Ed Lubowicki: Why the Best Business Lessons Come From Feeling Lost, Burnt Out, and Stuck in Your Career | E17

Ed Lubowicki (0:00)

You spend your whole life thinking you're the best at something, and then you make it to a level where you're not the best, and you see your best friends on TV getting the accolades, and you feeling like you're on the sidelines.

Sammy Peterson (0:10)

My next guest played Division I Lacrosse at Notre Dame, two Final Fours in a national championship game. Ed, welcome to Business MVP.

Ed Lubowicki (0:17)

I just thought that's how everybody felt, you know, like how everybody hated their job and just showed up anyway.

Sammy Peterson (0:24)

What's the one pattern you see that separates the people to build something meaningful from the people who stay stuck?

Ed Lubowicki (0:30)

I think like sometimes you need to feel that stuckness in order to find something you need.

Sammy Peterson (0:36)

So if you could go back and tell your younger self one thing about what building a meaningful career actually requires, what would it be?

Ed Lubowicki (0:42)

You can be walking the wrong path or you can be doing something you're not interested in and then 10 years go by like it did for me and you kind of wake up to it.

Sammy Peterson (0:52)

My next guest played Division I Lacrosse at Notre Dame, two final fours in a national championship game. Then he spent nine years climbing the ladder at one of the biggest consulting firms in the world. And then he walked away, not because he failed, but because success without purpose isn't success. Today, Ed Lubowicki is the founder of Lubowicki Performance Advisory, the executive director of Athletes Soul, and he's helping athletes and high performers figure out who they are when the game ends. Ed, welcome to Business MVP.

Ed Lubowicki (1:20)

I love it. What an intro. I got to steal, I got to clip that for some of my stuff. That's great. I also started as a VP for this company, 42U.

It's like VP of identity development in sports. So it's just another play on how to help athletes articulate their strengths that they learn in sport and how they think because of sport.

Sammy Peterson (1:41)

Ed, your dad played lacrosse at Florida State and introduced you to the game before you could walk. You were an All-American in high school. You get to Notre Dame and the competition is on a completely different level. What was that adjustment like?

Ed Lubowicki (1:53)

Wow, Sammy, you did your homework. You know where my dad went to school?

Yeah, my dad's an interesting guy. I love it. My dad's interesting. He played lacrosse into his 50s. He was a lax guy for sure.

Sammy Peterson (2:07)

He loved it.

Ed Lubowicki (2:09)

I loved it for a long time. Yeah, it was an interesting shift for me for sure.

My freshman year, I played lefty attack, and there were two other lefty attackmen, All-American, one being one of the best to ever do it. I feel like I say his name in every podcast, and I'm not like clout chasing, carrying on his stuff, but he was truly one of the best players ever played with. And it was a new thing for me for sure, seeing how he just managed the game and everything. So it was definitely a big adjustment seeing how that was. It was a big adjustment having lacrosse be your whole life. Like in high school, I had my friends that were not lacrosse players. I went to an all-boys high school, so we cared about sports, but you had to do other things as well. So getting to the college space, like revolving, like everything you do, revolving around lacrosse was another shift for me for sure.

Sammy Peterson (3:02)

Yeah. No. And Notre Dame is so good now, lacrosse, which is what a cool experience.

So you didn't travel your freshman year, I read, but then your teammates were playing on TV while you were watching from home after grinding all week in practice. So how did you handle that? And what did it teach you about finding your value when you're not necessarily the best player in the room?

Ed Lubowicki (3:21)

Dang, Sammy, were you following me around? And you knew where I was.

Sammy Peterson (3:26)

I do my research. I watched your Instagram posts.

Ed Lubowicki (3:29)

I got you. I got you. Yeah. No, it was a weird shift for sure because you spend your whole life thinking you're the best at something and then you make it to a level where you're not the best, then you see your best friends on TV, getting the accolades and you feeling like you're on the sidelines. So it definitely is a big shift. I think it's a motivator in a lot of aspects where once you're a part of that and you're in the same room with that excellence, it makes you naturally want to get better and contribute in other ways and support your teammates in whatever way you can. At Notre Dame, we had a blue squad and a gold squad. So the gold squad was like the backup kind of thing, and we always got to pretend to be the other team. So my freshman year in sophomore year as I was figuring it out, we got to pretend to be the Thompson brothers. I don't know if you remember them. They were Native American players that would throw around the world and do all this fun stuff. So we took a lot of pride in the gold squad. I'm sure a lot of my teammates that were gold squatters would appreciate me shouting that out. So yeah, it was definitely trying to be creative about finding other ways to add value for sure.