Play to your Strengths

John Coyle was a senior in Stanford in 1989 finishing up a degree in design and training for the 1992 Olympic games in short track speed skating. He’d placed 12th in the short track worlds in 1989 while training on his own with no coach and little ice time. Joining the national team, he thought training full time under professional coaches would vault him onto the Olympic podium in Albertville. What he got instead was a lesson about playing to your strengths rather than always trying to fix your weaknesses. His story has lessons for us all….. 

When John Coyle moved to the national team training centre in Colorado he underwent a battery of tests to determine his VO2 max, his power, his strength and all sorts of other nasty stuff they do to athletes to try to figure them out. After jumping, running, and pedaling himself to exhaustion, the results came back and they weren’t good. According to the results John Coyle might have been a good speed skater but he wasn’t a good athlete. The conclusion was they would need to fix John if he was to become a top ranked short track speed skater. 

To appreciate the rest of this story it’s necessary to understand a little about short track speed skating. It should be call burst skating because its really short bursts of effort followed by a short rest before engaging in another burst. Each lap around a hockey rink is 100 meters and generally takes just over 9 seconds. Here’s how John described it in his talk. “A world-class speed skater enters a corner at 31 miles an hour and, exactly two seconds later, exits at 31 miles an hour going the opposite direction. The equivalent acceleration is zero to 62 mph in two seconds, which even most automobiles cannot match. This generates a gravitational force of 2.7 Gs — almost as strong as a space shuttle liftoff. During a race, this happens every 4.5 seconds. For a 170-pound skater like me, racing each corner is like doing a 500-pound, one-legged squat from deeper than 90 degrees, while leaning over at 68 degrees, while traveling 31 miles an hour on an 18-inch-long, one-millimeter-wide blade, on ice, headed directly at a wall”. 

Now back to John’s story…. 

To bring up Coyle’s aerobic capacity he was sent out on endless long bike rides and long distance runs. The goal was to turn John into another Eric Heiden, a phenomenal long track speed skater. After two years of intense training Coyle’s fitness level barely improved and what didn’t improve at all was his skating – he failed to make the team for Albertville and fell in the world rankings from 12th to 34th. 

What I failed to tell you is that in one of those tests John did in Colorado – a sprint test where you pedal as hard as you can for 30 seconds at which point you literally drop off the exercise bike, he placed dead last of all the athletes tested. However, for the first 15 seconds (he only lasted 18 seconds in total) he generated more power than any athlete there including a young Lance Armstrong who was at the same test facility. 

John retreated from the National team program after failing to make the Olympic team in 1992 and over the next few years started to play to his strengths rather than focus on his weaknesses. Remember, each lap in Short Track speed skating is approximately nine and one half seconds which means a burst of approximately two seconds around the corner – with a glide (rest) interval, then another massive burst etc. lap after lap. Recognizing his strength was his ability to produce a massive burst of power over short period of time he concentrated on that and smashed the world record in the 1500 meter race in 1995. 

So why is John Coyle’s story so important to us as business people? Because we tend to do the same thing as John’s coaches did to him. Too often we’re so intent on shoring up our weaknesses that we forget to focus on our strengths. Here are some tips from John Coyle:

1. accept your weaknesses; 

2. recognize your specific strengths; 

3. solve the right problem (which is not necessarily the problem other people have diagnosed for you); 

4. double down on your strengths by accentuating the things that make you great. 

Take a moment and ask yourself “what are your specific strengths” and is your attention focused on solving the right problems. As John Coyle has taught us – while recognizing and mitigating weakness is important, capitalizing on strengths can be your most powerful weapon.