From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
When I talk about happiness, envision yourself at the ripe age of 85, comfortably seated on that metaphorical porch, reflecting upon your life. You're thinking, 'Good heavens, I've genuinely led a fulfilling life. I've established a loving family, spent my life with an extraordinary partner, and devoted myself to a profession that's injected an immense sense of purpose into my existence. I have minimal regrets and have maintained a light-hearted, playful approach to life.' This, to me, is what I would categorise as a profound sense of existential happiness.
I took the fact that I felt I wasn't good enough as a challenge. This is where I give some of my early bosses and mentors a lot of credit. They invested their time in my training and development.
I actually find the training much more mentally challenging that the competitions.
I've often thought that maybe there is a certain hormone in human beings that we can only produce it when we are face to face. And it's the hormone of shame – it becomes absent when you are communicating on social media and you become worse than you are.
Much of the pushback against science is related to a distrust of the establishment and of multinational corporations and their profit motive. It's easy to spread fear; as humans we're very tuned and sensitive to it.
Tuning into these feeling tones reveals their powerful influence – they often control our lives in ways we're completely unaware of.
Without the extreme magnifying glass that was on my life, I don't know if I would have stumbled on any of the discoveries I've made.
You should try and copy everything you possibly can! It's just that if you run out of alternatives, if you run out of options to copy, you will realise that your entire life has conditioned you to not only be a great copier, but to hesitate when copying is no longer an option.
I fell in love with the process first – they sometimes call it the grind. I fell in love with movement, with training, with everything between the competitions – and falling in love with that was instrumental to me because now, when things don't go right, and I feel vulnerable or emotional, I can dip into that state.
I define authenticity as the consistent practice of choosing to know who we are and embracing who we are. For a lot of us, we come to know who we are, but then we rail against our identities. I got so used to conforming, masking aspects of my identity that I became lost in my identity. I didn't know who I was. I was completely lost.
Love relationships, paradoxically, prioritize emotions above these considerations, which often turns out to be their downfall. What truly sustains us is what we mutually agree upon as beneficial and righteous, irrespective of our emotional state.
It's only a failure if you don't learn from your mistakes, right? I was always able to find some way of making every adversity into something positive, even if I was physically no longer the athlete I was, I became mentally stronger. I used every adversity and changed it into something positive.