Expert Series: Noah Hoffman on Attitude

Winning and losing with grace was a really hard lesson for me to learn. When I was young and not that young, when I was already competing at a professional level around the time of maybe I was 22, 23, 24 years old. I felt a need, when I crossed the finish line and wasn’t happy with my result to show everyone else that I wasn’t happy with my results. I felt like if they thought that, oh, I was okay with my poor performance, then I must not really care and not really want to be successful. And they would think less of me. So I would, in retrospect, I didn’t realize it at the time. I would literally put on a show and I would… To demonstrate that I was unhappy and this included throwing my equipment, this included storming out of the finish area, this included being super moody for one, two, three days after a race. Being negative, not being any fun to be around.

And it took my teammates conveying to me how harmful that behavior was for myself and for them. And it took years of it, years of making this mistake to really get the message that everybody knew based on the passion that I showed based on my work ethic, that I cared about what I was doing and I wanted to be successful. And they were way more proud of me when I handled myself with grace after a race than they would be if I was moody and trying to prove that I was unhappy. And this is something, this is maybe the biggest lesson of my career was, the way that I act is a reflection of me. And that includes after a great performance and after a poor performance and in the time before a race, when I’m nervous. All of the time, my actions matter and how I affect other people matters. And I am so proud of myself, even though it took way too long, that I finally learned the lesson of making a concerted effort of being positive after a race and how much that mattered to me and how the person that I wanted to be.