Episode Notes:
Discover the behind-the-scenes roller coaster of success and failure of a professional athlete, NCAA national champion, university valedictorian, engineer, and voracious learner. From being the cut from every minor hockey team to playing in NHL organizations, overcoming OCD and anxiety to becoming a university valedictorian, and losing everything to achieving peak health, happiness, and performance, I have learned many valuable lessons first hand that I want to share with the world.
The origins of Learn II Perform started in March of 2020 at the outset of the coronavirus pandemic. I had no job, no prospects, and $70k of debt. My 20-year hockey career had abruptly ended. I was stuck in my parent’s basement at 26 years old. And to top it all off, I was infected with COVID-19 at the peak of the panic and uncertainty. Looking back, I believe it was the best thing that ever happened to me.
In this episode, you will learn:
• Why you should listen to this podcast
• How this podcast will help you optimize your life
• How I have transformed my life and achieved high performance
• The motivation for creating this podcast
Topics:
[3:29] Why should you listen to this podcast?
[4:36] How will this podcast help you optimize your life?
[5:57] Who Am I? My personal story
[8:28] Being ghosted by a coach as a pro hockey player
[9:20] Lifelong struggle with OCD and anxiety
[11:00] Why COVID-19 was the best thing that ever happened to my life
[12:34] The purpose of Learn II Perform
Thank you all for joining me on this journey to lifelong health, happiness, and higher performance. And remember, always be grateful, love yourself, and serve others.
Teaser
In this episode… And 8,000 people erupted into a celebration as my dream turned into a nightmare. There could not have been a worse start to a pro career. But, it actually did get worse. I now had nothing: no career, no money, no prospects, and nowhere to go. My whole life’s plan fell apart right in front of me…
Episode Intro
Learn II Perform: Practical lessons so that you can immediately learn to optimize your health, happiness, and performance.
Welcome to the first episode of Learn II Perform! I am honored and thrilled to have you listening and can’t wait to share this learning journey with you. To start, just a brief introduction about the show. During a transformative summer of 2020, I outlined three core values that serve as the foundation for my life and the Learn II Perform platform. They are Gratitude, Self-Care, and Service.
In each episode, I will begin by expressing gratitude to someone or something that has improved my life. Then, each topic dedicated to self-care and performance optimization will be explored with scientific and anecdotal evidence. Finally, as my way of providing service, I’ll close each episode with actionable recommendations that you can immediately implement to optimize your health, happiness, and performance.
Before we get started, I want to make a quick disclaimer. Many of these episodes will feature a lot of review of scientific literature, but I want to be clear that I am not an expert in any specific field. Science is extremely complex and dynamic; what is accepted as correct right now may not be in the future. Additionally, there are so many contradicting reviews, and most conclusions come with some level of uncertainty dependent on a multitude of factors. Attempting to comprehensively and objectively condense complex topics into short podcasts is very difficult, and therefore it is very likely that I will be unaware of relevant studies and possibly misinformed in some topics. I will do my best to produce the highest quality reviews of pertinent information, but I am far from perfect and this is a learning journey for me too. So if anything I say has been proven otherwise, or you are aware of additional information and sources that either support or refute the information I present, I would love to hear from you.
My objective is to help people optimize their lives and I will gratefully welcome other insights, opinions, and ideas. Ultimately, I don’t consider myself an expert, but rather, a student.
Gratitude
So with that, I would like to kick off this first episode with a special thank you to my long-time best friend, Nabaa Alam. Since childhood, Nabaa has been more than just a friend, but has also served as a role model by epitomizing the marriage of virtue and excellence. In a late August phone call, he suggested I start a podcast to share what I’ve learned during my journey to human optimization to help others do the same. Without Nabaa, this may never have been produced – so thank you Nabaa!
Topic Introduction
Now, in this first episode, you will discover why you should listen to this podcast and how it will help you unlock your potential — optimizing your health, happiness, and performance. In addition, I will candidly share the behind-the-scenes roller coaster of success and failure that I’ve experienced as a professional athlete, NCAA national champion, university valedictorian, engineer, and insatiable learner.
So What’s The Bottom Line
Learn II Perform will teach you the secrets to optimizing your health, happiness, and performance, enabling you to achieve all your goals by:
1. Condensing complex information into brief, easily digestible episodes
2. Explaining what to do and how to optimize your life
3. Providing personal experiences and insights
1. Condensing complex information into brief, easily digestible episodes
Let’s get right into it – First up: Why should you listen to this podcast?
The answer: Because this podcast will save you time and energy by condensing complex topics into practical knowledge.
We live in a time where information is more accessible than ever, often leading to information overload. For anyone who genuinely wants to optimize their life – improving their health, happiness, and performance – how are they supposed to find the time and energy to do so? What makes it worse is that information and news stories all seem to contradict each other, making it almost impossible to get a straight answer.
But fear not, because I’m going to sort through the cosmos of information and present it to you as simply as possible. All the heavy lifting is done for you. I have spent countless hours listening to two-hour long podcasts, reading research articles on PubMed and spending all my money at the local bookstore. In addition, I self-experiment with everything new I learn to test its value in my own life.
In this podcast, my intention is to take the most valuable lessons, tools, and techniques that I have extracted through years of research and personal experience and condense them into brief episodes. This allows you to put your time and energy into your life – your family, your health, your career, whatever is most important to you.
2. Explaining what to do and how to optimize your life
Second question: How will this podcast help you optimize your life?
The answer: In just a handful of minutes, you will have learned the most important information about a topic and know exactly how you can begin to implement it that same day! This is your blueprint to optimizing your life.
Each episode will give you the bottom line:
• Why does it matter?
• How does it work?
• How can I use it?
In this manner, you can channel your inner CEO and focus on the most important information. And if the short episodes leave you curious for more information, I will share links to all sources on my website and I can always be contacted. My objective is to help you improve your life, so for advice, questions, and any comments, you are encouraged to connect with me. I will be happy to hear from you!
3. Providing personal experiences and insights
Third Point: What value can I offer you through my personal experiences?
The answer: I have transformed my life. I have been a champion. I have achieved my most ambitious goals. I have learned valuable lessons. I have built valuable relationships. And every day, I continue to optimize my health, happiness, and performance.
But more importantly, I have been unsure of myself. I have failed. I have had my heart broken. I have been wrong. I have made mistakes. I have suffered anxiety. I have had my dreams fall apart in front of me. I have been there, experiencing the same struggles as everyone else.
Personal Experience
To help you get to know me, I want to share my personal story. Let’s start with my hockey career. Since I was 5 years old, all I ever wanted to do was play pro hockey. Everything I did was about my hockey career and I had no other plans or interests.
During the last five years of my minor hockey career, from age 13 to 17, I was cut from all ten rep teams I tried out for, having my heart-broken on the very last day of tryouts eight times. I will never forget walking out of the rink as a 17-year-old with tears in my eyes because I truly felt like my dreams and hopes of playing professional hockey were over. I sent over 100 emails to junior hockey coaches across all of Canada asking for an invite to camp, just a chance to be seen. Sure enough, I got my chance in Kimberley of the KIJHL before going on to play for the Powell River Kings of the BCHL the year after. However, following a poor season in Powell River in which I had just two wins the entire season, and that was in my second-last year of junior eligibility, they decided that they weren’t going to bring me back, and naturally, I understood. So not only did I lose my spot there, but I actually had nowhere to play because no team in the entire country – about 130 total Jr. A teams across Canada – would take me. Year after year, the slim hopes of realizing my dreams got smaller and smaller.
But I overcame that. My last year of junior, after being picked up by a team that had an injured goaltender, I was actually nominated for top goaltender and player in the country, comprising of those same 130 teams that didn’t want me. I then went on to play college hockey, becoming an NCAA National Champion in 2017 and co-captain during my senior year – the first goaltender in the program’s 100-year history to do so. In my senior year, I was named the CoSIDA Academic All-American of the Year in the at-large division – considered to be the most prestigious combined academic/athletic honor available to student-athletes – ranking number 1 in a division which comprised of approximately 80,000 eligible student-athletes from 12 male sports [1].
Then, in the Spring of 2018, I realized my dream by beginning my pro hockey career with the Greenville Swamp Rabbits of the ECHL, and an affiliate of the New York Rangers at the time. On March 17, 2018, I made pro debut in Norfolk, Virginia in front of 8,000 fans. From being cut from every team growing up to playing for an NHL affiliate organization… sounds like a fairytale story, right? Well, it wasn’t. Just over a minute into the game, I got scored on with the first shot faced in my professional career. And 8,000 people erupted into a celebration as my dream turned into a nightmare. I remember grabbing my water bottle and laughing to myself, thinking “You have got to be kidding me.” There could not have been a worse start to a pro career. But, it actually did get worse.
At the start of my first full season of pro hockey in the following October, I was cut through a text message and ‘ghosted’ by the coach on the third day of camp: No follow-up message, explanation, or exit meeting… just crickets. Apparently ghosting doesn’t just happen in dating apps. And this happened after turning down a full-time offer to join a trillion-dollar bank in New York City. So despite having all the potential to do so many amazing things, I now had nothing: no career, no money, no prospects, and nowhere to go. My whole life’s plan fell apart right in front of me.
Yet again, I could have quit on my dreams, but I kept pushing and ended up with two full seasons of pro hockey and stints with ECHL affiliates of two other NHL organizations along the way. At the same time, I completed a master’s degree in leadership with a 4.0 GPA while working as an automation engineer in the summers. I may not have made the NHL, but I lived out a dream that should have ended a long time ago.
Switching gears, since I was young, I have suffered from high levels of OCD and anxiety. Throughout most of my life, I have been extremely stressed, unfulfilled, and borderline depressed in some instances. If I could sum up my struggle with OCD in three words, its “paralysis by analysis.” While in college, the impact of my OCD and anxiety increased dramatically.
Occasionally, I would have severe anxiety attacks. Some episodes would last hours, in which I was completely incapable of any normal functioning, other than ruminating in an eternal mental feedback loop. Most often, these episodes would only end when I was too mentally exhausted to continue or if I was forced to engage in an activity or conversation, most of which were largely out of my control. I have had these anxiety attacks at school, at the gym, at home, in the car, literally any place that I can stop and think. I have literally wasted weeks of my life worrying about hypothetical events that are entirely manifested in my mind.
Not exactly an optimal approach to high performance and happiness, but just like with my hockey career, I learned how to persevere. In 2018, I graduated as the Norwich University Valedictorian with a perfect 4.0 GPA in Mechanical Engineering despite missing a month of spring semester to begin my pro hockey career, and while serving as the President of Tau Beta Pi – The national engineering honor society, Vice-President of Pi Tau Sigma – The national mechanical engineering honor society, Founder and President of the Norwich Consulting Club, and member of the Norwich Investment Club. On top of that, I was part of a senior design team that won a NASA competition and was subsequently offered a NASA internship, which unfortunately I was ineligible for due to my Canadian citizenship [2, 3]. As mentioned previously, I also secured a full-time offer to join a trillion-dollar bank in New York City despite having no background in finance.
My most recent adversity was brought on by the pandemic. I was playing out my final and best season of pro hockey, about to finalize my master’s degree, and had a dream opportunity lined up for the summer and the next stage of my life. And then the pandemic happened. My hockey career abruptly ended, my opportunity disappeared, had no prospects, and had $70k of debt. I was stuck in my parent’s basement at 26 years old and was infected with COVID-19. Everything came crashing down on me again. This was perfect breeding ground for anxiety, yet I emerged the happiest, healthiest, and most productive I have ever been in my entire life. So what changed?
The answer is simple: Learning. I devoured information: reading books and research articles, listening to podcasts, and watching YouTube videos. As I began studying everything related to health, fitness, performance, and happiness, I realized that I was grossly performing below my potential.
With each new technique and concept that I learned, I actively implemented it into my life and evaluated its impact. And then I got addicted to self-improvement. To name just a few things I’ve done, I completed a 120-hour water fast, I take daily cold showers, and even created customized morning and pre-bed routines. I achieved my best-ever physique without a gym, eliminated brain fog and daily energy lulls, and even ran an ultramarathon with no training and less than 72 hours to prep. I read every day and have been learning four languages and the guitar. And all that is just a sample of what’s to come with this show.
Basically, I restructured every aspect of my life: mind, body, and spirit. And I’m happy. And I love my life.
Inspired by my time at Norwich University – the oldest private military college in the US – and witnessing many of my closest friends commission into the US military to serve, I made it a personal mission to serve the greater good of humanity in the best way that I am capable.
This has inspired my Life Purpose Statement: “To maximize my human potential and empower others to optimize their health, happiness, and performance.” My objective with Learn II Perform is exactly that, to empower people to improve their lives. It also allows me to be true to my values, by expressing gratitude to those who have inspired and taught me, practice personal self-care and constant development, and serve others by sharing my knowledge and experiences.
So What Can You Do
First and foremost, I encourage everyone to pursue their human potential every day. Discover what is most important in your life, and dedicate yourself to learning, practicing, and growing. Take advantage of every opportunity, resource, and interaction to expand your mind. Have an open mind, question everything, be curious, listen to hear the person rather than listening to respond, meet new people and try new things. I hope that Learn II Perform will provide accessible and applicable information to help you do those things so that you can continually reach higher levels of health, happiness, and performance.
In addition to the resources available to you through Learn II Perform, I am available to be contacted on social media or through my website for anything. I genuinely love to see other people grow and succeed, so I will be happy to help you out in the best way that I am capable. If you’re looking for more information than I can offer, which is very possible since I am a learner and still not an expert, I will do my best to point you in the right direction to make sure your specific needs are met.
I’m in this journey with you, and this is just the beginning. Let’s get better together.
And for each episode, I’ll always like to close off with a quote that I think is relevant, and for this one, I’m going to pull from one of my favorite artists. Lana Del Rey, in her new book, Violet Bent Backwards Over The Grass, there’s one page where she wrote something brilliant: “I’m writing my future” [4].
Episode Outro
To discover more, the full transcript of this episode with all citations is available on the website and you can also contact me on social media with any questions or comments. If you found this episode useful or think that it may help someone else, I encourage you to pass it along.
Thank you all for joining me on this journey to lifelong health, happiness, and higher performance. And remember, always be grateful, love yourself, and serve others.
References
[1] Men’s Hockey. (2018, June 12). Norwich Athletics. Retrieved October 27, 2020 from https://www.norwichathletics.com/sports/mice/2017-18/releases/20180612pk9ti3
[2] Atkinson, J. S. & Spears, S. (2018, March 9). Norwich University Crowned Champion of 2018 BIG Idea Engineering Design Challenge. NASA. https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/langley/norwich-univerisity-crowned-champion-of-2018-big-idea-engineering-design-challenge
[3] 2018 Competition. (2018). Big Idea Challenge. Retrieved October 27, 2020 from http://bigidea.nianet.org/past-competition-themes/2018-competition/
[4] Del Rey, L. (2020). Violet bent backwards over the grass. New York: Simon & Schuster.
