Will Ahmed
speaker
249 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 31 Mar
Will Ahmed’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Modern Wisdom · The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness - Will Ahmed - #943 · 19 May 2025
podcast
I don't have a lot of self-doubt now. I think that... I think that I've gotten good at questioning why I have conviction in things and then, you know, sort of examining that through other people's perspectives or through my own, you know, sort of deeper examination, if you will.
I don't think that you ever stop entirely having self-doubt and you probably shouldn't, you know, because then I think you get a little unhinged, so to speak. But I do think that confidence and self-belief is sort of a prerequisite for doing anything really hard.
Yeah, that's really well said. I mean, for me in building... Whoop, it was helpful to sort of disassociate building the company and building myself as a CEO or an entrepreneur. And I think for years, I had kind of wrapped those two things up as one. And so if Whoop had a good day, I had a good day. If Whoop had a bad day, I had a bad day. If Whoop was failing, I was failing.
And it's not a particularly productive sort of framing, if you will, for actually growing either yourself or the business. And the reality is that You know, the business could be doing great and you could be spiraling out of control or vice versa. You know, how many businesses suffered during COVID to no fault of their management team. Right.
And so there's it just it's it's quite important to separate those two things, I think, literally. And then I realized also that if I didn't start growing better. I was going to be the detriment to Whoop growing because as the CEO... Lame duck in your own company.
Yeah, because as the CEO, if you're projecting all sorts of stresses and you're not managing the company properly and you're kind of spinning out of control yourself, well, the business isn't going to be successful.
Yeah.
And so I felt, yeah, I felt especially early on, I was very much that chaotic founder. Now it's hard to, it's hard to go back and say, well, I wish I could change the way I behave for the first few years of the company's history, because there is an element of, and I think I believe this, there's an element of you change one thing and, you know, everything else changes going forward. Yeah.
And of course I'm, I'm super grateful with where I sit today and, and, you know, what we've been able to build, but, um, Yeah, I put up real walls in those, so that the period of like 22, probably to 24, 25 of just like real walls to anyone's feedback. And I was so certain about things and I was so stubborn.
And I think it's in a way, it's a good, it's a helpful mechanism to get something off the ground because there's no ambiguity, but you're very hard to work with.
Yeah, the unlock for me in that category has been... to be driven and grateful. And I feel like it's easy to get stuck on just the drive train and the dopamine system of, you know, when the company's worth a hundred million dollars or a billion dollars or $10 billion, you sort of keep telling yourself when I get to X, I'm going to be happy.
And what's good about that from a drive standpoint is it drives you there. But of course, when you get there, there's sort of enormous letdown. And it's also, uh, You have to balance it with being grateful for the moment that you're in. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs worry that or sort of misinterpret gratitude as complacency. But I think they are fundamentally different things.
And they work different aspects of your brain. Like the drive system is dopamine and the gratitude system is serotonin. And both of those have a way of making you happier. Yeah.
No, I mean, so I would say my sort of, broad operating principle is that I want to be of service. And that's a helpful framing because just out of the gates, it makes it less about what you accumulate and more about what you do for your company or society or your customers or fill in the blank.
And beyond that, I also get to work in unlocking human performance and healthspan and this sort of like what I would call noble mission, which is around making people perform better and live longer. And so by not having – My sole mission be around revenue numbers or company valuation or those sorts of things.
I think that alone helps you get a little bit outside of the miserable successes, so to speak. And so it's very easy to... just gloss over numbers that get bigger and not really associate any meaning with them.
But when you go from getting one testimonial every six months to getting hundreds a week from people that are like, your product changed my life, and you get to stand in front of your company and read that to 500 people who are blood, sweat, and tears trying to make this product great. You feel something. I mean, there's a lot of gratitude for me that comes from that experience.
And so I can still want to push for the company to be bigger and more successful and be affecting more people. But I can also at the same time, I think, appreciate the impact that it's having. and, and that's, I would say, will the entrepreneur or CEO, right? We all have these different identities and, uh, You know, I've sort of looked at hard things that happen in your life as a path to growth.
Like we talked about early on when I was 22, like not really knowing what I was doing running a company and just having to go through that sort of painful period of becoming a better CEO or becoming a better human. I think that in general... Um, you know, pain in some form leads to growth.
And so if you, if you kind of adopt a growth mindset, it makes you much more comfortable with being in that painful state. Now you don't want to be at it. You don't want it to be in sort of a masochistic way where you're, yeah.
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