Hard Pivot

Embrace Change. Find Purpose. Show Up Fully.

By: Apolo Ohno

Narrated by: Apolo Ohno

Length: 4 hrs and 25 mins

Publisher's summary

Apolo Ohno shares his most valuable lessons for overcoming challenges with resilience, creativity, and purpose.

In speed skating, a hard pivot is an aggressive shift of direction that requires courage, practice, and split-second timing. For Apolo Ohno, the most frightening hard pivot of his life didn’t happen on the ice—but rather, when he had to hang up his skates for good. “After my final Olympics, I felt confused, vulnerable, and adrift without purpose,” he says. “Yet that’s when I realized my experiences had given me something much more valuable than medals and memories. I had tools I could use to shift my life in a new direction—and most importantly, these were tools anyone could benefit from.”

With Hard Pivot, Apolo combines practical guidance, personal stories, and deep insights from the psychology of success into a resource to help you through challenging times. Here he shares his most valuable lessons and tools, condensed into the Five Golden Principles:

• Gratitude: A daily practice to help you maintain perspective, cultivate empathy, and alleviate stress
• Giving: How to elevate your life’s purpose by offering your time, attention, and resources to others
• Grit: Exercises to build mental stamina, resilience, and toughness to persevere through hard times
• Gearing Up: Ways to prepare yourself to meet the unknown with flexibility and grace
• Go: Develop the courage to take risks, learn from success and failure, and come back stronger

When life drastically changes—whether by choice or circumstance—the hardest part is often letting go of what was familiar and stable. Yet in Hard Pivot, Apolo provides the tools and inspiration to create a new life filled with greater purpose, wisdom, and joy. “You can trust yourself,” he says. “You can lean into the curve, pick up momentum, and speed down the track to success. In that pivotal moment, you might even find that you’re having the most fun you’ve ever had. You’re in flow. You’re enjoying your precious life. And you’re winning.”

©2022 Apolo Ohno (P)2022 Sounds True

Critic reviews

“In Hard Pivot, Apolo Ohno guides readers as they embark on their own journeys of transformation—offering valuable insight and techniques, and giving you the courage to keep moving forward.” —Billie Jean King, world-renowned tennis champion and author of All In

“Like so many of us who are professional and Olympic athletes, Apolo Ohno is no stranger to overcoming incredible obstacles, self-doubt, and failure—and all in the public eye. But it’s his skill for applying these seemingly outward experiences to our inner worlds that is truly unique. Hard Pivot shows all of us how to discover what brings the most meaning and value to our lives and how to keep those things front and center as we face challenges or crossroads along the way.” —Jeremy Bloom, Olympic skier, NFL player, and author of Fueled by Failure

“Apolo Ohno lives a life where he works every day to train his mind and spirit for peak performance. In this book he takes us there with him on that journey, and he shows us how we can do it too.” —David Creswell, PhD, professor of psychology and neuroscience, Carnegie Mellon University

Great book!

I enjoyed this audio book. It was clear and concise. I wish there was an accompanying workbook for the exercises that I could purchase.

Nice read

Going through a season of burn out and uncertainty and this book has helped me shift my perspective.

Great book

Great book to listen to when you are looking for change in your life, or feel stuck where you are at. Highly recommend