Name: Brainstorm Health 2023 - A Winning Formula For High-Level Performance
Uploaded: 2023-04-26
Duration: 17 min 22 s
Description: Apolo Ohno, Olympic Medalist, U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame; Author, Hard Pivot Interviewer: Alan Murray, Chief Executive Officer, FORTUNE

Apolo Ohno, Olympic Medalist, U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame; Author, Hard Pivot Interviewer: Alan Murray, Chief Executive Officer, FORTUNE 

Brainstorm Health 2023 - A Winning Formula For High-Level Performance 

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A Winning Formula For High-Level Performance 

It has been an awesome first day of the conference. A lot of real talk up on stage including some more pessimistic view points. But, you know, I think we all appreciate it. Um and definitely some inspiration as well. Um In just a short while, we're going to present the Bernard J Tyson Memorial Leadership Award. Speaking of inspiration, and this year, we're honoring a woman who is unwavering in her work as a reproductive justice and human rights activist. And in fact, is one of the architects of the movement. But first, he is a man on a mission to inspire, to motivate and guide individuals to unlock their full potential. He wants to help people deal with change and transformation and establish behaviors that lead to greater resiliency. And I think we all know the importance of greater resiliency after these last few years. He's a best selling author, the champion of the show, dancing with the stars. Yes, lots of fans here, I'm sure and he just happens to be one of not one of the most decorated us Winter Olympian of all time. Please welcome retired Olympic speed skater Apollo Ono for a conversation with Fortune, Ceo Alan Murray Apollo. Welcome. Oh, thank you. This is a, this is a great honor for me. I usually interview Ceo Si, don't get to interview Olympic athletes. So thank you for uh subjecting yourself to this. Thank you. Yeah, I'm ready. I'm ready to the hot seat and I'm glad Mahal mentioned that not only has the man won eight Olympic medals but also dancing with the stars that we may ask you to do a few moves. There, there was a period in my life when I would walk through security at airports and I was no longer referred to as there's that speed skating guy. I was that dancing guy. Yeah. So uh so I have a confession which is, I've always been a little bit skeptical about athletes telling business people how to do their jobs. I thought they seem so completely different, but I read your book hard pivot and I really appreciated the fact that you right up front said, hey, there are some traits that worked here that do not work here at all and there are other traits that carried over nicely. Can you talk about that? What, what worked? What didn't work? How did you have to change? Sure. I think look the transition point from one identity which you subscribe to. You are given external validation by your fans, by the coaches, by getting the medals by media that you are good. And this is your purpose in life and doing that for 10 or 15 years and then the snap of finger changing direction and kind of wondering adrift of what's next in my life. What else am I good at what passions do I have? So there is a formula there that says what attributes can I take from the sport that I did prior, which is you can imagine pretty foundational, hard work, discipline, structure, consistency, grit, all those kind of elements that I think make any person successful with any career, those are transferable. I think that some of the selfishness associated with being great in individual sports is not transferable, right? And I think that that is a that was a huge wake up wake up call for me when I decided to make the change aside from just trying to identify with, if I want to show up as this type of a person in the corporate setting in the business setting, I have to realize that there are so many people that do not have the same background. So you talk about the selfishness, talk a little bit more about what it, what it was that worked as a skater that you had to learn differently to succeed in business. So I think that the kind of underlying obsessiveness around if it does not help me as a person get better, faster, stronger, it's a secondary priority. And if that means that I win, but someone else loses even on my team that was ok because it was an individual sport. So in business, you can't have that right. You need to be able to kind of garner that different type of conversation in a different way. You you in the book, you talk about empathy and you talk about vulnerability, both of which were not your strong suits as a skater, but you have focused on as in your new career, am I right? I, and, and it's an ongoing journey and, and experience. So you're right, like empathy and vulnerability were things that we had shielded and hid from most of like the world. I never wanted to show my competitors that I had weaknesses. I was unwilling to show empathy to competitors if they had shown their weaknesses to me. And as I transform, as I continue to want to transform into what I call Apollo 2.0, I want to be the type of leader that can have kindness, but also have strength, can have vulnerability, have empathy, be open with my communication, but also with authenticity and those things were, I wasn't taught how to be those things in sport. And so it was a harsh learning lesson about, well, what is a leader in terms of how the external social environment has given me when I was growing up and how do I change that internal perception of what that person is because it's a much different world than it was 20? Yeah. So you gave your book the title Hard Pivot, which is a skating move, right? What's a hard pivot in skating? Hard pivot? I mean, if you haven't seen short track speed skating, a hard pivot is, you're in an inside of an ice hockey rink, you're hurdling down a straightaway going 35 to 40 miles an hour, you cross over onto your right leg and while pulling about 3.5 G forces, you do a complete U turn going in the opposite direction, so executed successfully, you could carry your speed and momentum onto the next corner unsuccessfully. You crash into the pads. Kind of wondering what has happened, which is a great, which is a great metaphor because we all know a lot of a lot of people making the transition that you made do end up crashing. I mean, it is hard. Was it hard for you? It was very hard for me no matter how many people had told me, what are you going to do when you retire? What's next for you, make sure that you prepare yourself. There's a real reason why 86 to 88% of let's just use one sport, particularly of NFL athletes. Three years after retirement are in a really challenging situation. Whether that's bankruptcy, divorce, depression, there's real data and points around this and a lot of it's got to do with the loss of identity loss of purpose that exists and it's actually got nothing to do with money. I mean, obviously the poor decision making has a lot to do with it. But behind that layer is something else. And so when I retired, I just knew that I wanted to win and I wanted to win aggressively and fast. And like, if you had asked me 13 years ago, Paula, what do you want to do? I want to be the best at business. Like, what the hell does that even mean? Right. What are you talking about, kid? You had some missteps earlier? Absolutely. And I think, do you want to share any of those? Yeah. So I think like first and foremost, it was the inability to recognize whether it was partnerships, whether its ideas and sometimes and all of you in business know this, sometimes it's really good to fail fast pivot and then try again, right? As an athlete, you don't ever want to give up on anything. So you're just kind of like picking up this dead horse, carrying it around with you even though there's no more life in this thing. And so that you can imagine that has happened in a few instances in my life early on. So you, you make this hard pivot and when you come out on the other side, what is it, what is it that you think you've learned from your life as a skater from the pivot that is, is worth sharing with other business leaders who are struggling I mean, look, everybody in this room has to go through pivots at one time or another. What, what, what is your, what, what have you learned that you can share with this group? So I think the hard pivot mentality is not just business. I think all of us as human beings will face some sort of loss through loved one, through experience. And there will be a mismatch between what our expectation was and us not hitting that expectation, which results in some level of disappointment. And that can be very dark disappointment, that kind of keeps you paralyzed in the space of not moving. So my entire thesis is how do we create the dynamic psychology around approaching these types of challenges that we all will face in business, in personal relationships in life itself as what they are and knowing that sometimes those pains that we do experience psychologically can be huge levers to lean into and propel us in a different direction. So what does that mean? How is the pain lever that you lean into? So, for example, like most athletes, I would say top tier, top 1% in the world if you had said to them, how many of you love to win and how many of you love to lose or hate to lose? I would say like half of them probably hated to lose more than they loved to win, which is sort of like a strange concept in like deep fear and failure. Well, that comes from some sort of like traumatic experience, probably from the age of like 12 to 16 years old that forms some basis or outsized psychological approach towards a sport, whether it's Michael Phelps Apolo Ono Sean John White, you know, Michael Jordan, these people all have the same type of, of you can call it chip on the show and ceos too, right? Someone who's so obsessive. So micromanaging cares about every detail and every minute of every meeting as if it's like the last thing on earth, there's something associated to that tied to some experience that makes them care outside to the rest of the population. So if we know those things, how do we be able to control them in a way where it does not control us? Right? So this is the best of it without the worst of it. Look this, this is, this is the most powerful asset in the world, right? Assuming GP T doesn't completely just right. Maybe we've got a couple of years left. Um But still this is like this is still the most powerful asset in the world, but this is also the six inch space between our ears is still the most, the world's strongest prison if you allow it to be so many of us are held back. Me included by the insecurity, the self doubt, the fears of failure. The I'm never good enough. I'm not smart enough. I'm not taught, whatever those things are that you're not enough. If those things aren't either motivating you and pushing you in the right direction, they're holding you back. So my idea is if you want a hard pivot, you need to be vulnerable, open human and you can still be strong in all those elements. And so I think first and foremost, having that self acceptance or communicating to your organization, to your team, to yourself, to your family about where you are at today, identifying what, what that is and saying, well, we're going there. So, you know, without kind of faking the funk is what I call it like. This is, this is where we are, this is the, this is the cold, hard truth. This is the challenge. These are things that have happened that maybe didn't uh go our way that we needed to. And here's how we're gonna make a change. And, and was that part of your pivot? I mean, is the skater, were you motivated by the fear of failure? I think for over half my career, it was deep fear, psychologically of fear of failure. Where did that come from? So, I mean, without, we've got five minutes left here. Um We wanna go deep into your life here, Apollo. I uh I, I look, I love like behavioral science, like I love it just, it fascinates me. It's what I studied with other athletes. I grew OK, I'll make it real short, I grew up in a single parent household, Japanese father immigrated from Japan, gave his son everything right and believed in me so much. But also like we talk about like tiger mom, tiger father mentality. If you don't know what that is basically, it's just like this immigrant mentality that hard work is like literally just the standard of getting to that place. So one example, OK, imagine you're 12 years old or your daughter or your son is 12 years old and you wake them up every single day at 3 30 or four o'clock in the morning and you drive them to an empty, empty school or church parking lot, you strap a minor's light to their helmet and you just have them skate around on roller blades while you're taking like, I don't know, random artificial lap times. This doesn't sound like an imaginary scenario. Yeah. So that was me. So that's where my, you know, and you're 12 years old like dad, I hate this, I don't want to do this anymore. And then your father and by the way, I love my dad, incredible like mentor. Um But this is where I'm just being off there. I'm keeping like the real trauma open live, right? I'm still working through the hard pivot. Ok. Um So that's, that's where it started. And then, so my, the feeling that I got of, of showing up as my best self and not being not good enough it psychologically embedded in the hurt. I never wanted to taste that again. So then I was so afraid of having that failure that it kept me so obsessed. I was willing to do what no one else was willing to do for the long distance and long time, the equation is that, which paid off, which ultimately pays off. But so, so it was your, I mean, when you talk about leaning into it, it was your great strength, but ultimately also your great weakness. Yeah, I was talking, I was doing a podcast earlier today and one of the conversations was if I didn't have that pain or if we didn't have, if athletes don't have that pain, is it possible to get the same type of outcome? I think the reality is we think it might be possible, but the percentage is low. I think that there is a reason why these experiences happen that create outsized results, but they have to change some kind of chemistry in the brain. You uh use an interesting Japanese word in the book. I am I pronouncing that, right. I what, what does it mean? It, it's really just about finding your purpose and what is your, what is your, what was your purpose? And what is your purpose? If you had asked me, you know, many years ago, my, my purpose would say like I am only here to, to skate. That's why I'm here. Um Very shortsighted. Did not understand it. Also allowed and gave me the power to jump out of the plane, so to speak with no parachute because I I was all in. There was no plan B I burned the ships. Now, my purpose I feel is to reinvigorate, remind and help guide people all humans regardless of Olympic athlete or not about their own inner potential. Number one and number two, about the fleetingness of life. And so the second being the most important, if you were 90 or 80 years old, and you can go back to your age today, what would you tell yourself or remind yourself of the remainder of those years that you have the way that you talk to your family, your loved ones, your co workers, all these things. And how much of that stuff would you say? Hey, remember all that small stuff that you get mad about? Why don't we just like allow that stuff to not be involved with your day to day? Like it's not an important aspect. And so I think when we think in terms of those metrics of, we have a limited amount of time on this planet. 86,400 seconds per day. Yes, most of us waste lots of those times, right? It's OK. It's being human. But how do we gain more of them back to create real experiential me, memorable um Just times in our life and that's, that's what I feel like I'm here for today and I don't teach, I just want to guide people for their own inner answers again. You in a way you're talking about giving back. Yeah. Yeah. I guess it's giving back. I think it's more like, you know, I first started tasting what this felt like when I would go on stage and spend time with organizations and companies and I would see like the slight pupil dilation, I would see the eyes sparkle slightly and I would see the reinvigoration of people to say like, oh yeah, like I almost forgot that I, I have control over this perceptive reality that I'm that's occurring to me. OK, very, very quickly. How do you, what, how long do you want to live? And how do you take care of your, how do you take care of yourself to extend your life? And are you thinking about those questions uh as a as a quick answer? OK. Uh I would like to live as long and as healthy as possible. OK. Um To where I could like reach down, grab my grandkids and hold them up like that to me is a good, healthy, strong line. What steps are you taking to ensure that you can do that? OK. Four foundational principles. Here we go. All right. We got to get these four. I'm sorry. We, we're about to learn how to live long healthy lives. I'm not going to cut the conversation off. These are these are things that, that I think about that are very simple and they're like just they're repeatable. Ok. So my Apollo is like personal big grain of salt. Ok? You like it? Don't like it, throw out the window, it's OK. Four foundational principles. How am I sleeping? How am I eating? How am I moving? And how am I thinking? Not just about like the world and my social environment, but how am I healthy here within myself when I look in the mirror, am I OK with who I see? Am I accepting that person? So those seem to be like I'm not searching for perfection here. I just want like to get a handle on those. Am I sleeping enough? Am I eating? Well? Am I moving my body daily? And and how is my social environment? And this type of stuff really helps too and we can communicate, we may want to get more detail on that but not right now because Sasha is going to have my head. Ok. Thank you very much. Thank you.