Optimization

Over the past few years I have become obsessed with human optimization.  I’m not talking about click-bait life hacks, silver bullets, secret formulas or lottery tickets. I’m talking hard work, productivity and efficiency. In a general sense, pretty much all of ski training is working toward optimization. We go to the gym to optimize our muscles, we go out on 6 hour over-distances to optimize our heart and we do regular intervals to optimize our lungs. But all of these are physical optimizations. In the sport of biathlon, that’s only half the challenge.

In my early years of biathlon I was without a doubt a better skier than shooter. But I soon realized to be a complete biathlete I was going to need to figure the shooting out. After an entire summer of regular range work I became more comfortable with the rifle, but was still having some major trouble. After talking to some friends and teammates I recognized my inability to shift my focus from ‘race mode’ to ‘shooting mode.’

Biathlon shooting requires so much focus on relaxation, and I being somewhat of a ‘Head-down-all-out’ type, understood what this was doing to my shooting. All too often I found myself on the shooting mat, thinking about the trail. I began wondering what I could do to optimize my mind.

My older teammates turned me on to a book that has literally changed my life. With Winning in Mind by Lanny Bassham is an instructional book about how Lanny (an Olympic position shooter) developed tools and techniques to optimize his mental preparation for competition. Obviously his tools can relate to biathlon because position shooting and biathlon shooting are so similar. But when you seriously stop and think about the book in a much more general sense, his tools can be used to optimize any area of life: work, school, training, relationships, arts and crafts, it doesn’t matter. When you truly understand his techniques and how they work, you can change your life. Ever since first reading ‘the book,’ as my teammates and I would refer to it as, I have been obsessed with mental optimization.

In total I have read ‘the book’ 6 times cover to cover and have referred back to individual chapters countless times. But my fascination doesn’t stop there. Over the summer I began listening to optimization podcasts like Joe Rogan Experience (JRE) and recently Jocko Podcast. JRE has some interesting guests and they love to shoot-the-shit so unfortunately from a two hour episode you may only get 15 minutes of optimization talk, but it’s usually captivating and enlightening. Jocko is an ex-navy seal and fits the stereotypical military tough guy mold too well, and most of his podcasts are him reading books about war, but when he gets started on optimization, it’s pure gold.

Now that I have shifted my focus from athletics to business I began thinking of ways I could apply these optimization strategies as an entrepreneur. I was doing an ok job but didn’t know much about the business world so I began to stall. Thankfully I received a book for Christmas called The Slight Edge, by Jeff Olson. This book is literally about mental optimization in terms of business.This book inspired me to get to work and “Get after it” as Jocko would say, But I was still having trouble because I wasn’t sure what steps I should be taking.

In all the optimization outlets, discipline is one of the common themes across the board. Being able to hold yourself accountable and execute the actions needed to reach your goal are essential to optimizing your life. Discipline had come up so much that it was even a subject of one of my Word onthe Trail podcast episodes which can be found here.

In basic terms, small daily actions, when repeated over time add up to create something wonderful, or destructive (depending on what the action is). For biathlon its things like training, dry firing, eating healthy, Etc. But I’m having trouble finding daily disciplines to promote Kick Zone.

At the moment I’m trying to find at least one thing I can do each day to build the website. The two most important aspects for the site are content and views. I don’t expect people to come to view the website of there is no content so I’ve decided to start searching the web for Nordic blogs to feature. If you know of a skier who has a blog about life as an athlete I would love to check it out. Once I get a few blogs featured I’ll start promoting them on the Kick Zone social media accounts. I get content, the athlete gets recognition. It’s a win-win.

I’ve already begun featuring a few athletes so head over to Kick Zone to see what blogs I’ve already featured. They’re entertaining coming-of-age experiences and thrilling accounts of races from this season.

That’s all I have for tonight. If anyone is interested in talking about human optimization I’d LOVE get a conversation going. It’s fascinating to me that the way you think can lead you down the road to success.