Doing Nothing is Winning
Pro Cyclist Harry Sweeny on the Choose the Hard Way Podcast
Doing more might be the easiest thing.
Doing nothing might be the hardest thing.
It might be the thing you need the most that you think you need the least.
If you want to go bigger at the things you care about the most in life, the key may be walling off time every day to do nothing.
That’s the thing that struck me the most about my conversation with pro cyclist Harry Sweeny. Harry has been killing the game as a World Tour pro, making a mark as a leadout man and more at races like the Tour de France since 2021.
You can hear my full interview with Harry on the Choose the Hard Way podcast on Spotify, iTunes and with full video on YouTube.
I follow pro cycling closely, but what put Harry on my radar was his YouTube channel where he shares a look behind the scenes at his training, his pro-level chef skills, his coffee game and life as a pro cyclist.
After Harry completed his first Tour de France he discovered he had what it took to be in the mix with the best in the world. Around the same time he became curious about certain aspects of how he experienced life and the world.
“There were a lot of small things. I wouldn't like how shirts felt on my shoulders or people wouldn't understand if I kept arguing and arguing for hours about the same thing. There were a few people that mentioned things to me like close friends and family.
“We work with psychologists all the time. There's not really any stigma around seeing a psychologist in a professional sporting world. So I just went to see a psychologist. Within 30 minutes, she was like, yeah, you're definitely on the spectrum.”
If you follow Harry’s YouTube channel, you know he stays busy and if he’s not training, he might be skiing, hiking, running, rebuilding a Vespa, constructing an altitude chamber in his home or perfecting a new recipe. One thing he isn’t doing much is sitting still.
Working with a psychologist, he started to explore how he managed his level of mental arousal while racing bikes.
“I went through a lot of the stages of the Tour de France my first year where I would say I was mentally switched off. I had enough of a physiological talent that I could go through a stage switched off and make it through. And I think that enabled me to think that that mental state was normal where I wouldn't have to really put energy into switching my brain on to do my job.
“I could just do it without really having to try to do it. And I needed somebody to tell me basically that like that level of mental arousal is incredibly low and not normal. And that I could work on it and drastically increase my performance.”
Making the effort to work with a psychologist and explore this territory wasn’t easy.
“It's draining to be honest. When I first got into it, I was hesitant. I thought, what can someone tell me about myself, really?”
To work on reaching a higher state of mental arousal at the moments that mattered the most while racing, the psychologist had Harry start work on the thing that he finds to be the hardest: doing nothing.
"For me, doing nothing is going for a hike. If someone asked me what I do to relax, it would have been, I got back from five hours of training, I quickly cooked a nice lunch and then I went out on an hour hike and then I went shopping. That would be me doing nothing.
“And it took for the psychologist to be like, you're actually doing a lot of stuff. You're putting a lot of mental stress on your body.”
The action he had to take to reach a higher level of performance was to take no action. To take no action meant training to take no action. Getting started meant starting small and building from there.
“For me, it was to spend 10 minutes a day where you're actually doing nothing, where you're just sitting there. You're not on your phone. You're not reading a book. You're not playing a game. You're actually just doing nothing and for me, it's incredibly difficult to do. But I have to. It's all part of my recovery. I really have to just sit on the couch and do nothing.”
Sitting still can be the hardest thing to do that delivers the biggest returns that we do the least.
It may be the most important thing to do.
The easiest thing to do might be to stuff more into every day--more riding, more lifting, more training, more work, more action, more stimulation, more scrolling, more watching—more.
The hard thing can be nothing.
Nothing can be what we need the most.
There is power in nothing.
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Man, I relate to this. Doing nothing seems like a waste of time. Yet, some of the best years of my life have been when I had those 10 minutes each morning of meditating.
My biggest goal for the last two years is to be bored. I’ve failed both times.