Rich Roll

Tell us about yourself and your background.

My name is Rich Roll. I am an author, a podcaster, a husband, a father, and an athlete. I have a history with addiction and recovery. My story is about persistent change, mid-life transformation, and that anything is possible. I’m a former attorney turned into an ultra-endurance athlete and podcaster, and now somebody who writes books. The focus of my interest and the primary themes of my podcast pivot around change and transformation.

As a young person I was someone brimming with promise and potential. I ended up at Stanford University and was a member of their two-time NC2A Championship swimming team. The world was truly my oyster – until the introduction of alcohol, when my priorities quickly shifted.

Essentially, alcohol ended up robbing me of everything meaningful in my life. There’s nothing romantic, sexy, or rock ‘n roll about my story. It took me to some very dark places, and, at the end of my drinking career, I was very much alone, desperate, and unable to live. By the grace of God, I had that moment of reckoning you hear about with people in recovery. I hit rock bottom, and I suddenly became willing to do what I wasn’t previously willing to do: ask for help, and receive help.

That is the first major life transformation I navigated, from alcoholic to sober. To this day, through the many transformations I’ve navigated in my life, it’s the principles I learned in the rooms of recovery that still anchor me and are guideposts for how I think about personal liberty and freedom, self-actualization, growth, and transformation.

I grew up in Washington, D.C. My father was a government lawyer and my mother was a special needs teacher. By the time I was in high school, my father had moved to private practice, and we went from middle class to a more privileged situation. I became the beneficiary of a private school education. All my needs were provided for. My parents were still married, and they were very invested in my success. I did my best to live up to expectations, both as a student and as an athlete.

I learned very early on that I could make up for any talents I lacked by doubling down on my capacity for suffering. In other words, I developed a very large work ethic that served me well in my younger years, and I engineered this trajectory towards getting into all the fancy schools and acquitting myself as an athlete. I ended up at Stanford, this incredible institution where, by day I was in classrooms with some of the brightest minds in the world and, in the early mornings and late afternoons, I was training with Olympic gold medallists and world record holders. The world truly was my oyster.

But I was always a shy, quiet, insecure kid, who compensated by doubling down in the classroom and in the pool. I had challenges making friends. I didn’t really know how to be a social animal. I was very insecure. Alcohol seemed like a miraculous cure to all of that.

I remember the first time I got drunk. It felt like being enveloped in a warm blanket. I was being provided with the answers to all the questions I ever had about how to be in the world. All I could think was, ‘When can I do that again?’

Sure enough, I did do it again. In the early days, it actually helped me learn how to be among other people, because it gave me the ability to feel comfortable in my own skin. I didn’t know what that felt like, and I think I’ve benefitted from that. But I knew very early in my drinking career that my relationship with alcohol was different from that of my peers. I had some unconscious sense of being an alcoholic, but that didn’t stop me from having a very unhealthy relationship with this substance. I was functional for a while, and in the beginning worked. Then I stopped working, but I kept doing it, and the consequences started to add up.

It took a number of years before I was ready to reckon with my problem. I had to create a lot of chaos and hurt a lot of people I care about before I was really willing to do something about my problem. I’m so grateful I was blessed with the willingness to do that, because everything good in my life – or even the fact that I’m alive today – is truly a direct consequence of my decision to get sober back in 1998.

What limits your freedom?

Most of us limit our freedom. The human animal is a storytelling animal. We construct stories to make sense of our lives. We inherit stories and we fabricate our own. These stories and narratives that we tell ourselves about who we are and what we’re capable of end up dictating the reality and the fabric of our lives. When you begin to deconstruct these stories, you realise it’s all fantasy. Even the best story you tell yourself about who you are and what you’re capable of is a fable.

The negative stories are certainly detached from reality. Our brains hand-select certain incidents that occurred over the billions of experiences we’ve had and single them out as significant. They then get anchored in our neurology and in our consciousness, and we attach meaning to them. Those stories become predictive of outcomes.

We’re victims to our stories. We self-identify with them, and for the most part, they limit us. They imprison us. I’m always trying to deconstruct stories, hold them loosely, and detach from my identity, because identity is something we use in these stories. We construct an identity around them. Sometimes that serves us. Whatever happened to us when we were younger, our story is a defence mechanism or a strategy to survive fundamentally. We need that and we should honour that, but we’re in a constant state of change and growth. Just like a hermit crab outgrows its shell, we’re always in situations where we must leave our shell, find a new one, and wander around naked, vulnerable, afraid, and confused. This is the cycle of the human animal.

I think a lot about the power of story to inspire and limit change. There is no animal other than the human that tells stories, so storytelling is fundamental to all of us. We inherit stories from our forefathers, just like we inherit generational trauma. These patterns get imbedded in us and send our lives on a trajectory we never chose for ourselves. On some level, we’re living reactively based upon these stories, the things we’ve inherited, and the experiences we have weathered throughout the course of our life.

Freedom is understanding we have the agency to transcend all of that, to make different choices, to pay attention to our heart, and to invest in what matters to us. We don’t have to live out a story, but we must stop self-identifying with those stories. Most people walk around so self-identified with the story that the idea of detaching from it is something we don’t even know how to begin doing.