The mountain doesn't care
about your strategy.
It just asks: can you perform right now, on this terrain, with what you've got?
I'm a PSIC Professional Ski Instructor and Trainer. Former Chair of the CSIA Board of Directors. A CARV athlete chasing a Ski:IQ of 155+.
None of those credentials matter as much as what skiing has taught me about how humans actually perform.
I've been on snow my entire adult life. I've trained instructors, coached racers, served on the board that governs professional ski instruction in Canada. But the reason skiing keeps showing up in my writing, my speaking, and my framework is simpler than credentials.
Skiing is the most honest feedback loop I've ever found.
CARV is a pressure insole system that measures everything: edge angle, pressure distribution, turn shape, fore/aft balance. It gives you a number called Ski:IQ. I'm chasing 155+.
That number isn't vanity. It's a measurement system that forces you to confront the gap between what you think you're doing and what you're actually doing. Sound familiar? It should. That's the same gap I spend my professional life studying.
Every run generates data. Every data point is an opportunity to adjust. But the adjustment doesn't happen in the data. It happens in the body, in real time, at speed, on terrain that doesn't wait for you to process the spreadsheet.
This is deliberate performance. Not deliberate practice in the "10,000 hours" sense. Deliberate in the sense that every turn is an experiment. Hypothesis, execution, feedback, adjustment. Repeated at 60 km/h on ice.
Every lesson I teach about AI and human performance, I learned on snow first.
The difference between knowing the right technique and trusting it when the pitch steepens. That's the gap between understanding an AI framework and actually using it when the business decision is live and the data is ambiguous.
The way a good instructor watches where a student's weight is, not where they say it is. That's the gap between what people report about their AI usage and what's actually happening in their workflow.
The way terrain forces honest feedback that no coach, no manager, and no dashboard can replicate. That's what's missing from most AI implementations: a system that tells you the truth about your performance in real time.
Skiing isn't a metaphor I bolt onto my professional work. It's the laboratory where the ideas get tested before they ever reach a boardroom.
Follow the pursuit.
I write about skiing, performance, and the lessons the mountain teaches. Subscribe and you'll see the hill reports, the CARV data, and the occasional analogy that connects a carved turn to a leadership decision.