• by Micheal P. Gumbert , June 16, 2026

Micheal Gumbert, Media Director, Unlock Health writes, “What do Alysa Liu and Rory McIlroy have in common? The thing they share in common is a mindset, ironically both forged in hardship.”

What do Alysa Liu and Rory McIlroy have in common? One is a back-to-back Masters winning golfer and the other is a 20-year-old gold medal winning figure skater. Other than being professional athletes in sports, I suspect a lot of people do not think of being particularly athletic, they do not seem to have a lot in common. But the thing they share in common is a mindset, ironically both forged in hardship, at 16 Alysa Liu had walked away from figure skating and until last year Rory had been chasing golf’s grand slam for 11 years. Of course, Rory hasn’t just won A Masters, he has in fact won the Masters back-to-back and we watched as Alysa Liu having come out of retirement to seemingly float across the ice in Milan to win a gold medal.

So again, I ask, what do they share in common with one another? The answer is summed up by the comment made by Tara Lipinski after Liu’s performance in Milan when she said that Alysa had seemingly figured out how to compete without caring the weight of competing, something that every athlete was trying to figure out. Something that Rory had figured out as you watched him stalk Augusta National, he was not golfing to prove something, no he was golfing because he loved it and happens to be pretty dang good at it. How much weight to compete do we as marketers carry on our shoulders? What would even feel like to be able to compete without carrying that weight?

Competition is good, I want to be clear about that from the outset, or at least competition in, and of, itself is not bad. Again, going back to what Lipinski said, because she still correctly pointed out that Alysa was competing, but it was not about the medals or the rankings, it was about the skating. This thing that Alysa loves because it allows her to show the world who she is. That is the lesson for marketers not that we should not compete or that metrics do not matter. But it is about finding the metrics that allow us to compete in our industries, or even just with ourselves, without carrying the weight of that competition. That starts by going deeper and realizing it is not about clicks, impressions, view rates, likes, or shares. We pay attention to those things because they are easy to measure. What is more important are people’s feelings about our brands, products, and services but those things are almost impossible to measure.

At the end of the day as marketers we want to win, we want our brands to win. Winning for us might not be a gold medal (then again if someone wants to give me a gold medal, I’m not going to say no), winning is a business outcome. Winning is people remembering us. We have a solution to a problem they are facing and winning are our organizations seeing the value of marketing. Trying to accomplish all of that is a burden, there is no doubt about that, but we need to be like Rory and Alysa and be able to do what we need to do without feeling the weight of that burden. If we can do that, we are already closer to winning then we realize.

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