Redefine Normal with Team USA Triathlete Cameron Schiller
Cameron Schiller is an award-winning content & brand marketer, Founder of RYOT Media, co-chair of the Young Leadership Council of the Brooklyn Museum, and an elite skydiver and wingsuit flyer. Cameron recently became a competitive triathlete, going from zero experience to making Team USA in just one year, and will represent the US at the World Championships in 2023.
In this conversation, Cameron Schiller and Chris Sparks discuss the training methods of elite athletes, overcoming mental barriers, and leveraging data to reveal hidden dimensions of performance. You will also receive a crash course on elite skydiving including techniques to heighten your proprioception, confront your fears, and stay calm in the face of unforeseen challenges.
See above for video, and below for audio, resources mentioned, topics, and transcript.
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Links and resources we mentioned during our conversation:
Additional Forcing Function links:
Experiment Without Limits (peak performance workbook, free download)
Performance Assessment (quiz to reveal your greatest opportunity for growth)
Check out previous Forcing Function Hour episodes.
Topics:
(01:55) Jumping out of airplanes
(10:22) Dealing with the unexpected
(20:20) The first half Iron Man
(37:37) A crash course on aerodynamics
(43:12) The aftermath of achieving a goal
(52:04) The greats come up together
(01:00:55) Redefining normal and other lessons
Podcast Transcript:
Note: transcript slightly edited for clarity.
Chris (00:05): Welcome to Forcing Function Hour, a conversation series exploring the boundaries of peak performance. Join me, Chris Sparks, as I interview elite performers to reveal principles, systems, and strategies for achieving a competitive edge in business. If you are an executive or investor ready to take yourself to the next level, download my workbook at experimentwithoutlimits.com. For all episodes and show notes, go to forcingfunctionhour.com.
It's an honor to introduce today's guest, Cameron Schiller. Cameron is a talented commercial director and marketer. He works on brands from hospitality, sports, to consumer-packaged goods, but when Cameron takes off the suit of his Clark Kent alter-ego, he transforms into a high-performance athlete. Cameron is an elite skydiver and a wingsuit flyer. He recently became a competitive triathlete, going from zero experience to a national competitor in less than a year. Cameron is about to compete in the Triathlon Long Course Championships. This Sunday, yes, this Sunday, Cameron will be swimming 1.2 miles, biking fifty-six miles, and running 13.1 miles in hopes of finishing in the top eighteen and qualifying for Team USA, competing at the world championships in Spain in 2023. You guys want elite performers, today you have one.
I invited Cameron on the show to talk about his training to become an elite athlete, overcoming mental barriers, and how to lead a life of adventure and challenge. Cameron is a total force of nature, and after this conversation you're gonna see why.
Thanks for joining me, Cameron. Very excited to have you on the show.
Cameron (01:48): Thanks for having me, Chris. Wow. What an intro. What an intro. I'm really excited to be here, and thank you for having me.
Chris (01:55): So, let's start with skydiving. An elite skydiver. What does that look like? What prompted you to start jumping out of airplanes?
Cameron (02:04): I think what prompted me was it was very much an accident. It was by chance that I was in a certain place at a certain time. My career—as you mentioned—at the time was as a commercial producer and director. It just so happened that we were working on a project right next to a very cool drop zone in Paris, California called Skydive Paris. And the director of photography on our project had a friend at this drop zone who flew, as a skydiver, cameras in movies. He said, "Let's go over and check it out. You wanna come with me?" And he knew I had an adventurous spirit, but really had not branched out beyond growing up playing basketball and tennis and these little—football, and these sports. But I loved adventure. So we went over to meet his friend, and it's amazing. He had this film-camera-size red camera on his helmet, and all of this really cool gear on, and I just looked at him, a little Red Bull and patch over here and GoPro patch over here and I was thinking, "Wow. This is like the stuff you never think you'll see. The communities you never think you're gonna find."
They invited me to stay the weekend, and I did, and they said, "You wanna get your license?" I said, "How long is that gonna take?" He said, "Just hang out for the weekend, maybe we'll get it done by the time you leave."
That's kinda how I got into it, within after six hours of ground school the next day, I was going up in an airplane to do my first jump. I said, "So, who do I get attached to in this jump?" And they said, "You don't get attached to anybody. It's called 'skydiving', and you're going to jump out by yourself." I said, "The first time, I'm jumping out by myself?" And they go, "Well, we'll be near you, but we won't be attached to you." It absolutely terrified me, but that was the first time, and within twenty-four hours of seeing skydivers for the first time I was now in an airplane going up to do a skydive with two tandem masters not attached to me but watching me from the side the whole time, and I was gonna have to pull that ripcord myself the very first time.
Chris (04:13): What was that experience like? What's the first thing that went through your mind when your feet touched the ground?
Cameron (04:18): Oh, well, let's go back before I touched the ground. I mean, the first experience was terrifying. It was absolutely terrifying. I was scared beyond measure. I was so afraid. I mean, you're jumping out of an airplane. This is not normal, or it doesn't feel normal. Everything in your body or your mind tells you, "You should not be doing this." Because it's not something that we've grown up with, it's not a habit that we've developed and formed. We haven't grown up building the skills and the muscles around a sport like this or to perform like this, so it was something very new and foreign, and I was very fearful of it, but I always had a drive to push myself and try new things. And so it was a little bit of these two sort of competing mindsets with one another, and at the end of the day, I chose to do it.
And it was very scary until the moment that I started doing it, and the moment that I jumped out for the first time and I started flying, my confidence built a little bit. And then the next it built a little bit more, and built a little bit more, and I'd say it probably wasn't around until the fortieth jump, which took place all within a period of two weeks, that I really started to feel connected in the sport and connected to what I was doing. I didn't feel like an outsider, I didn't feel like I was trying to assess whether or not it was something that I enjoyed or could do, but I felt a part of the sport.
Chris (05:48): So for many people, skydiving is a bucket list. "Hey, I'm gonna do this one time, check that box. And hey, I made it to the ground, I'm still alive." Two weeks in, you've had your fortieth jump. It's safe to say that you got hooked. What kept you coming back?
Cameron (06:06): Well, I think what kept me coming back actually surprises most people. It's understandable that when we think of something like skydiving, I've found that generally, most people associate it with the same feeling you have on a roller-coaster. When you're on a roller-coaster, you're at the top of that roller-coaster, and you go off of it, you start to fall straight down, and your stomach lifts up, and you get this huge rush, and all of this adrenaline, and that's expected because you're accelerating from zero to a very, very, very fast speed, and you're gaining speed, which is acceleration. And so your stomach sort of lifts up, and people associate that experience with skydiving.
And so it's natural that someone feels that it's gonna be or thinks it's gonna be this really big rush of adrenaline and that, "Oh, you must love doing crazy things." And what I found was something that's always attracted me, which is, is that it's a high-performance sport, and to perform a skydive there are many factors that go into it and there's lots of learning and knowledge and training that goes into not just developing yourself as a skydiver, but even into every jump.
Let me paint that picture for you a little bit. I'll bring you guys inside of the room of a jump, and then we can certainly deconstruct what goes into getting you there. But to get your skydiving license, the first step is six hours of training on the ground. So you'll go through—and I've taught this—It's called "AFF Level 1," and I've taught this to others. I was invited to teach when I was in town. It's six hours of training, and you learn a lot of skills. There are qualitative things, there are quantitative things. Essentially, you learn—Think of yourself as a pilot. You've gotta learn what's all the gear that you're going to use, what is aerodynamics, what happens as you move at a fast speed through the sky, what are the different altitudes at which things happen? You learn a lot of knowledge. Then you have to go up, fly that knowledge in a real-life setting. You go up inside of an airplane, it'll be going ninety miles an hour, you'll jump out at thirteen thousand feet, and now you've got four minutes of falling and under a canopy.
It's a really exciting rush, but with all of these skills that you build and all of the tools that you've assembled to manage the situation at every point, there is the reality that there are many variables every time you do this sport. Every time you do a jump. It begins from when you're on the ground, how many people are a part of your jump? How many times have you jumped together? How well are you going to interact with each other? Do you have a good plan on the ground for what you guys all wanna do? Now, jump ahead. You're on the airplane. The plane travels on a specific flight path that you are aware of before you leave the ground, and you've learned the topography of the land that you're flying over. And at every three thousand feet, the wind is moving a certain direction, but now you get up there and the wind has changed, and the plane has gone back around and it has to take a different flight path. So now you thought you were getting out here, but you're actually getting out over here.
And now as you're flying with other people falling down, there's another five or ten variables that will come in. Perhaps you guys don't realize it and you float off of your course. Perhaps you plan to do a maneuver and it doesn't work out. Perhaps you go to open your parachute and it doesn't open perfectly—which is very common—and you have to make certain adjustments. Let's go into a landing and say that you wanna land this way but there's cross traffic and you have to change all of the maneuvers that you do.
All of these things are variables. And so if we sort of zoom out from that, it's similar to sports like race car driving or sports where there's a lot of variables and a lot of details that you have to constantly be monitoring as you are performing that sport. So it's not even as much as no day of skydiving can be the same, or no skydive can be the same, but I would say minute by minute of a skydive can never be the same.
Chris (10:22): It strikes me that in your—let's say, your day job, a lot of what you're doing is creating a sense of control. Having a brand, have a sense of control about the perception of that brand, or getting the perfect shot and setting things up just right to tell a particular story, and you willingly put yourself in a situation where not only can you not control the variables, you might not even know all the variables that you'll face on a given day. How has your mindset shifted in terms of your ability to deal with the unexpected?
Cameron (10:58): I love that you bring this up, because when I was younger in film, and I've always been a very creative individual, I was always very—I don't want to say "insistent," but I was always very confident in my vision, and that the vision that I had and wanted to bring to others would be well-received. It's confidence in yourself and what you can create. And when I was younger and I would get some, in the form of a reaction, some sort of resistance, I would be somewhat defensive of it. Defensive of my position and my inclination and what it was that I wanted to say. And that slowly changed over time. I actually feel that skydiving has actually been the greatest learning experience for these types of situations, because it wasn't so much that—What motivated me first was to tell my vision, but then as time went on, it really became about, how do we, together, against a lot of variables produce something that moves people? Right? And it was less about me and more about we.
And skydiving, what I've learned every time I jump out of that airplane is that you are immediately going to confront a number of variables, and you have no idea what they are. And not only will they confront you immediately, but you have a limited amount of time to address those variables, and produce a very specific outcome. In skydiving, there are what are called the priorities, and the number one most priority, number one most important priority in skydiving is "pull." Nothing supersedes this. It's "pull," and then "pull at the right altitude."
Now, "pull" means pull the pilotchute, which then inflates and opens up your main parachute. It doesn't even matter where you do this, this is just the number one thing you must always do, is pull. Now, there are redundancies and backup systems, but as far as your priorities, this is the number one priority. So there is a lot of prioritization in how you assess the different variables that you're going to encounter, but what I learned after that, and I felt after those forty jumps was not that, "Wow, this is the sport for me," but I began trusting myself. And I think trust is something that is really a value that I hold very strongly to, which is you spend time building a set of skills.
And sure, we can make anything look right on paper, and we can simulate things. As a pilot, you can go into a simulator and you can address the situation in a specific way, and every time you can beat the simulation. But real world is where the rubber hits the road. We do a simulation on the ground before every jump, and we walk through how we're going to do this jump. I've been a part of twenty-way jumps with twenty people. But the moment you get up there, anything can change, and anyone might be changing it. It might not even be you and something that you can control. And when you jump out every time at thirteen thousand feet, which is the average elevation at which you jump out, you've probably got about sixty to sixty-five seconds of freefall time, at which point you will all separate, your parachute will open above you. It will never open right. There will always be something about it that you want to adjust. It won't always open perfectly. And then you'll take a few minutes and you'll fly all the way down to the planned landing area.
Trust is, for me, not only an important value but perhaps one of the most important tools, muscles that I have developed, because at every moment I need to trust that I have the tools to address the variables that are put in front of me to get me safely down to the ground.
Now, I would say it does take time for someone to become comfortable with that ticking clock of sixty-five seconds. You do have enough time to address these things. We're just not used to that type of pressure. And we see it as pressure, but sixty-five seconds is an incredible amount of time to assess and deal with any situation properly, and statistically, it is incredibly safe. But it's trust.
So once you trust that you can handle a situation of jumping out of an airplane every single time—and I've done it over three thousand jumps—you start to apply that to other situations in your life.
And this is where the first real growth started happening for me. Because when I looked at variables that were put in front of me at the time, in my work, I would see them as though they might be inconvenient for me at the time, and though they might distract me from the singular view that I have of how something should be done, I have to trust that I have the tools and that I have the skill to not only address that situation, but to drive towards the most favorable outcome. It becomes easier and easier the more you skydive, I can tell you this. There was a point for me when I began to really enjoy and take pride in that this is not, "Oh, something bad is happening to me," but "this is inconvenient," but the trust is that, well, I feel I am one of the truly capable people to be the one who deals with these types of variables. And that then becomes your sandbox. That becomes where you focus on building your skills the most, is when you start in the foxhole every time, essentially, and you have to always get yourself out. And it doesn't become, "Am I getting out?" It becomes, "How well am I getting out?"
Chris (16:38): That's beautiful. It's turning the unknown from a threat into an opportunity, and it's sort of like expecting the unexpected. And what I really respect is how one growth edge, how skydiving became this catalyst for all these other areas in your life, where perhaps there was a resistance to variables or wanting things to conform to your vision, and becoming more adaptable and confident in your ability to show up no matter what hand you were dealt.
For those of you guys who are listening, I mean, we touched on it very briefly in the introduction, but in addition to these three thousand jumps, Cameron does wingsuit flying. So you see these pretty in my mind crazy insane videos of the guys flying so close to the mountain it looks like they could almost touch. What we don't realize, because we're seeing this first-person perspective, is that there's a person flying next to or behind this person to get that shot, and arguably that is even more impressive, to fly that same route but also pointing your camera in the direction to be able to get that shot. Just tell me, like, what was that like? I mean, this all started for you because you saw a guy wearing a camera that said, "Hey, come on, let's go." All of a sudden you were the one wearing that camera, getting the shot, shooting those flights. What was that like for you?
Cameron (18:17): Camera flying is very exciting. I'll definitely help put us there, but within skydiving, wingsuiting—just to maybe share a little bit more about how it's sort of all broken down—wingsuiting is considered a part of skydiving. It essentially is skydiving just with a suit on that essentially turns into a hard wing, but all of the same gear is utilized as in a normal skydive with a tight suit, and then when you put on a wingsuit.
Now, I know a lot of wingsuiters who fly through the mountains. It's not that they just get there and jump and there's a guy capturing it. There are many hours and days and days and days and days that they train there to be able to do that. It is a very high-risk scenario. I choose not to place myself in that environment, but I have a lot of friends who do that. I choose—and have always been passionate about—two things. One is still wearing wingsuits but going outside of from an airplane, as well as potentially base jumping off of buildings and other things. But primarily I stay to jumping outside of an airplane.
I mean, I grew up—I'm the son of a filmmaker. So I grew up with cameras in my hand, and I still have all of these toys. And for me, like, I always love being able to bring an experience to life for others, I think which is where my work and my career sort of comes in in content and brand marketing. And so I've always focused on flying a camera. And yes, to all the much, much, much better camera flyers than myself out there, you're all incredible. And in fact, they're more talented than—we say—than the actual skydivers that they're shooting, 'cause quite accurately, as Chris said, if you are skydiving this way and you have a camera flyer beside them with a camera, they not only have to also skydive and fly that way, but they also have to know where the camera's pointed to capture the shot. It is definitely an exciting skill to add on top of being a skydiver.
Chris (20:20): It's reminiscent—Tom Cruise is back in the news recently with the new Top Gun and everyone talking about, "Isn't it incredible that Tom Cruise does all his stunts?" But again, what we don't realize is the full team of people and all the orchestration that goes to, "Hey, sit here and do this." There's obviously a lot of bravery to put yourself in that position, but tons of professionals who make it happen, who are the real stuntmen, the real performers.
Cameron, I'd love to bring this to the ground. So your alter-ego, you are now a competitive athlete, a triathlete. How did you end up running your first Iron Man? I know this is a really fun story. Let's start there.
Cameron (21:07): So, the pandemic happened, and it affected so many people in so many different ways. It was a time where participating in sports like skydiving were not only not an option, but there becomes a challenge and there became one very quickly, in how to stay connected to that community. By nature, skydiving is a sport that you travel around the world to do. Very seldom do I do it in my backyard, not even literally but within the state of New York. One of the joys is to travel to really wonderful destinations, so I have cultivated friendships in many countries. And so the pandemic made it very hard to stay connected to that community, but that desire to have experiences that still test our abilities and to continue to build both soft and hard skills never went away.
And there was a void. There was a void for two years. And as we were slowly coming out of the pandemic, I was at someone's birthday weekend, someone who I'd recently met, her and her husband and her daughter. Her name is Alexandra. She has a wonderful husband and adorable daughter. And the group that had assembled for this weekend to celebrate her birthday, the morning after sort of the big celebration everybody sort of woke up and there was Alexandra with this Iron Man hat on and all of this gear and she goes, "All right, we're going for a run." And I'm thinking, "Okay, cool. I'm physically active. Like, I'm up for this. Like, yeah." She says, "We're doing three miles." Well, three miles to me sounded perfect. Like that's tough. Three miles, that's thirty minutes of running. And we did the three miles, and she goes, "Great, we're doing three more. Six miles." I was like, "Are you crazy? Six miles? I mean, that's sixty minutes of running." I hadn't done that since I was like twelve years old, thirteen years old. Actually, I don't even know if I had ever done that. Well, I had. But it had been many years.
And then after five of the people in this run fell off, and I was like the last man standing and we finally finished, and then she went on to run another mile and came back. And she came back and I said, "Whoa, where does this come from?" And she said, "Hey, everybody, let's do yoga." I was like, "Wow. If only I could." And I felt alive and energized, because all of that was very challenging for me, and there was a point at which she—I don't remember the context, but she looked at me and said, "Hey, I'm doing a half Iron Man in less than three months. Come do it with me in Arizona." And the first thing I say is, "What's an Iron Man?" Once she explained it to me, I said, "Wait a minute, that's the thing where you do the swim, the bike, and the run, you go out and you rip the wetsuit." I was like, "This sounds awesome. How difficult is it?"
And she goes, "I have a feeling you can do it." And I say, "Well, I hope it's challenging." And she goes, "I think it's gonna be challenging." I said, "Okay, in that case, count me in. I'm in, I'm not gonna say no, I will show up, who's the best coach in New York City to get me to where I need to be in less than three months?" And she told me, and I went to see this coach who I later learned coaches the number one nationally-ranked team in the United States with four national championships and thirty-six team championships, it's crazy. And I didn't know this even when I started, but I went and I swam with him for a day and I did something else for a day, and he said, "So, tell me why you wanna train with us," I said, "I wanna do a half Iron Man in less than three months," and he said, "You're crazy," I said, "Yep."
I guess it was the first time in two or three years that I saw this challenge in front of me, almost like when I started skydiving. There was a lot of enthusiasm that I felt very, very quickly for something that seemed out of my reach or out of the reach, and then I knew if I told other people I was doing this, they'd go, "You're crazy." But I mean, I've spent all these years as a skydiver believing that the extraordinary is not only within our capacity, but the more that you do something, the extraordinary actually becomes something ordinary. And this idea of to me now skydiving is normalized in my life. If someone says, "Whoa, you go skydiving," I'm like, "Yeah, that's like the entry point. To jump out of an airplane. In that community."
And I just found myself kind of like that first day in skydiving with this opportunity, and I could sense that a tremendous amount of growth would come from it and that perhaps it was another journey like before, and another love and passion that I might develop. So the goal immediately when I started was, "You have a race in three months. It is a 70.3 mile race. It could take you anywhere from six to eight hours." And when I learned two weeks later that like, you don't even stop at an outhouse to go to a bathroom in that time, you just go, I knew that this was a journey to do something extraordinary, but that if I worked hard at it eventually it would be something normal. And that excited me.
Chris (26:09): So this is a total zero-to-sixty in three months. Tell us about that early training. What was it like working with your coach?
Cameron (26:19): It's now been just about a year, and as a skydiver, there are not too many ways that you can communicate—Or I shouldn't say that. I should say when you communicate with another person as a skydiver, you can't use your voice, because the wind is between you and the other person. And so you develop other ways of communicating, both through facial expressions, through hand gestures. You might say "relax," you might say, "How do you like it?" But it's that smile so that people know that you're really having a good time. Or you might say, "Relax." But you've learned new ways of communicating. And so too becomes what happens in the world of triathlon. And I began coaching and sort of brought a lot of those skills into the world of triathlon.
And immediately I knew from my own experience that I was actually going to be on a very specific journey, because I had chosen a goal in a very short period of time that is not—To perform well requires actually more time and training, to actually perform at my best. My goal was not to perform at my best, my goal was to cross the finish line. So the capacity that you build in yourself and that your coach builds in you is different than if you said, "I'm giving you a year and I want to start to be a great triathlon competitor." He would actually train you very differently. He would build base skills, fundamentals, grow you from there, and sort of build layer upon layer upon layer. But I came in and I said, "You don't have that. You've gotta just take me, go like this, and then spit out something that's gonna cross the finish line."
And so the skills that he had to build were—perhaps he had to fast-track my mental skills. He had to fast-track certain things that—He had to sort of determine what performance level was attainable, and then how do I push him to perform his best within sort of that segment of ability. But in reality, had I said, "You have six months," instead of three, he might have been able to get me here. And so I went to compete, but before the three months ended and going into the week before the race I felt very confident in my ability to finish, in my ability to perform, and my ability to accomplish the goal that I set out to accomplish.
Chris (28:08): So, this was your first major race. Perhaps your first race total. You're going in there a little bit green. Some of that naïveté was probably helping you. What was unexpected about the race, or what's something that as outsiders we would never guess about running a half Iron Man?
Cameron (29:19): I think one thing just right off the bat that you would never guess is how many people to your left and to your right actually participate in the sport of triathlon and actually participate in long-course triathlon and Iron Mans. I'm completely blown away. I used to think that it was a very far, distant person who was not the person next door, and I was amazed and excited to find that people everywhere participated in endurance sports, and it's really, really not just exciting but reassuring. But I think the one thing that I didn't expect was I was very prepared mentally for suffering. It's something that I had not dealt with as a skydiver, but I had learned through my coach—or been taught, I shouldn't say "learned" 'cause I had yet to experience it—but I had been told and sort of prepared for this idea that I would experience a great deal of suffering, and that the body can actually tolerate more suffering than the mind. It's actually the mind that doesn't want to tolerate the suffering. We actually think it's the body, but your body can tolerate a lot more suffering than your mind wants you to tolerate. And this is something that I've learned, and is a constant battle for me. That's actually the battle that I go to fight every single time I race, now.
And I found that everything goes according to plan until it doesn't. Very similar to skydiving. Everything goes according to plan, in skydiving, usually the second you get out. Then the plan's gone.
But I found that the first two-thirds of the race I was feeling great, everything was good, it was exactly as we had talked about and we had simulated and we had worked through in my nutrition plans and I was hydrating at the right times and I said, "I'm gonna do this. And actually, I think I'm gonna be fine when I'm done with this." And it was like, "No problem, I got this." And then it was exactly like mile four of the run, which is probably four hours into the race, or five hours into the race, at which my body completely shut down.
Now, I didn't know why, because so much of our time that we had had been spent building basic skills. "How do you swim?" Actually. Like, really. I had never been in a lap pool before. So, how do you swim? I knew from skydiving that I had a really great ability to mimic technique. That's one of the things I learned about myself, is that if you show me how the body should do something as a skydiver, you have to be very exact and very precise. And so I said, "This is what I can bring to the table. If you can demonstrate things for me, I can mimic them incredibly well. That's what I'm sharing with you, I think, is a sort of superpower that I have to accelerate getting me where you want to be." I offered that up. And so we focused on these. He said, "Great, I'm gonna take that, I'm gonna take this, I'm gonna prepare you for pain, and this is really great."
Everything goes great until it doesn't. And so I found myself, all of a sudden my whole body shut down, and I didn't know why. And I didn't know why because I had very limited experience and knowledge to pull from, even today. I now understand the difference between things like aerobic and anaerobic and Vo2 max and strategy for a race, but I'm still so early on in this game. It's only been a year in this sport. In the time since that race and this, I've learned now a lot of the causation of things. But I didn't know why I was experiencing these symptoms, and the only thing I had to rely on was simply my mind. And for these additional eight miles, I had to psychologically find a way to move my body for eight more miles. I have more tools in my toolkit today than I did then, but it surely was the first time that I was faced with, "How much do you want to accomplish something?" It's not just great I have the skill and I can do it, but do you really, really, really, really, really want this? Because the pain that you are enduring was unimaginable to me. And it turns out that when you want something bad enough, you can increase your chance of succeeding and accomplishing that so many-fold beyond what you think is possible.
And in my case, I did finish. Today now I take my hat off, because there are tens of thousands of people who do this all of the time. So that is the one thing that I was most surprised by, is the mental challenge that I would have to face.
Chris (33:46): Tell us about this mental battle. What are the arguments that you were facing to stop, to give up, to slow down, and what's your self-talk? How are you bringing things back to keep putting that one foot in front of the other?
Cameron (34:02): I think there's two—Now this is just for me, everyone I think develops their own approach. I mean, it's through testing and learning that you really find what does motivate you. What motivates me today in confronting these very big challenges and seeing if I can get myself there quickly, those are things that really stem from growing up, and it has really fueled my participation and my love for things like this, but why I challenge myself. But ultimately, there are two things that motivate me in a race. One of them is more the skydiver mentality. Everything you do matters. Certain things matter more, certain things matter less, certain things you should prioritize more. But in a triathlon race, truly every second matters. I've lost positions in finishing races by two seconds in a two-hour race, I've lost a podium position by fifteen seconds in a one-hour race. And these are different length races, still swim/bike/run. I have missed qualifying for something by a minute and eight seconds.
Well, let's break down a race really quickly. A triathlon is swim, then you bike, then you run. You do not stop. You transition your equipment, your gear, and your—In between each. So you will do a swim, you will go into an area, it is still being timed, you will take off your wetsuit, you will put on your biking gear, you will not even take time to put on socks. You will go bike, you will come back, you will take that off, you will put your running shoes on, then you will go run, then you will cross the finish line. You can lose eight seconds by putting socks on.
So, if we do the math, I've already shared with you three races that I would have performed better at had I not put socks on. Just that simple thing. Right? Literally not putting socks on in a race. There are some people who have their shoes already clipped into their bike, because it takes too much time to put those shoes on. And so as you begin to break a race down, "I hit this hill, I slowed down, I didn't hit my fifteen-second mark," you realize that those two seconds, three seconds, five seconds, eighteen seconds could have been made up had you not taken your foot off the gas here, here, and here.
And you don't know as you're going through this race how much time you need to save, because you also don't know how much time you're losing. And so you're really—In this sport, seconds matter. And every opportunity you have to pick up time, you want to pick up that time.
I'm going into—On Sunday I'll be competing in, as you mentioned, the Long Course National Championships. There is a clear strategy that we've developed over looking at everybody's times from last year as well as who everybody is racing, with all of the variables of the terrain and four thousand feet of elevation, exactly if I perform a certain way in the bike how fastly do I need to get through that transition? Do I have time to take an extra gel pack with me, or take a sip of water even, or do I need to make sure I get on that bike and hit a certain time?
And so these are all things that you're faced with in this sport. And so that's one part of this psychology, which is everything matters.
I think the second one really is, "Why do you do this?" The "why." Like, what drives you to compete, and if you're driven to compete, for me it's a sense of accomplishment. For me it is every time I do a race, how much better am I doing, how much harder am I pushing myself? And that's my affirmation in life that I carry into my work and my personal life.
Chris (37:37): Incredible. You mention your superpower of mimicking technique. And I wanna leverage your superpower for a minute. Could you give us a quick crash course on proper technique? I assume that when I'm in a pool, when I'm running, I'm doing things completely wrong. What are the common mistakes that people make when they're doing these aspects of a triathlon?
Cameron (38:04): Because I'm not an expert in the sport of triathlon yet by any measure—The great thing about this sport is that it's done by age group, so it really is a lifelong pursuit. I mean, if you don't mind I would love to teach you something about skydiving, because I can do that in a skydiving world that I think is much more relatable to people today. If that's okay, can we use that as our example?
Chris (38:25): Sure.
Cameron (38:26): Okay, great. So, when you're in the sky, and if you've ever seen a wind tunnel, like the iFLYs, that is a replication of the sky. A wind tunnel is a tube, and the wind comes from the ground vertically up, and you float in it. This is very similar to being on the highway at ninety miles an hour. You stick your hand out the car window and you sort of turn your hand and, whoa? All of a sudden your hand flies. That's aerodynamics. That is what happens in the sky. In the sky, it's about a hundred and forty miles an hour. You know, wind tunnel, iFLY, it's about—It can be anywhere from like eighty-five to a hundred twenty, hundred and thirty miles an hour. So it's a very good replication of the sky, and it's where sometimes we'll train and do a lot of things. But the form that you develop as a skydiver is very similar to gymnastics. How you are positioned with that hand outside of the car, imagine now trying to do somersaults outside of that car at ninety miles an hour. How do you do that? It's years and years and years of training.
So what are some sort of examples that I can help explain? There is a position in skydiving called "sit flying." Now, I'm in a chair here, and if I just raise my hands imagine that I'm sitting and so my legs go out and down, and there's surface area here. This is all surface area. As I'm in the sky going down, wind is gonna hit here and it's not gonna hit here. And this is surface area. Now, if I want to balance myself in the sky, I want to capture the same amount of wind on one side as I do on the other. And I wanna do it symmetrically. And that will keep me balanced.
That is a pretty tall order. Not only, though, do I have to catch the wind here, but I'm catching it underneath my legs, because my legs don't have a seat below them. So what do you think happens if my hands—And I'm gonna sort of just fake this. What do you think happens if we're not sit flying, you and I, straight down, and I decide to go like this with one leg? Do you think that it's going to change our position, or my position?
Well, I'm no longer symmetrically like this. And if I did this, what do you think if I did that? Do you think that perhaps wind might catch this part of my hand and turn me a hundred eighty degrees or even three hundred sixty degrees? The answer to that question is "yes."
So, to give you one more example. To get in this position, a "forward drive," you can actually do this. You can move yourself forward while being in a seated position of skydiving. It's crazy. I mean, it's so much fun to learn this stuff. So, to drive myself forward, you do more than just capture wind on your arms and on the underside of your legs. You actually capture wind right here, and you actually capture wind right here in the small of your back. And so if I want to drive forward, all I have to do is move my chin forward about one inch and I will no longer capture the wind here, and I will drive completely forward.
If I want to move backwards in a seated position, I will move my chin backwards, and I will capture more wind here on the back of my head and it will drive me backwards.
And so these little movements of adjusting my head like this and of my hands and adjusting a hand position this way or that way will completely change the trajectory of my body. And so these details matter so much that sometimes we even focus on, is our toe pointing this way or is our toe pointing this way?
So when you think about how much control you develop over your body, it's a lateral move to then go into another sport and say, "Show me what I need to do with my body." Because you've spent all of these years building a skill to control all of the little parts of your body.
Chris (42:28): I can see how that would be really transferable as a superpower, where if you can be shown where your body needs to be, being able to do that and thus putting yourself in that position you can internalize what it feels like to replicate it.
So, we've been talking about the last miles of your first race, overcoming this mental battle, managing to finish. You've put three months of insane effort—I think there's no other way of putting it—to finishing something, to prove that you can do it. And you finished the race, you crossed the finish line. What happened next?
Cameron (43:12): Well, the first thing I did was someone came over to me and said, "You ever gonna do that again?" I said, "Absolutely not." And then a day later I was singing a different tune.
It was tough. After that race, I suffered from depression. I became very depressed. It was probably a three-month period of the least amount of activity and social engagement that I had done in a while. And this was coming out of COVID, so I don't say that lightly, but I became very introverted and very depressed.
Chris (43:44): And how did you start to pull yourself out of it? What do you attribute that feeling to?
Cameron (43:50): I had this exciting goal, which for me was, again, to push the boundaries that I had placed in front of myself, that we all place in front of ourselves, and achieve something that I felt was achievable. And it was a huge goal, and it meant so much the moment that I crossed the finish line. I mean, I was crying tears of happiness as I crossed the finish line. I really felt like, "See, there's nothing I can't do. There's nothing I can't do. Like, bring it on. There's nothing I can't do in my life." It may take me a lot longer to get there than I wanted to—It's such a confidence builder. And you feel like you can take down mountains. And put in me what you want to, I'm not gonna shy away from it.
But then that goal goes away. The race is over, there is no more mountain to climb, what you came here to do is done, and there's nothing left. And so I didn't know how to deal with that. I didn't have the tools to deal with that, and I had never been faced with that.
And worse, everyone thinks that you're okay. You've just shown that you are someone who can tackle these obstacles. And now instantly you are someone who is being impacted and you've completely fallen off the mountain, immediately.
It was very hard to admit to anyone that while I had just done this thing that I was so proud of, I also was the next day very lost and I needed help. And I didn't know how to communicate that to anybody.
Chris (45:21): It's wild. It's an aspect of high-performance and being a high performer that I don't think gets talked about often enough, because there is this culturally reinforced "put your head down and do what's necessary to finish, to ship." And you know, you put years into your startup and you finally exit for millions of dollars, or you have this dream to produce this film and you finally watch it on the big screen. And you know, achieving this dream that you weren't even sure that you would ever finish and it's there in front of you, the accomplishment has occurred, no one can take that away from you. And just the question of, "Okay, what's next?" And that's a real struggle that I have seen with clients and friends who've had the real luxury of experiencing wild success, but usually coming back to earth very much so after that and having to face the question of, "Well, I know I can do anything now. I did this thing that I didn't even know if I would be capable of. What do I want to do now?" That's such a big question to face, and it can certainly be paralyzing.
You mentioned this three-month period of really processing, that, hey. You've proven to yourself that you can do the extraordinary. That you are not ordinary after all. How did things shift for you? This was a year ago. You're prepping for a race that I know you know you're going to finish, that's no question. You are competing, you are trying to be in the top eighteen of a pretty large and talented field. What changed for you in terms of why you showed up to practice, why you continue to put in that work?
Cameron (47:20): I really have to credit my coach Scott Berlinger. He's a phenomenal coach, and he's been doing this a long time. He's helped so many people achieve extraordinary things as triathletes and as swimmers and as runners and as bikers. I can't say enough good things. I think he understood something that I didn't at the time, and he had experience with something I didn't at the time, that I was going through. And the goal that I had, the accomplishment that I had, was something that I had planned for and I had decided on, and I wanted to unlock the potential that I knew I had. And so there was an element and an aspect of Scott helping me accomplish something that I felt was in my reach but I needed his help to do that. I needed him to help me build the skills to do that thing that I knew I could do.
But I hadn't fallen in love with the sport, I'd fallen in love with that goal. And I think what he's helped me realize is there's a lot more things and abilities that I have that I don't see that he could unlock. And so he said, "Just come back to practice. Just come. Keep coming, keep coming, keep coming. You know you're going to hate it, keep coming, keep coming, keep coming." And somewhere around two and a half months—fortunately, it was down season—so when the season started picking back up I reluctantly would come and do practices and do practices and do practices. And I didn't have a goal of my own, but slowly he started unlocking potential that I had that I wasn't even aware of. And all of a sudden my mile time goes from ten minutes to nine minutes to eight minutes to seven minutes to six minutes. My last running race, which was—actually, during a triathlon I competed in the Short Course National Championships. There's more than one national championship, there's Short Course, Long Course, and a few others. But I competed earlier in the year in the Short Course National Championships, I went from like a 9:30 minute mile pace to, in the national championships, running a 5:58 per mile pace.
Chris (49:21): Absurd.
Cameron (49:22): And so I didn't even know I could run until he unlocked this potential. He not only showed me that there a lot more goals that I could have that would excite me, and a lot more opportunities to challenge myself beyond that one. That that is not the end-all be-all. You can tell yourself it is the end-all be-all, but it is not. There are always ways, if you fall in love with the sport and the journey, there are so many exciting things to challenge yourself with. And I hadn't been open to that in those first three months. There also wasn't time to be. And then slowly he started showing it to me and he started unlocking potential that I had never unlocked before, and I really fell in love with the journey of being a triathlete and the endless opportunities you have to test yourself, to race, to build new skills. And what I love most about the sport is, is that you never age out of the sport. Because it is competitively done by age groups, there are amazing competitors who are fifty, sixty, seventy years old. And so I feel very fortunate to have found something I love doing, that I can build skills in, that I can test myself in, and that I can push myself in, and there will always be a place for me competitively until I choose to stop doing the sport.
Chris (50:39): That's phenomenal. I really like the way that you've described the impact that working with a great coach had on your performance. It's something that I see in my work. I think there's a big misnomer that the role of a coach is to help someone improve. And the way that you put it was, "unlocking someone's potential." I see it as, like, we already have what we need. It's just a matter of accessing it. And having someone to cast that mirror on yourself to show you what's there but you don't yet have the capacity to see in yourself. That process of really tight feedback and having someone who sees that potential to bring it out in you—this is just so invaluable.
I would love to hear about your experiences competing with the Full Throttle team. There's something that we say often here at Forcing Function, that the greats come up together. That several of the members of your team are world-class athletes, people who are on the podium time after time. How has that encouraged you, allowed you to be better, bring out this full potential to be swimming, biking, running alongside this team?
Cameron (52:04): I'm so happy you asked about the team, because I really have become so fond of it in such a short period of time. Full Throttle is a team of seventy-five to a hundred athletes all who train together on a daily basis. We train out of Chelsea Piers in New York City, which is our home facility. It's a hundred and fifty thousand square foot facility that has a six-lane twenty-five-yard pool, quarter-mile indoor track, a dozen trainers, indoor cycling rooms, it's really a phenomenal place. And we all come together every morning at 5:45 AM and 8:00 AM sessions to train together, and we train five, six days a week together. These are people that you'd see every single day, from—they work in finance, they work in sports, they work in arts and entertainment. They still come together every single day to work on this together as a community.
And we say, "We train together, we race together." And this is a really big part of, I think, the community of Full Throttle, is the first real core value that I felt is, everyone belongs here. This is a place for everybody, whether you are a beginner like I was, you're a first-time competitor, you are a national competitor, or you are a world championship competitor.
There are currently eleven members of Team USA that train on Full Throttle for team national championships, actually thirty-nine team championships now. It's really a phenomenal team, but there is something to be said for coming together to train and the impact that that has on the skills that you build and the community that you forge and the confidence that you have in yourself when you go to race.
Chris (53:52): Talk to me about that, in terms of this sense of community. Why is it so important?
Cameron (53:57): Well, community has always been an important thing for me. It's always something that I've looked for. It's one of my five core values in my life, is community. In business, we talk about feedback loops. For me, community is an always-on feedback loop of how I live my life. It is an always-on feedback loop, and we tend then to seek out those whose values we aligned with, and I've grown up loving sharing journeys with people. For me, the sense of accomplishment is more exciting and more enjoyable when I have that experience with someone else, when I share that with someone else. But also it's that people in your community—It's a support structure in sports like this that are really, really important to have. Because like in all things, in life and in sports, you are gonna have good moments and you are gonna have challenging moments and you're gonna have great experiences and you're gonna have difficult experiences.
And I think that when you're connected to a community, it's a place where you can build skills, you can build relationships, but you also can tap into institutional knowledge. You have a support structure to help you deal with whether there are great challenges or difficult things. And there will be times when the training is very hard, and there will be times when you wanna give up, and there will be races when you wanna stop, and there will be races that you wanna celebrate, and all of that I find you perform better when you are a part of a community. And so this is something that's really important at Full Throttle, is "we train together, we race together." Because we don't consider ourselves ever doing anything by ourselves.
Chris (55:40): I know a real big part of the training program at Full Throttle is using data and measurement to identify opportunities. What role has measurement and tracking progress played in the transformation that you've experienced as an athlete?
Cameron (55:58): Great question, and I think this is relevant across all sports and all aspects even of our lives is this concept of measurement and data. If we measure nothing, we learn nothing. It then becomes very qualitative assessments. Not quantitative. And in work, what does success look like in your work? Well, if you don't have a measurement framework, how do you know what success looks like, and how do you know what level of success you've achieved?
The same with skydiving. At the end of every skydive, "Guys, what is the skydive? What do we wanna accomplish on this skydive? Great, so what does success look like to us? How well do we all work together?" We get down to the bottom, "How did that go?" "It went great." "It didn't go great." "Great, let's assess." I think in the sport of triathlon and Full Throttle, data and testing becomes just as important, because this helps us understand where our thresholds are, it helps us push past blocks, it helps us gauge improvement, and at the end of the day—Look. One of the reasons I love racing is because it's pretty binary how you did. You placed, what you placed. You finished, you didn't finish, you came in first, you came in second, you came in third, or you didn't place. That in itself is a system of measurement. But when we look at data and this idea, something that I've really carried into the team, is this idea of like unlocking the value of the data that is invisible to you.
This is something that excites me more and more and more, in that I'm really working with a team and developing some of my own initiatives to really help us better unlock the data that's invisible to us all, and the same way that my coach unlocked these abilities that I had and wasn't aware, so too that must exist for everyone. And I believe even beyond what he can see. There must be hidden potential that we have yet to unlock. And for everybody, it's going to be something different. But the same way that you know, if we can add just two seconds to your performance in a one-hour race, Chris, that might be the difference between you being fourth place and you being on the podium. And we know that because it's happened, and it's happened to me many times.
Chris (58:13): Cameron, I have to put you on the spot here. This concept that is data that is invisible to us but could be the difference, talk to me about that. Like, what are we missing? We can talk about this in a performance context or a business context. Totally up to you.
Cameron (58:29): I'll let you take us down which of the two paths that you want. I don't know that I'm an expert in either one, it's actually—It's something that I've experienced and seen in all of the sports that I've done, and something that you accomplish something with a team, even in business, that was an incredible challenge, and you learn new things about yourself. It's something for those who are of a curious mind. I know that it exists. We've seen that it exists. So I don't have the answer for you, what this looks like, but I do know that for everyone—There's a saying that I have. Look, when I started in my pursuits, and we—you and I have talked about this recently. I used to think of what drove me was to take the ordinary and you know, accomplish the extraordinary. That everybody's ordinary but has the potential to be extraordinary.
But the more that we accomplish, we set goals and we take down barriers and we accomplish goals that are extraordinary in our mind, the more often we do that, the more that actually becomes normalized. If a skydiver comes over and says, "Hey, what'd you do today?" And I say, "I did a skydive," he's like, "That's it? All you did was a skydive?" But if I go to my friend and they say, "What did you do today?" "I went skydiving." And they're, "Oh my god, that's crazy! Like, you went skydiving?" And it's that through accomplishing and taking down these sort of barriers that we put in front of ourselves, the things that we tell ourselves are not attainable, the more that we begin to do that, the more that we normalize what we're capable of. It is not something extraordinary, but it is in fact normal.
So, too, in the sport of triathlon. Someone recently said, "Wow, that is so awesome you did a half Iron Man." And while I was very appreciative that that person wanted to share that sentiment with me, my thought was, "Well, actually, that's kinda just the entry point in this sport of four hundred thousand people." Right? There are four hundred thousand amateurs, ordinary, everyday people who go to work like me every single day. Four hundred thousand who are members of the USAT, who compete in short- and long-distance endurance sports. And to them, like, "You did a half Iron Man. That's great. What was your time?" is the first thing that they're gonna ask you. They're not gonna give you a pat on the back that you finished. They're gonna go, "Oh, what was your time?" And it's because that behavior of accomplishing a task like that to that community is normal, and it's become normalized.
Chris (01:00:55): I think that's an incredible point about redefining your sense of normal, that your environment, who's around you, what they reinforce, what they value. And this will become what you do, what you value, what you think of as just another day or a day of being extraordinary, taking on something extra-normal. So, if you—Perhaps if you're looking to better yourself or to see what that dormant potential looks like, it all begins with changing your surroundings and who you surround yourself with and being a part of a community where the definition of normal is different, where your definition will shift and thus what you see as attainable and just another day at the office will shift as well.
Cameron (01:01:56): Yeah. And that carries over, as it has for me, I believe it will for others, into every aspect of your life. When you approach your work, and I think this takes us back to where we began in our discussion, which is, "How does this connect to your work?" And I think these concepts have helped me tremendously. I wasn't as fortunate as others earlier on. I never had real mentors, I had to learn by doing. Never really took that much from college, I was a screenwriting major, and so I really had to learn by doing. But a lot of these principles that I learned in the sports world, I found the more that I started bringing them into my professional career, the better teammate I'd become, the better leader I'd become, the better performer I'd become. I do believe the better human I've become.
Chris (01:02:54): How have you been able to apply these principles from sports to the rest of your life?
Cameron (01:03:01): Well, I think the first is, is that you can't control everything. Right? There's a lot of things you can't control. There is no perfect scenario, I think is the way that I've looked at things. But we all experience in our life things that make us laugh, things that make us cry. We have moments we'll never forget, and we have moments that we can't wait to erase. These are all emotions that are part of being human and that are part of everyday life. It's the reality.
Now, some cultures celebrate the things that we don't, and for some, it's the opposite. No one is immune to any of it. And the reality is that, at some point, we will all experience things that are difficult for us, and other times we will experience things that make us happier than we ever imagined we could be. But what I always go back to then is no matter what it is that I'm faced with, I feel confident that I have the tools to confront what is in front of me and to get through it. And I've faced a lot of challenges, I've faced different points in my life where I was doing very well, I've faced other points in my life where I was not doing well and I was on the verge of being in really difficult positions on several occasions. Nothing that anybody's immune to. And I've always had to go back to what has become one of my mantras that I've developed over the years, which is, "Where I am at is not an indication of what I'm capable of in life."
And I think this is something that's really important that we tell ourselves, because we're so connected—There's such like a quid pro quo on what is identity. "Identity is what people see." Well, it's not what people see. It's where you are. And I mean that in a specific context. This idea that I am so much more than what is in front of you, where I am at in my life is not indicative of where I can be, and not to feel if things aren't going right in life, that—To see that as a negative, but to see it as, "Here is an opportunity for me to draw on the skills that I have to drive even further and to produce an even stronger outcome."
Chris (01:05:13): Something I think really wise that you said is, "Coming back to where I'm at." As you put it, that "where I'm at" does not indicate where my potential is, what I'm capable of. And I find that this is a long road of self-actualization, of realizing potential, and in order to finish the race, you have to stay in the race. And it's not a straight line. It's not just a quick path from A to B. There are many highs and lows along the way, and continuing to take that next step forward begins with an acknowledgement and awareness of where you're at.
I know personally when I've felt stuck, it usually comes with a denial of reality. A wishing things were different, but not being ready to acknowledge the way things are so that I can move forward. So that's something that I've seen with high performers that translates from something that they have a lot of success in, to other areas that maybe don't come as easy, is they start to recognize that, hey, not everything is going to come easy. I don't need to identify with someone who's great at everything, who always wins, who shows people far beyond what they expected of us. But the acknowledgement of, "here is where I am now" allows for the ability to identify that next step forward.
Cameron (01:06:48): Absolutely. Something that you said just gave me sort of a little flashback, which is why if we wanna bring this back to skydiving for a minute, this idea that, "I wanna quit." Well, as Steve Harvey has said, if you quit you'll never know whether or not you could have done it. That's one thing I love, is the motivation of Steve Harvey. But as a skydiver, we talk about all of these variables, and we've touched on a few. The wind changes at certain elevations, your plane's not in the right place, but there are other types of things that can happen during a skydive. Your parachute can not open the right way. In fact, it actually never opens the right way. There is always an adjustment that has to be made. But there are things that can go really wrong with how a parachute opens. You have the skills to deal with it, and you've been trained. They may not be life-threatening malfunctions, they are what we call slow-speed malfunctions, and they are manageable. Your line twists, could be completely twisted up, and you literally have this little—You don't even have full parachute, just a little twisted line. And you know how to deal with it.
But one thing that you learn very quickly you can't do is you can't just say, "I'm done," and walk away. That's the one thing you can't do.
And so I think that that has been a really strong tool, or that's been a really strong learning situation that I draw upon a lot, which is that so much of what I've done in athletics, you just can't walk away when shit gets tough. And so in life, as much as we want to click our heels together three times and say, "I wish I was somewhere else," the reality is that you're not somewhere else, you're exactly where you are. Life isn't happening to you, life is happening. And so do you trust that you have the skills—which you do, we all do—and the capacity to go that next step, given where you are right now. Well, of course. We all do.
Chris (01:08:45): I think, perhaps, all of us could use a little bit of a push these days. Maybe taking on a challenge to see what we're capable of. Cameron, if someone was listening to this and maybe they're hearing the message that perhaps I should take something on that I don't actually know I can finish or that I'm capable of or how I will do, what would you tell them in order to prepare for something like this, to take that leap?
Cameron (01:09:15): I think—First of all, call me. I'll do it with you. I don't have a problem with it. If you live in New York and you wanna come do a triathlon, you come train with us for a week, no problem. It's on us. Seriously. I don't care whether you've ever been in a pool before, it doesn't matter. It's a place for everyone.
So that's the first thing, is when I say everybody belongs here, open invitation.
But that's a great question. I think for everybody it might be something different, because we're all driven, you know, there are different things that interest us. But find something that you've told yourself a couple of times that, no, you couldn't do it, but deep down you know you wish you could. "I wish I could get on a horse and jump like other people that I know," or, "I wish I could do this but, I mean, it just seems too far away from me." Figure out what that thing is that you've told yourself you can't do it, or maybe now is the time to admit to yourself that you haven't done it because you told yourself you can't, and then give yourself a time limit. Give yourself an unreasonable time limit. If you think it's gonna take you six months to learn the skill to do that, give yourself three. If you think it's gonna take you three months, give yourself six weeks. Put a date on the calendar and commit to doing it.
And then figure out how to get it done. You'll figure out how to get it done and you'll move yourself forward, but the first thing you have to do is identify something that you in the past have told yourself, for whatever reason, you can't do. Then commit to doing it, and commit to doing it in half the time you think it's gonna take you. And the experience you will have over that period, I promise you, I promise you, you as an individual will grow in so many ways that you are aware of and then so many ways that you're not. You will build potential that you knew that you had that you now improve, and you will build potential in things that you never even knew you had. And then when you're done, pick something else. Or keep doing it. But that mindset of, I not only am capable of doing something, but now challenge yourself to do it in a reasonable amount of time, I think you'll surprise yourself what you're capable of.
Chris (01:11:28): Creating the opportunity for surprise. And it's in the name, Forcing Function. There is an inherent magic to committing to something ambitious, because you will find a way to do it. That first big step is always the hardest.
Cameron, I think that's a wonderful place to start to bring this to a close. I just want to acknowledge and thank you for sharing all the things that you've learned from your jumps, from your races, from your experiences of pushing yourself and finding out what you're capable of. I hesitate to use the word "inspiring," because I know what you do is normal and should be treated as such, but it's—to see the level of intention that you bring to what you do and the curiosity of who's going to show up and what's going to happen when I can't control everything, I think it's really—I really admire it, and it's been wonderful to hear more about what's happening on the inside. So, thank you.
Cameron (01:12:37): Thanks for having me, Chris.
Chris (01:12:28): Before I let you go, is there anything else that you'd like to share? Is there any place that you'd like to send those who might be listening who might wanna connect with you later?
Cameron (01:12:50): You're always welcome to find me through my website, cameronschiller.com, my Instagram (which is also @cameronschiller) are probably two of the best ways. I love hearing from people. Doesn't matter who people are, whether it's sports or whether it's other things, I love connecting with like-minded humans. And I'm very genuine when I say if you are in New York City or if you ever see Full Throttle at a race, come over to us, or call us, show up at training, and you can roll with us for a week, because really accomplishing extraordinary things is something we're all capable of doing and something that we invite everybody at all levels to come on that journey with us.
Chris (01:13:35): Thank you so much for joining us today, Cameron. See you all again soon.
Tasha (01:13:40): Thank you for listening to the Forcing Function Hour. At Forcing Function, we teach performance architecture. We work with a select group of twelve executives and investors to teach them how to multiply their output, perform at their peak, and design a life of freedom and purpose. Make sure to subscribe to Forcing Function Hour for more great episodes, or go to forcingfunctionhour.com to sign up for our newsletter so you can join us live.