Good morning, friends!

In 2012, Kara Lynn Joyce was sitting in a tiny dark room with seven of her competitors minutes before the race that would determine who would win a spot to compete in the London Olympics.

She needed to get first or second place in order to qualify for her third Olympic Games. By this point in her swimming career, Joyce had become an expert at finding her focus before high-pressure races.

But in this particular moment, she was falling into an uncontrollable spiral of negative thoughts. For the first time in a long time, Joyce felt like she wasn't in control of her own mind.

"Things just hadn't been going my way," she says in an interview with The Profile. "I had been thinking about all the things that had gone wrong. As humans, it's easy for us to go down the path of negativity."

And there was plenty of adversity Joyce could've focused on in that moment. In the previous year, she had dealt with debilitating back pain, she switched swim programs twice, and she hadn't been performing as well as she'd liked.

"I had all of these negative thoughts going through my mind, and then I was like, 'Wait a minute, wait a minute.' I'm about to walk out on national TV and swim in the Olympic Trials for the chance of making my third Olympic team. What am I doing? If I learned anything in 21 years of swimming, it's that if I don't think I can succeed, then it's not going to happen."

Thanks to that realization, she was able to mentally re-calibrate by asking herself this very important question: "What can I do now to get into the right mental state?"

The way she did it wasn't by "thinking positively." Instead, she played a mental movie of her entire career — from watching the Olympics on TV as a little girl to breaking records to falling short to getting back up to sitting in this room right now. She had survived and persevered through it all, and she deserved to be here.

As a result of this mental exercise, you can see Joyce's quiet confidence on full display as she stood at the starting blocks before the final event at the Olympic Trials. "It's my favorite race," Joyce says, "because I was able to change the outcome of the race before it started."

Joyce went to her first Olympic Games at age 18, and then she retired at age 26. After years of training every single day, she suddenly found herself accountable to no one but herself.

"It doesn't matter if you're 26, 60, or 75," she says. "If you retire from something, it can feel like the rug is pulled out from under you. You go from being accountable to something or someone every day to, all of a sudden, nothing. The biggest thing I feared is not finding something I was as passionate about in retirement."

That fear never came to fruition because Joyce was willing to take the first step into the unknown. Her swimming career had taught her an invaluable lesson: "The antidote to doubt is action." So she refused to sit still.

Joyce was able to pair her Olympic experience with the adrenaline-filled journey of starting a business. In 2017, she founded the Lead Sports Co, which hosts the LEAD Summit, an annual, all-inclusive event that connects young female athletes with Olympic champions and experts in sport and mental health.

In the last four years, Joyce has discovered that running her own company can be equally as grueling, frustrating, and rewarding as training for the Olympics.

"The skills I developed as an athlete in keeping my confidence up when it was really important have definitely helped me on those crazy days as an entrepreneur," she says.

In this conversation, Joyce explains that self-confidence and mental resilience are the keys to succeeding in sports, business, and life.

Check out the full interview below:

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PROFILES.

— The ultimate recognizer[**HIGHLY RECOMMEND**]
— The king of weed pizza
— The director behind Pixar’s biggest hits
— Hollywood’s rising agent of change
— America's global soccer star
— The unlikely NBA star
— China's 're-education' camp survivor
— The TikTok therapists

PEOPLE TO KNOW.

The ultimate recognizer: In the military, there is an esoteric discipline known as "pattern-of-life analysis," which involves establishing a person’s identity based on his or her cumulative habits. As a pattern-of-life expert, Kevin spends hours a day, seven days a week watching people in Afghanistan go about their lives, with the goal of separating out the insurgents from the civilians. All that data then gets synthesized by Palantir's algorithms. Palantir is capable of mining and aggregating data on individual people in a manner that would astonish anyone. But in a life-and-death situation, what happens when the machines are wrong and the humans are right? (WIRED)

“We humans have the ability to recognize faces. It’s part of our genetics. I knew his face. I doubted the computer. I was right.”

The king of weed pizza: Chris Barrett, also known as the "Pizza Pusha," has made bank on the gray market selling pizza laced with 40mg of THC per slice. Barrett himself has a colorful background. As a teenager, he got entangled with the New York Mafia starting as an errand boy for the Colombo crime family. At 22 years old, Barrett was sentenced to five years in federal prison. Today, he is an entrepreneur, selling cannabis-infused pizza under the brand Stoned Pizza. (Grub Street)

“I’ve done a lot of risky things in my life. Selling pizza ain’t one of them."

The director behind Pixar’s biggest hits: Pete Docter has had a hand in nearly every Pixar production since the original Toy Story, but is credited as the director for four of the most inventive movies: Monsters, Inc.,Up, Inside Out, and Soul. After John Lasseter's exit, Docter has reinvigorated Disney's multibillion-dollar Oscar-winning powerhouse by ushering in a new diverse generation of filmmakers and projects. Here's how he did it. (The Hollywood Reporter)

"You cut Pete open and inside is a ride from Disneyland and a scene from Lady and the Tramp. He just fricking loves animation at its very core."

Hollywood’s rising agent of change: Challenging norms is an integral part of actress Tessa Thompson’s ethic. A lot of people in Hollywood say they are going to change the industry, but she is one of the few who seems as if she actually will. "I’ve always felt a little afraid of what happens when we get too comfortable, that we’re not growing," she says. "Maybe I’m a masochist or maybe I’m a sucker for the discomfort of the first squeak.” Here's how she's changing the way business is done in Hollywood. (Town & Country)

"I’m curious about being able to give opportunity to folks that people might say are less experienced."

America's global soccer star: People speculate that ****Christian Pulisic may be the best American soccer player ever. That's a lot of pressure but not as much as Pulisic puts on himself. “Going into a national-team game, I never thought that I need to perform because everyone is expecting me to be the best player,” he says. “I would put pressure on myself because I wanted to do well. I wanted to be that player that everyone wanted me to be.” (GQ)

“Christian does not go down. He soaks up a ton of punishment.”

The unlikely NBA star: In a league full of outsize personalities, Jimmy Butler is one of the NBA's fiercest and most enigmatic stars. For years, he made his name as a scrappy, demanding, and sometimes inconsiderate player and teammate. He was the guy who wasn't afraid to tell the truth as he saw it, even if that meant reportedly chastising young teammates for being “soft." But his entire outlook and reputation changed in 2019 when Butler joined the Miami Heat. (GQ)

“I think what I respect most about people is how they work. If you work hard, I'm helping.”

China's 're-education' camp survivor: Just a warning that this story will send chills down your spine. After 10 years of living in France, Gulbahar Haitiwaji returned to China to sign some papers and she was locked up in one of the so-called "re-education" facilities. For the next two years, she was systematically dehumanized, humiliated, and brainwashed. (The Guardian)

"Wave after wave of propaganda crashed down upon me, and as the months went by, I began to lose part of my sanity."

The TikTok therapists: A steady stream of mental health professionals are trying to meet an anxious generation of young people where they are on social media. Enter TikTok. Limited to 60 seconds, therapists are making TikTok videos that aim to answer big questions: “What is intergenerational trauma?” and “What are healthy ways to express rage?” But for therapists who suddenly find themselves with a massive online following, the pressure can feel constraining. (The New York Times)

“People are posting in their pajamas. It’s a different connection.”

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AUDIO TO HEAR.

Michael Phelps on dealing with darkness: When Olympic champion Michael Phelps was at his peak, he says he "treated my body like it was a Ferrari." He was sleeping 8 to 10 hours per night with a 2-hour nap during the day (....must be nice). He would eat up to 10,000 calories a day. He was drinking tons of water. In this interview, Phelps talks about taking care of his physical body while malnourishing his mental state. "I go strictly internal and pick at internal scabs that really hurt," he says. "I almost try to inflict pain, so it gets bad. And when it does get bad, it really spirals."(Link available to premium members.)

Jane McGonigal on how playing games can spark confidence: This is a fascinating conversation with Jane McGonigal, a PhD game designer who explains that games can simulate our reality in a way that helps us get better at problem-solving, decision-making, and confidence-building. Here's why play is the best way to learn new things. (Link available to premium members.)

VIDEOS TO SEE.

Ed Catmull on the power of creativity: Tell me a profession in which observation isn't considered important. The best doctors, lawyers, movie producers, journalists, and investors are all considered observant people. In this interview, Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull explains why creativity is all about awareness and risk-taking. (Link available to premium members.)

Tobi Lütke on how he solves problems: Shopify founder and CEO Tobi Lütke says the biggest advantage he had as an entrepreneur is starting out as a programmer. "You think in systems," he says. "By default, most people think about cause and effect, but the world doesn't work like that. The world actually works in systems — it is loopy, not linear." This is a fascinating interview that gives us a peek into Lütke's systems-based mind. (Link available to premium members.)

Rickey Gates on understanding America: In 2017, ultra-runner Rickey Gates decided he would traverse the country in order to better understand his fellow Americans. Gates ran roughly a marathon a day for five months, which would add up to a total of 3,700 miles. He went from South Carolina all the way to San Francisco in a journey that showed him the true nature of people across the political spectrum. "Empathy is at the core of understanding and appreciating that we're all complicated people, and I think very few of us have it figured out," he says. (Link available to premium members.)

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