Enough of saying, I'm going to do this in January, and then January 18th comes, and then that New Year's resolution has just faded. Now, that's a form of consistency. So your original question, which was around the goal-setting process and how do I want to be great, it started with getting my first micro-wins and understanding that I actually could win races. I could have success. Without that, it doesn't exist, right? over again and you've had no wins, then maybe you need to scale that thing back and start to look at the small micro wins as your big wins on a day-to-day basis. Gain the momentum, get that snowball effect to start rolling again. And then as you know, momentum is powerful. And when you feel good, ride it, use it. It's like the downhill on a bike. Build that speed as fast as you can, because you never know when the

environment changes. And now you have to go back uphill and it's very hard. And the slog is slow when everything feels like a struggle. So you have to, you know, life is like that, right? It's like these cycles, speed skating and the Olympics is like that. And knowing that it doesn't matter every day is not going to be this easy coasting feeling. But for me to embrace when it is the hottest, when the flame is the closest, when it is the most uncertain and the most challenging, that's when you build the type of character traits that are required over time to handle any type of situation and uncertainty. And, you know, Hard Pivot, which is the book that I've been writing for actually four years now, is an open letter to a younger Apollo. It's an open letter to someone

who is struggling or has been forced to go into reinvention and to hard pivot. When we go into a corner, Adam, we go straight like this, right? We're going 35 miles an hour, and then we have to do a hard U-turn on one leg. And if you don't succeed in that corner, you fall, you hit the pads, and it's devastation. You don't have to stay down. You have to get back up, right? And scramble your feet and continue and try to finish the race. But that hard pivot, I'm a firm believer, is not only going to happen to each one of us. It's absolutely critical for each one of us to have and experience transformation and growth and all of those things that we know about, right?

The personal development, the psychological aspects of business and personal life, they are so intertwined now. And as we as human beings start to recognize that stress and pressure can be incredible traits for beautiful substances, right? And that means we create diamonds. We create boiling water, pressure and heat and all these things. We thrive in them. So don't sway away from them. There's definitely a difference between getting in the red zone, which is too much.

It's just too hot. You can't handle it. And the green zone, which is coasting, you want to be in that yellow zone, which I talk about is that sweet spot. And that sweet spot is where it forces you to grow. You're going to be uncomfortable. You know it's not going to be easy, but that's what's required of you. And that's how you become the best version of yourself. So the more and the faster that we can recognize that, the easier it is. And that's what my life passion today is to help people unlock that within themselves, right? Is to say, look, enough is enough. I'm so sick and tired

of getting in my own way. I'm so sick and tired of self-sabotaging, maybe because subconsciously, I don't really believe that I deserve to win. Maybe I don't believe that I'm good enough. Enough of that. It's all the BS that's happening between your two ears. You can change the paradigm shift. And it's not until you are willing to do it that anything that I write in this book is going to be useful. So it starts from within first, right? I'm not some guru who's giving you some recipe for success. I'm saying I too have felt pain. I too have made mistakes. I too have gone down the wrong path. I too have self-sabotaged. And you know what? I too have been able to turn that around to my advantage, to be able to enrich the life that we all deserve to live. And so that's what the message really is, is it's a message of loss of identity, of reinvention, of adaptation, and figuring out how to thrive instead of just survive when it's time to do the hard pivot.

All right, we're going to pause the conversation right here and pick it up next episode, which will be next Wednesday. So make sure you subscribe so you get notified when that episode is released. You're not going to want to miss it. If you felt that this episode so far was super inspirational and valuable, wait till next week. The value bombs get dropped like every other minute. So you're not going to want to miss it. And again, thank you so much for tuning in to Start With A Win.

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