Two stories, in particular, stayed with me.

Alysa Liu, 20 years old, stepped onto the Olympic ice last week and delivered what many are calling one of the most joyful performances in recent memory. She waved at her family in the stands before her free skate. She grinned through her program as if she were at a Tuesday morning practice back home in Oakland. When she finished, the reaction she shouted into the camera was, let’s say, heartfelt. She won gold — the first women’s figure skating gold for the U.S. in 24 years.

What made it remarkable wasn’t just the medal. It was the path. Liu had stepped away from the sport at just 16, burned out, wanting a more typical teenage experience. She climbed toward Everest base camp. She enrolled at UCLA to study psychology. She came back two years later — not to prove something, but because she’d rediscovered why she loved it. “Medals do not validate me in any way,” she said. “I give myself validation when I’m able to create.” The gold followed. Not the other way around.

Then there was Lindsey Vonn. At 41, she came out of retirement — with a partially titanium knee and a freshly torn ACL — to attempt one more Olympic downhill. She crashed seconds into her run, was airlifted from the course, and underwent surgery for a complex tibia fracture. From her hospital bed, the message was clear: “I have no regrets. Knowing I stood there having a chance to win was a victory in and of itself.”

Days later, when the physical shock had settled and the emotional weight arrived, she added something even more honest: “The mental battle started today. It hit me like a ton of bricks. The battle of the mind can be dark and hard and unrelenting.”

Two athletes. Two wildly different outcomes. Both pointing at the same question: How do you compete with everything you have — and still stay whole?

I’ve been sitting with that question for a long time.

I’m 70 years old. I play doubles squash three or four times a week. I’ve been practicing mindfulness meditation for twenty-five years and teaching it for six. For most of that time, I kept these two parts of my life in separate rooms — mindfulness was for the cushion, the retreat, the quiet Friday morning sangha; competition was something louder, edgier, driven by a desire to win that didn’t seem to fit neatly into concepts like acceptance and non-attachment.

It took me years to understand they weren’t opposites. They were pointing at the same thing.

The paradox, in its simplest form: How do you pursue something with everything you have while also accepting where you are right now? How do you care deeply about the outcome without being destroyed by it?

Most productivity culture says: want it more. Push harder. Close the gap. Most oversimplified mindfulness advice says the opposite: let go of outcomes, stay present, it doesn’t matter who wins.

Both miss the point entirely.

Somewhere in your world right now, there’s a high school athlete with a club ranking, a college recruiting dream, and a phone full of highlight reels. They are striving with everything they have. And they are often suffering in ways that are invisible to the adults around them.

I see the aftermath in the leaders I work with — most of whom were that athlete once. A relentless inner critic that formed on the court or the field and never quite left. A voice that says the score is a verdict. That a loss reveals something essential and damning about who you are.

What nobody told that teenager — and what Alysa Liu eventually had to discover for herself — is that the most dangerous thing about high-stakes competition isn’t losing. It’s the identity you build around winning. When your worth is tied to your performance, every loss is an existential threat. And that’s not just a sports problem. It’s a mindfulness problem. A failure to separate the scorecard from the self.

Liu walked away from skating at 16 because the sport had consumed her identity. She came back at 20 because she had, in the meantime, found one. The medal followed.

Here’s something I’ve come to appreciate playing squash at 70 against people who are often half my age and considerably faster: there is a kind of freedom in being an amateur that professionals rarely get to experience.

Nobody is paying me to win. No sponsorships hinge on my shot selection. My family’s livelihood doesn’t depend on what happens at noon on a Wednesday. That means I have access — if I choose to use it — to a relationship with competition that is uncomplicated by external stakes.

And yet the voice shows up anyway. You’re playing terribly. That was embarrassing. You should have trained harder. The ego doesn’t check the scoreboard before deciding to weigh in.

So the question I keep returning to is: what am I actually competing for? At this stage of my life, the real contest is internal. Can I stay present in the third game when my legs are tired? Can I lose to 40-year-olds and genuinely wish them well — not just perform graciousness while stewing inside? Can I bring curiosity to a bad game instead of judgment?

These are meditation questions dressed in athletic clothing. And they turn out to be the exact same questions Lindsey Vonn was asking on that mountain, and that Alysa Liu was asking every time she stepped back onto the ice after two years away.

The scale is different. The paradox is identical.

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called it flow — that state of complete absorption where self-consciousness dissolves, time warps, and performance seems to emerge from somewhere deeper than strategy. Every athlete has had a taste of it. Most spend a career chasing it.

You cannot force your way into flow. You can only create the conditions and then get out of your own way. The ego — with all its commentary and scorekeeping and need to look good — is precisely what blocks it.

What Alysa Liu described after her gold medal was unmistakably that state: “I was peak happiness when I was out there on the ice. Nothing could bring me higher than that.” She wasn’t tracking the score. She wasn’t monitoring the competition. She was simply, completely, there.

That is not indifference. That is the highest form of presence.

For older amateur athletes, this is both humbling and genuinely encouraging. The flow state isn’t reserved for Olympians. I’ve experienced it on a squash court at noon. It doesn’t require extraordinary talent. It requires extraordinary presence — and presence is something you can practice every single day, on and off the court.

A few things I’ve learned, both in sport and in the room with the leaders I work with:

Goals are compasses, not cages. You can be deeply committed to improving — your game, your leadership, your practice — without making that improvement the condition for your self-worth. Liu said she didn’t need the gold to validate her decisions. The goal pointed the direction. Presence is how she skated.

The opponent is a gift. Whether it’s a stronger player, a difficult quarter, or a goal you haven’t reached yet, the resistance is where the practice lives. Vonn didn’t see the mountain as the enemy. The risk wasn’t incidental — it was the reason.

The score is feedback, not verdict. Outcomes are data. They tell you something useful. They don’t tell you who you are. The ability to receive that information without being crushed by it is one of the most sophisticated skills a human being can develop. The athlete who learns this early carries it everywhere for life.

Rest is part of the game. The athlete who trains without recovery breaks down. The leader who pushes without pausing burns out. The meditator who strives after stillness finds only more agitation. Alysa Liu took two years away and came back with an Olympic gold. Sometimes the most competitive thing you can do is stop competing for a while.

Yes. Absolutely, unequivocally yes.

The paradox resolves when you stop treating striving and accepting as opposites. They’re more like your dominant and non-dominant hand. You need both. One reaches forward. The other steadies you.

I watched Lindsey Vonn, at 41, stand in a starting gate on a torn ACL, staring down an icy mountain she’d raced a hundred times, knowing the risk and choosing the moment anyway. I watched Alysa Liu, at 20, step onto the Olympic ice grinning — not because she didn’t care, but because she’d finally learned how to care, without being consumed by it.

I’m a 70-year-old amateur playing doubles squash at noon, trying to do the same thing on a much smaller stage.

The question is the same for all of us — at 16, at 41, at 70. Not whether to compete. But whether you can bring your whole self — ambition, humility, effort, equanimity — to what’s right in front of you.

That’s the practice. That’s the game.

Written by Clayton Platt

Link to Clayton’s Website: The Athlete’s Paradox: Competition, Ego, and Presence