Hey, worklifers, it's Adam Grant.

Welcome back to Taken for Granted, my podcast with the TED Audio Collective.

I'm an organizational psychologist, and this series is about rethinking assumptions we often

take for granted about how we work, lead, and live.

Today's guest is one of times most influential people, sprinter Allison Felix.

In Tokyo, at age 35,

she won her 10th and 11th Olympic medals, becoming the most decorated track and field athlete in American history and the most decorated woman ever in the sport. She's now meddled in five

straight Olympic games. It was an especially triumphant moment since it came in the aftermath of challenging Nike's

lack of pregnancy protections for athletes.

When Allison was expecting in 2018, they tried to cut her pay by 70%.

When she asked them to guarantee her salary, if her performance suffered due to childbirth,

they refused.

After she spoke out publicly and walked away, they finally changed their policy.

Since then, Allison has founded her own footwear and lifestyle brand, Seish, with her brother

Wes. I'm an advisor to Seish, and I was thrilled to see Allison win gold and bronze in her own shoes.

I can't think of a better role model when it comes to achieving excellence, sustaining success, and bouncing forward after disappointment.

Hey, Allison, I want to start with your childhood. I think a lot of people assume that you must have been the tiger woods of running, that you were crawling down a track at three months old and training for the national championships by kindergarten. But that's not what you were doing. Yeah. What were you up to instead? I was a normal kid. It's funny. Yeah, you think an Olympian, like you're off to some type of Olympic training camp or you're doing something. But I was literally growing up in my neighborhood. I played basketball. I did gymnastics. I chased after Wes. I grew up in my neighborhood, riding bikes and, you know, doing all the

stuff that all of us did. And I was just active. And then in high school, you know, I found track

and field from just being at a new school and wanting and my family telling me sports is a great

way to like find friends. And so that's how I found it.

But I think I think it's so important to try like everything. I think because I, I literally

found my passion. It came to me. And I think that allowed me to just, I don't know, have a lot

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