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
Yeah, that's well said.
Yeah.
Well, I would say it's recurring fleeting thoughts because the things that matter to you keep coming back. At least I've found. And then I think the other thing that everyone should learn in some form is the ability to close their eyes and breathe. And whether you call that meditation or mindfulness or fill in the blank, develop some process to sit with yourself.
Well, one step is to state it. I mean, don't be coy about it. I want to build this company. I want to be a musician. Fill in the blank. What do you want? And state it to the world. And then... you cannot underestimate hard work and consistency. If you are hard charging and consistently hard charging, that is such a differentiator on sort of everyone else. And that's in turn what creates luck.
You know, like if you keep showing up and... you keep getting rejected and all of a sudden you meet this person and they introduce you to that person. And next thing you know, you're on a plane and you showed up to the city and it didn't quite make sense. And now you're meeting the person who all of a sudden has the answer to that thing you wanted to that break that you needed.
And so I, you know, I think getting what you want is some carb combination of hardware consistency and luck. And you could probably bolt onto that, like a comfort with rejection. because you're going to get rejected enormously. And the more ambitious what you want is, the more you're going to be rejected.
And that goes back to my point about people, when they're trying to get what they want, actually get insular rather than going out. You want to be introspective about what you want, and then you want to be extroverted about getting what you want.
And I think people get stuck sort of going out and about because they're afraid of what's someone going to think if they know I want this thing or, you know, what if they say no to me?
I think commitment is another criteria to get what you want, like being deeply committed to it. And whether that's a relationship or, you know, a pursuit that you're after in your career, like staying committed to it is huge. I meet a lot of young founders who are kind of, they're sort of in school, they sort of have a job, they're sort of starting something, right? And there's a safety in that.
Because if any one of those things sort of blows up, they've still got the other two and you'll still sound good at a dinner table, you know? I will say though, getting over fear of rejection is part one, but getting over rejection is part two. Like I struggled with that.
Well, from the age of 21 to, I mean, look, I've now dealt with rejection throughout every phase of building this company, but I would say it was most painful from the ages of like 21 to 24 because I hadn't experienced actually a lot of rejection in hindsight up to that point in my life. And everyone I was telling this idea to about like, hey, I want to start this company.
This is the thing I'm going to do. a lot of people I respected, like they were all kind of telling me like, this is a bad idea, dude. Like you should not do this. And, and then of course you go try to raise capital and investors tell, you know, and you try to hire people and they tell, you know, and, and, um, and I, you know, looking back on it, I think there was good reason for that.
Like I was a kid, I was starting something that is big in engineering and medicine and computer science and math and, um, You know, I'm not an engineer or a computer scientist or a doctor or a mathematician. And like, and so there's just, and I was super young and naive. And so like, I understand why I faced all that rejection, but it still was very painful.
And, and then that's where the conviction piece wavers, like your commitment and your conviction wavers. I stayed very committed to the idea, again, because I believed it was going to exist in the world. And I had deep conviction around that. But my self-belief, that's what wavered. Because when you get told no enough times, you're kind of like, well, either they're all crazy or I'm crazy.
And at some point, you're looking at numbers like 50 to 1, 100 to 1. You're like, well, okay. Yeah.
I just hadn't proven enough at that point in time to make it more obvious or to make it a more acceptable idea. And that was both in the form of the idea and the maturation around the idea and the capability of the tech as much as it was also – sitting there like a future CEO and entrepreneur. Dude, you're 23.
Yeah. And I didn't have great answers to the competition either. That was the sort of other variable in building the business that was quite complicated. It was just... Any sensible person was going to ask the 22-year-old or the 25-year-old, like, well, how are you going to beat Nike? How are you going to beat Apple?
How are you going to beat Adidas and Under Armour and Microsoft and all these sort of big gargantuan companies? So that probably played a role in an appropriate level of skepticism.
Yeah. I mean, there's an element of, I think, building anything where you have to see a version of the future that other people don't see. And then at some point you either need to be right or you're not.
And I'd go a step further. I think it's actually in part to get people over the fear of failure. Sort of get them out of the blocks, right? Take the leap. Stop being paralyzed. Don't be paralyzed, yeah. I think that's where, to your point, the failure porn's coming from is trying to convince people that it's okay to put themselves out there.
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