Life Lessons from Skiing
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This is the Too Many Trees newsletter, where I (Eric Nehrlich) share what I’ve been writing and reading in the realm of leadership and personal development. My executive coaching practice helps leaders amplify their impact by focusing their time and energy on what matters most, while uncovering and reshaping the unconscious patterns that may be holding them back. If you know somebody that could benefit from my perspective, please forward this to them or have them set up a free intro chat with me.
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I've been skiing a lot in January, so when searching for material to post on LinkedIn, that's where my mind went.
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I'm skiing a lot with my kids these days, and it's amazing how fast they are improving. What's interesting is that they don't need a lot of instruction to get better - they just need time on the slopes. They can feel when they get things right, and they know when they get things wrong because they fall.
And I keep reminding them that falling isn't a big deal. We tried a steep black diamond run over the weekend, and my daughter was doing great, but then fell towards the bottom and slid 20 feet down the hill. She was understandably freaked out and crying, but we took a few deep breaths together until she calmed down enough to ski the rest of the way down. A day later, she was begging to do the same run because she knew she could do it. Her confidence actually went up because she had fallen - now she'd experienced the "worst" outcome, and had recovered.
A mistake I see a lot of rising leaders make is to avoid trying something until they are sure they can do it perfectly without mistakes. But that's not how learning works. We learn by trying things, seeing what doesn't work, adjusting and trying again. We learn by making mistakes and recovering, building the confidence that we can try more ambitious things even if something goes wrong.
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I was talking to a beginner skier a couple weeks ago, a dad learning to ski with his kids, and gave him a piece of advice that changed his comfort level immediately, which was to focus on getting his weight above his downhill ski. Similarly, I told him to lean forward to help get the front edges of his skis to carve into the snow to help him turn.
The funny thing is that these are the same tips I focus on for myself. When I feel myself losing control on a high-speed turn down a black diamond run, I remind myself to lean forward and get my weight over the downhill ski.
But the way to really build those habits into muscle memory is to slowly and deliberately do it under easier conditions, like, say, going down an easy run behind my kids. Because it's safe and slow, I can really intentionally focus on those cues, and carve a perfect turn through the snow. Each turn is another repetition to train my nervous system to do the right thing. And having done so many of those turns, my body automatically does the right thing when flying down the mountain at 30 mph.
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Okay, maybe it's a stretch to try to extract leadership and life lessons from skiing. Mostly skiing for me is about the joy of doing something I'm great at, where I am not thinking or worrying about what else I should be doing, and instead focused completely on the present moment.
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What activities are bringing you joy these days?
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Coaching spots available:
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That’s where coaching can help. I work with rising tech leaders to accelerate through this shift so they can avoid burnout and lead with purpose and clarity.
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If you know somebody for whom that might be helpful, invite them to book a free intro chat to explore new possibilities with me.
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And now for the normal personal development content…
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I was honored to be featured by Lisa Nicole Bell on her Behind the Brilliance podcast, a long-form interview show for the intellectually curious and relentlessly ambitious. She drew out several aspects of my career journey that I had never shared before, including:
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- the challenge of letting go of previous identities when pivoting your career
- how to set boundaries around work when you're ambitious
- when working many hours is thrilling and energizing, and when it is draining and leading to burnout
- letting go of the myth that working harder and stressing more leads to greater impact
Here are a few articles on excellence that caught my attention recently:
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- David Epstein's interview of Brad Stulberg about his new book, The Way of Excellence. I resonated with how Stulberg advocated for "reconnecting with our innate humanity—our drive to create and contribute and flourish and explore our potential and to care deeply and give things our all. That’s how I define excellence, not as a destination or a standard, but as a process of caring deeply and giving something your all" (similar to my experience skiing!). I immediately bought the book and have been enjoying his perspective on excellence as a quality we feel in our body, as that aligns with my recent experiences.
- What does a batsman see?, an article from Cricket Monthly recommended by Cedric Chin of Commoncog. I don't know anything about the sport of cricket, but I loved this deep dive into how world-class players develop their expertise by focusing their attention intently on very specific cues. Two bits stand out to me: "mental energy is a finite resource that a batsman must conserve ... . In order to conserve his finite quantum of mental energy, he would have to use fierce focus as little as possible, so that it was always available when he really needed it." These top-tier batsmen would intentionally distract themselves between balls so they can preserve their limited focus energy. The other was how they trusted their subconscious to identify the pitcher's intent - they only used their "fierce focus" to watch the ball on its way from the pitcher's hand to their bat.
- Steve Yegge's essay on what will survive the coming of AI. Steve Yegge is a legendary essayist in the software development community (I loved his description of Jeff Bezos as a "hyper-intelligent alien with a tangential interest in human affairs"), and his recent work on orchestrating multiple AI instances to coordinate with each other to generate code is fascinating. In this essay, he talks about what will help you (or your software) be valuable enough to not be replaced by AI, by using an evolutionary lens that "software tends to survive if it saves cognition". If the value of the cognition it creates is much greater than what it costs, it will survive. This can take the form of compressing insights (which took years of experience and bug fixes and edge cases to generate) or being so efficient or useful that it's not worth it to re-code it when you can just use the software instead. That being said, LLMs can't use your software if they don't know about it or if it's hard to use, so you have to make it visible and friction-free for LLMs if you want them to adopt it. Lastly, there are times when users want human connection or curation or presence, which is what I am betting on as a coach, in addition to the valuable targeted insights I offer. Just need to improve my visibility both with LLMs and with potential clients.
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Thanks for reading, and see you in a couple weeks!
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My daughter rocking a run that had previously scared her.
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