I say that in some of my keynotes, and people usually laugh. But I mean it. It is not a normal thought to wake up one morning and decide you are going to spend the next four years pushing yourself to extreme levels in pursuit of becoming the best in the world at something. Most people do not think that way, and honestly, most people should not have to. But if you want to compete at the Olympic level, that is exactly the mindset you need.
I spent three Olympic cycles building my life around BMX racing. I won two World Championships and became the only American to win Olympic gold in BMX Racing, at the 2016 Rio Games. I also know what it feels like to crash hard at the highest level, because I did exactly that at the Tokyo Games in 2021. Through all of it, the mindset never changed. It is the same mindset that drives anyone trying to reach the top one percent of any field, whether that is sport, business, or anything else worth chasing.
The Four-Year Clock Never Stops
Here is something most people do not realize about training for the Olympics. For four years, you are on the clock twenty-four seven, three sixty-five. There is no real off switch.
Every single decision you make during that stretch matters. What you eat, how you sleep, who you spend your time with, how you recover, how you train when no one is watching. Every one of those choices can affect whether you make the Olympic team, how you perform once you get there, and whether you walk away with a medal.
That kind of pressure changes how you have to operate. You cannot afford to drift through decisions on autopilot. You have to be intentional, all the time, for years.
A Simple Lens for Every Decision
The way I made it through four years of that pressure was by simplifying everything down to one question: is this going to make me better?
Will this help me get faster? Will this help me win the next race? If the answer is yes, I did it. If the answer is no, I did not.
That sounds simple because it is simple. Olympic-level training is often repetitive and even boring. It is not glamorous. It is the same workout, the same drills, the same recovery routine, day after day, month after month. But that simplicity is the point. When you strip a decision down to one filter, you remove a lot of the noise that trips people up. You are not debating whether to skip a workout or stay out late or cut a corner. You already know the answer, because you already know what the goal requires.
That is the part people miss when they look at elite performers from the outside. It is not complicated. It is just incredibly hard to do consistently.
You Have to Know What You’re Signing Up For
Here is the part that I think matters most, and the part people skip over. Before you even start down that road, you have to be honest with yourself about what it is going to cost.
You go in knowing this is not going to be sunshine and rainbows. You go in knowing it is going to be physically, mentally, and emotionally difficult in ways you cannot fully prepare for. You know you are going to need people around you. Coaches, family, training partners, people who can support you when things get hard, because they will get hard.
And even with all of that laid out in front of you, you still choose to push forward.
That admission, made honestly and made early, is what separates people who quit when things get difficult from people who do not. They are not surprised by the difficulty. They expected it. They priced it in before they ever started.
The One Percent
Roughly 14,000 athletes make it to the Olympics during any given four-year cycle, out of a global population of more than eight billion people. That works out to somewhere around 0.0017 percent, or about 1 in 500,000 people on the planet.
That number is not meant to be discouraging. I bring it up because it puts the mindset in context. When you are chasing something with odds like that, normal effort does not get you there. Normal thinking does not get you there. You need the willingness to be a little bit crazy, the discipline to filter every decision through one simple question, and the honesty to accept upfront how hard the road is going to be.
That combination is what it actually takes to compete at the Olympic level. Not talent alone. Not luck. A mindset built around obsession, simplicity, and an honest acceptance of the grind.
Applying This Off the Track
You do not need to be training for the Olympics to use this mindset. Anyone chasing a high-level goal, whether in business, sports, or any other demanding pursuit, can apply the same three principles. Get a little obsessive about the thing you are trying to achieve. Simplify your decisions down to whether they move you closer to your goal. And be honest with yourself, early, about how hard the path is going to be so you are not blindsided when it gets difficult.
That is the Olympic mindset. It is not reserved for athletes standing on a podium. It is available to anyone willing to commit to it.
If you want to bring this message to your team, organization, or school, head over to connorfields.com to learn more about booking a keynote.
– Connor Fields
