I spent 16 years as a competitive gymnast, progressing through the Junior Olympic program, earning a spot on the US Junior National Team, and securing an athletic scholarship to Stanford, where our team captured our first national championship in 14 years.
This journey taught me invaluable lessons about skill development, mental toughness, and performing under pressure. However, it also instilled some maladaptive mindsets that went unexamined.
Since I hung up my grips in 2009, I've explored other athletic pursuits: running middle and long-distance races, training in boxing, and now enjoying weekly Crossfit classes each Saturday. These diverse experiences have broadened my athletic perspective.
With the benefit of hindsight and perspective, here are the key lessons and anti-lessons from my gymnastics career:
Positive Lessons:
- Almost all complex skills (or knowledge) can be broken down into smaller components and gradually reassembled. I learned a full-twisting double layout off the high bar through step-by-step drills and progressions. This gave me the confidence to leap into new fields, roles, and industries knowing that I'd be able to build. my skillset and adapt to these new environments.
- Visual feedback is crucial for improvement—you need to see what you're doing to perfect it. Watching yourself on tape, whether in a gymnastics meet or an investor pitch, can be cringe-inducing yet it's crucial to understand how you come off and how to improve.
- Learning to distinguish between productive discomfort and injury-warning pain is essential. As I got older, I never left a workout pain-free. There's no way to achieve large-scale success without stretching your comfort zone, but going too far and burning out can set you back for a long time and must be avoided.
- Full commitment is vital; hesitating is the surest way to injure yourself. When a gymnast freaked out in midair during a skill, you knew a crash was about to come—the key is to finish what you initiated with as much power as possible. Similarly, when you commit to a direction with your company, you have to follow through even if it's not the most optimized choice in order to give yourself and your team the best chance of success.
- Focus on controlling your performance rather than external factors. During a meet I never watched the other athletes or worried about what score I needed from the judges to move up—I let my coach or my parents worry about that. Similarly, outliers are most effective when they don't get caught up in mainstream thinking and run their own race.
- Great coaching and intense training will outperform great equipment and fancy facilities every time. I switched gyms at one point in high school and the new place was dingier than my old gym but had a very competent and intense coach who took my training and performance to another level in just one year. A great entrepreneur doesn't need a top of the line laptop or all the newest software tools to build a great product and a strong business—immense drive and a good playbook are the only essentials.
Anti-Lessons:
- Excessive individual focus: Team collaboration often achieves more than solo excellence. College gymnastics helped ameliorate this somewhat but as a largely individual sport, gymnastics led to an underdeveloped appreciation for the power of teamwork. In business it's usually a highly collaborative team, not a lone superstar, that has the biggest impact.
- Competitor blindness: Understanding rivals helps you learn from their successes and identify their vulnerabilities. Gymnastics is a side-by-side sport rather than head-to-head. In business, your company and product will be compared to alternatives in the market. You need to deeply understand the competitive landscape—and where your offering fits in—to succeed.
- Over-generalization: Unlike gymnastics, business success often comes from excelling in a specific area rather than mastering everything. While being well-rounded is important, finding and leveraging your unique strengths and competitive advantages is often more valuable than trying to be great at everything.—especially as an outlier.
I see these same patterns all the time in my executive coaching work. My high-achieving clients often come in with incredible drive and discipline from their past lives - whether they were athletes, academic stars, or crushing it in their early careers. But here's the thing: those same experiences that made them successful can sometimes hold them back.
The real breakthrough happens when they start recognizing and rewiring these old mindsets. By keeping what serves you while being willing to let go of what doesn't—you end up a better leader with a great set of tools in your arsenal.
