Champions are made in the off-season: Genuine ownership is your biggest form of leverage to get your further than you every thought possible
Your sense of ownership, how you spend your free time even when people are not looking, is one of the strongest determinants of your ability to get further than you ever thought possible.
“Champions are made in the off-season.”
As a long-distance runner in high school — training for Cross Country and Track & Field — I was obsessed about this quote. It was my mantra — passed down to me by a coach named Twiggs. As someone who came from an insanely un-athletic background (I got cut from the junior varsity badminton team…), only starting to run (or train for any sport, at that) my sophomore year of high school, but with the ambition of being faster than those who had spent many more years of training than me — I only had one choice: to be a workhorse. During the gap of time between Cross Country and Track when most people took a bit of a break, I religiously joined the “veterans” after school and on weekends — panting hard through their easy runs and trying to keep up as much as I could. I took the summers to attempt to outwork everyone — running 50 miles a week my first summer and 100 miles a week my second summer. Bret Izzo and I woke up at 5AM to get a few miles in — even when we had season going on.
All of this training got me from literally one of the slowest runners on the team to someone who represented our varsity team as the second fastest runner in my senior year of high school. Maybe it wasn’t so impressive when you look at the caliber of athletes that exist in the world — but those 3 years taught me a very important lesson: if you wanted to be great, you couldn’t just rely on “training when you’re required to train”. The seasons would get you fast — but what really made you take leaps in your ability was what you did outside. The extra miles you put in, the strength training you did, the work that you put in for your nutrition and mindset — those were what separated the people who just were “good” vs. those who were “great”. No one told me to wake up at 5AM, people told me to relax and just chill out during weekends when I needed to wake up early to train, and my parents even thought I was crazy and too restrictive in my life. No one understood it. But for me — this intense focus and ownership was my true joy. For me, it represented the purest form of purpose.
I was reflecting upon this because although I wasn’t a competitive athlete anymore, this lesson reflects much of my fundamental belief about how the world works beyond — and what it means to truly strive to be the best you can be in your respective fields. I’m not saying that this mindset is for everyone. I completely respect how others view the world — but this is just how my own brain works. For me, I’ve seen how a sense of ownership takes you further than you otherwise thought was possible. I’ve seen how ownership makes you driven beyond belief, and how it makes you able to form great communities that believe in the same goals. I’ve seen how ownership changes your life for the better. For me — I could never see a world again where I did not have an intense sense of ownership for the things that I did.
Personally, this principle of ownership is why I love building and creating new projects — and why I have worked on Cornerstone religiously for the past 2 years even when balancing a consulting job at Bain in supposedly the most “intense” practice (our private equity ring-fence). It’s why I left Bain to join GovTech Edu after realizing that I had a much higher ceiling than I was letting myself reach because the consulting job did not tap into my sense of deep ownership. To get to a sense of genuine and intense ownership is different between everyone — and represents a true form of understanding of the “self”. You can’t just choose what someone does and believe that you can somehow find a sense of genuine ownership over it — because the truth is, it just may not suit you. As Naval mentions in his articles on wealth creation:
“Then the last kind of luck is the weirdest, hardest kind. But that’s what we want to talk about. Which is where you build a unique character, a unique brand, a unique mindset, where then luck finds you. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.”
You can spot this in people that are intensely great at what they do. One person from Bain who is constantly rated a top-performer (and people can truly see how frickin’ good he is at his craft) spends his weekends reading analyst reports, dissecting trends across sectors, and poring over books about micro/macro-economics. It’s his happy spot — people may think he’s crazy and overworks himself — but that’s genuinely what he finds true ownership and “self” in. This guy spends his time outside of work to do what some people may deem “more work”. But to him — that’s what he personally finds fulfillment in. What he does outside of work and what he personally finds deep ownership at makes him great at his craft. I deeply respect this guy.
After watching this guy do his thing and reflecting on my principle of ownership — I realized that consulting was never going to imbue into me a deep sense of ownership (no matter how much I wanted it to). I felt it in certain projects — where it touched upon certain sectors I was deeply interested in (in particular, AI and e-grocery). In these projects, I spent my weekends and my free time doing things I didn’t need to: deeply absorbing competitive landscapes and points of differentiation through podcasts and articles. This knowledge and ownership — I noticed — were the things that truly created a differentiated impact in the project vs. me just doing things that were assigned. But this sense of ownership quickly went away when I landed into yet another project in another sector that I could not give two personal damns about. In those projects I just did what was needed to keep going. I could definitely be “good enough” to keep getting promoted, but I was never going to be one of the greats and truly call it my craft. And for me — as I mentioned, I never wanted to be doing something where I didn’t feel that everyday.
But what was it that I noticed myself doing in my free time — even things that were “useless” to my job at Bain? Well, beyond working on Cornerstone and deeply being passionate about the education sector — I was spending my time reading and learning deeply about technology and product management. I spent weekends taking extracurricular courses in AI Development, blockchain development, and reading books about continuous discovery, product leadership, man-months, systems, and data instrumentation. In an optional “advanced analytics” training course at Bain — I clearly differentiated myself in ability compared to my peers because this was just something I did in my free time. None of this was information that was needed in my job — but I just naturally gravitated towards it and spent my free time doing it. It’s what made me “happy”. It was where my sense of ownership laid, and that’s what makes me the person I am. No one could replicate this sense of ownership. But Bain would never put me in a position where I could capitalize on this ownership as leverage for myself. Realizing this was the ultimate wake-up call to leave — despite the fact that being at Bain was a prestigious job that people respected, that I would learn a lot in my job undoubtedly, and that it was a firm full of smart and fun people.
Now — I am a month into my new job and have the ability to reflect and synthesize. What I realize is this: my fire is burning insanely bright, and I’m realizing that who I am at my core is deeply aligned to what the work at GovTech Edu allows me to do. My intense passion for education, technology, data, and product — and all the time that I spend in this space even outside of work — allows me to bring valuable nuances and insights in thought to the conversations and a deep energy to my work even as someone who is relatively (if not, extremely) young in my career. Everything I do and learn outside of work tremendously relates to my actual work — and hence allows me to not just dwindle on theory, but also to think of “what’s beyond” (beyond whatever leadership recommends to do), experiment and refine my hypotheses and mental models — making me a stronger person in what I do in the long term.
I have to use what I learned outside of work and inside of work, do independent analyses and insights generation through conversations with team members, and apply it across a Product tribe to to help define and shape a strong vision and product strategy that tackles existing gaps we have. The language I use and how I gain “buy-in” across the team for why this work is important isn’t just “because this is what our boss wants”. I can articulate our “why” in a very clear way — because these are things that I’ve deeply thought of and foundations I’ve built through my sense of ownership beyond just delivering outputs. Although it’s still very early — I can see how this already is playing a role in how people trust me: how people beyond my original team are starting to include me as a key member in their discussions, and as a thought-partner in refining thinking.
In building our Product Operations practice, I don’t just look on Google to analyze what other companies do in terms of their processes and structures, and just replicate it word for word. Using that sense of ownership, I take it upon myself to build relationships with PM’s, designers and engineers to understand where they perceive the greatest challenges for them lay — and use the “language” that I’m continuing to build outside of work to help bridge the divide between various functions and connect the dots (even if the concepts involve very technical lingo that requires me to spend time reading up on). Again, this sense of ownership leads me to think about outcomes beyond my job scope, and build trust across cross-functional stakeholders. It would be impossible if I just relied on work as work to learn. Below is an example of a conversation I had with an engineer when we were discussing building effective data infrastructure:
But as I mentioned with the Bain guy who has differentiated himself significantly due to his sense of deep ownership — this doesn’t feel like work for me. I deeply care for what I do, and these are all things that I noticed myself gravitating towards even when I wasn’t in this job. I have SO much fun thinking about various product, policy and technology concepts, reading up on articles, and figuring out how to tease out the first principles in order to apply to the work that we do now. I’ll debate and converse about this thinking with best buds like Madeleine Setiono — as we spend the night arguing about the utility of continuous user discovery vs. hypothesis-driven thinking and which one is more dangerous when used wrongly and which one is more relevant as a skillset to build. As a result, I feel like I’ve personally learned more, enjoyed more, and grown more this month than any other month that I’ve had in my previous job. And this is just from an ownership angle — I haven’t even really counted in the fact that my colleagues are some of the most mission-driven people I’ve ever met in my life and that my direct co-workers on my team (Rangga, Claire, Zahra, Budi) are people that inspire me to be my best.
To repeat my main point in the article: genuine ownership is your biggest form of leverage to reach new heights. If you’re able to tap into this — you will realize that you will grow much faster and more intentionally than you ever have before.
I also want to say that this type of mindset may not be for everyone, and I acknowledge that some may not feel that this is applicable to them. I completely respect that. To some — a job is just a job and a means to an end — and that’s 100% OK. In this case, you can definitely apply these ownership principles while you’re in the job by being perceptive and pushing yourself to take ownership for outcomes vs. simply just outputs — and you don’t have to necessarily spend time outside doing additional things.
For me, this genuine ownership is necessary for me to have in everything that I do. As I mentioned previously — it pushes me to be better, it makes me happier and more fulfilled, and it allows me to find a community of people that align with similar beliefs. I can’t really go back. For those of you of who these principles resonate with but are either not sure where your “sense of ownership lies” or maybe are stuck in a position where you may not be tapping into this sense of genuine ownership, I recommend the following:
Spend more time listening and reflecting about yourself and what drives you,
Listen to what your gut tells you,
Know that many things in our modern world are not as risky as they seem to be
And that you can never really go wrong by following through in things that you can have a genuine sense of ownership on as our modern world values differentiation in perspectives / thought.
Thanks for reading! :)
Peace,
Nathan Gunawan