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
Like what you just described where you're like, you want to force yourself to be in pain, but more just in the sense that like, wow, a bunch of things just went wrong in a row for me.
And this is very painful. My best friend committed suicide a little over a year ago. And in my personal life, that was the most pain that I'd ever felt in my life. I'd never lost anyone, let alone someone who I had seen a week earlier. And I think when you're first going through the...
the trauma of an experience like that it's hard to find perspective in it but you know if my emotional range at that point in my life was like from a six to a ten where like you know zero is about zero is like the worst thing in your life and and ten is like you know you feel great euphoria like in hindsight my emotional range was actually kind of narrow
right and so being able to go down to a to a one or a two for some period of time actually opened me up in a in a really healthy way in the months later and in a way that i never would have anticipated from having this terrible thing happen in my life and uh and so you know some of it's a little bit of just how you reframe everything but i have found that
in whatever category of your life that you're feeling some kind of enormous pain, there is something on the other side of it that you'll benefit from.
Well, your first reaction is to try to go numb because that is a coping mechanism. If you don't feel the pain, you can kind of still get through the day. And you have to process the emotion. You have to feel it. And so I think in the first 10 days of it, I was sort of white knuckling through it. And especially kind of day to day in running the company.
Now, fortunately, the company is also at a stage where I've got, you know, an executive team that's pretty functional and they knew what I was going through. It wasn't like it was a secret. And then at least in this specific case for me, I... I delivered the, uh, the eulogy.
Um, and it was, I mean, he was a very popular young man and it was in front of 800 or a thousand people in this massive church. And, uh, and so that, and that was one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life was having to talk about his life. Um, and you know, someone I loved and cared about and, uh, And just a whole wave of emotions went through me doing that.
And so that, one, I felt enormous relief from doing it. And then, two, in the aftermath of it, I was proud of being able to celebrate his life. And so there was sort of a weight that was taken off from that experience. And then, of course, you deal with these other stages of grief, which is around like I would play squash with them every week.
And so now every time I go to the squash courts, I think about them. Or I go to the steam room and I would sit with them. So you have these different stages of grief. But I think in those first 30 days, the best thing that I could have done was to go through that huge wave of painful release of emotion.
Yeah.
I think that that's sort of a natural thing that's a sort of a natural thing that I, anyone can do because it's, it's scary how your body feels like it's a physical overwhelming, um, uh, state and, uh, and it, it's distracting. Like you, you know, you think you're in the middle of a conversation next thing you're, you're crying.
So I understand that, but I, if anyone's listening to this, who's going through grief, I would encourage them to, uh, take whatever time or whatever process they need to release what they're feeling in that period.
Oh, it was huge. And I think it was an exaggerated experience because I had to write down everything I felt about him. I had to, you know, deliver that in front of actually a large number of people that happened to also be all of my closest friends.
Yeah. And it was, you know, a large public speaking event too, which is, you know, its own form of whatever. And I had never, you know, experienced death like that. And I wanted to celebrate someone who was a really important person in a lot of people's lives. So, yeah, I think that it was a very exaggerated experience, and I'm grateful that I got to do that aspect of it.
Yeah, that's a great way to describe it. They're kind of out and about trying to chase a bunch of things, and they're upset they're not getting what they want, but they've never actually declared what they want.
Well, I think the first thing to know is that it's an inwards examination. You have to ask yourself what you want. You can't go asking everyone in your life what you want. You'll never figure out what you want. And so that's a very internal and introspective pursuit. And I do think that It's hard when you're young because you haven't quite figured out how to talk to yourself yet.
At least I hadn't when I was 18 or 19 years old. But you can be sort of self-aware of things that you're drawn to. So... Let's start with things that you're not drawn to. Well, you know, I did a bunch of internships, so to speak, when I was like 18, 19, and 20 or whatever. And I worked in finance, which sort of seemed like what I should do because other people I knew were going to go into finance.
And I just didn't enjoy it. And by the way, in my free time, I was, you know, doing research on the fitness industry or the wearables industry or the sorts of things. And, and then, you know, when I would go play squash practice at Harvard or whatever, like I would love working out and love like pushing myself. And, and through that, I also was somebody who used to overtrain.
So I got interested in how you can figure, you know, how can you understand overtraining? And through that, I found myself doing physiology research on things that in the past I wouldn't have been interested in or not drawn to. And I think the things that you think about Mm-hmm.
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