Speaking to Australian Gold Olympian athlete Chloe Dalton yesterday in WiT Virtual about building range and resilience, one other talk came to mind – champion skateboarder Rodney Mullen saying that the moment his winning streak ended was his moment of liberation – because that’s when he had nothing left to defend and everything to create.
Dalton’s sports career is interesting – unlike Mullen, she didn’t stick to one track, she switched sporting tracks three times. She started off in basketball, went on to play Rugby Sevens and her team won the gold in the Rio Olympics of 2016, and now she’s playing for Carlton in the Australian Football League. Yet that didn’t mean her rugby days are over – she’s now dual training for the Tokyo Olympics as well as the AFL.
I asked her why she chose not to specialise in one track (as most athletes do) and she quoted the late Steve Jobs, “The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again.”
She believes that when you are a beginner and, as long as you are teachable and willing to learn, it’s easier to pick up new skills. People judge you less, forgive you more; you can ask all kinds of questions; and you are freer to experiment.
In a way, we have all become absolute beginners at this time. Like Mullen, our winning streak has ended – after a decade of growth and everyone saying how 2019 was the best year ever, our travel business has come to a complete stop.
Yes, it’s restarting in a couple of spots in Asia (which we are all watching like a hawk, hungry for any prey it can spot in the distance) but essentially for most of us, It’s almost like we’ve been given a blank canvas on which to begin anew.
When we realised at WiT how we weren’t going to be able to run our events in any foreseeable future – WiT Indie on March 13 (Friday, the 13th, and I refuse to read anything into it) being our last hurrah – we scrambled. Suddenly, we were without a hard goal in sight. When you run events, you have a hard target and you work towards it. And after a while, it becomes like clockwork, you know what has to be done to get there.
Dalton also spoke about feeling rudderless at this time. She’s used to setting a goal and working towards it (Read this story, it is fascinating how she Googled her way to a gold).
But now that Covid-19 has disrupted the Tokyo Olympics as well as the Australian Football League – who knows when sporting events will be allowed again, just as we don’t know when we can travel again – she had to find a new reason to keep training. “I had to change the reason I was training,” she said.
We too had to change the reason we did things because suddenly, the old goalposts were gone. And we had to begin anew.
In creating our “Unity In Series” content series – The WiT Podcast, WiT Virtual, WiT Community Blog – we were entering new territory and improvising on the fly, like absolute beginners.
We had to learn about virtual platforms and how they worked. Who knew there were so many although everyone seems to have defaulted to Zoom? We were worried about being “porno-bombed” but little did we know how we would bomb ourselves.
So let me take you behind the scenes and share some bloopers with you.
In our Virtual event (using Workcast) featuring Kuo-Yi Lim (Monk’s Hill Ventures) and Hian Goh (Openspace Ventures), despite asking them to come on at least 45 minutes before start time to make sure things would work, Hian managed to disappear completely just as we were about to begin.
Because he was working from home, he didn’t have the right laptop and had to borrow his wife’s, he said. He finally managed to come back on 30 minutes into the session, saying “that almost gave me a heart attack” and you could hear the relief in Lim’s voice – mine too as well.
In another session, I disappeared for a full 40 minutes and you could hear me in the background recording whispering, “Can you hear me”, desperately trying to get back on. Turned out the audience could hear me, but not the panelists. Anyway, the show went on because Vera Lye, my side-kick, gamely continued and had to juggle moderating, working the slides, conducting the polls, and managing my WhatsApp instructions. I apologise, off-screen or on screen, I am a control freak.
When I finally got back in, it was a very cool Yudong Tan of Trip.com who calmly said, “Oh I think Siew Hoon’s come back on” and you could hear the relief in Vera’s voice. Mine too. I blamed my dog.
In the session with Chloe Dalton this week, this time using Zoom, my dogs bombed the recording. Well, them and my helper, Adora, who decided that it was time to walk the dogs just as I was beginning the interview. I believe she made her grand entrance twice, once with a black mask, looking like a Ninja warrior in stealth mode.
I tried not to swear, but I think I managed a rather dignified “Oh my gosh”. I was raised properly, I will have you know. Kudos to Dalton who, given her resilience as an athlete, kept a straight face throughout.
That’s what sporting heroes do. They don’t flinch at anything that comes their way, even absolute beginners fluffing it up.
So on that note, I’d like to dedicate David Bowie’s “Absolute Beginners” to all of us, who have to find a new reason to do things because the old goalposts are gone and we have a blank canvas on which to create.
“Oh, we’re absolute beginners
With nothing much at stake
As long as you’re still smiling
There’s nothing more I need.”
Stay smiling. Keep fighting.