On Perseverance, Tom Brady, and the Ordinary Us
“You have to experience what it takes to achieve something difficult, because you learn a lot in the process,” said one of my good friends at a dinner at our home many years ago. My friend, an accomplished yet an unassuming professor, explained, “That learning is more important than whether you achieve your goals.” While his comments may have been directed toward the youngster at the table, I have pondered over them myself. Back to the present.
Tom Brady, the GOAT (Greatest Of All Time) of football, has reached the pinnacle of American football many times, leading his teams to the National Football League (NFL) championships — the Super Bowl — ten times, winning seven of them in a 22-year career. It is an accomplishment that is unlikely to be reached again anytime soon. For historical comparison, Otto Graham also led the Cleveland Browns to ten league championships from 1946 to 1955 winning seven of them. In modern times, Joe Montana led his team to four Superbowl wins. While not comparable because he was a running back, Jim Brown, also of the Browns, was arguably the greatest footballer of the century before Brady.
We cannot imagine what it takes to be Tom Brady and his like. They didn’t just try to reach the top of the mountain. They succeeded, repeatedly. The perseverance it takes to win the mental and physical struggles of four quarters of a football game is easy enough to grasp. The practice and training it takes to win one game, and from there what it takes to win seven championships is beyond our grasp. How can ordinary people like us relate to striving to achieve something difficult, without regard to success, and what can we learn? Perseverance is certainly one element of it.
I am a golfer, though you have to realize that I am using the term loosely. If you take 70 shots to complete a round of 18 holes of golf (averaging about four shots per hole), you play well and you are a scratch golfer. I am not a scratch golfer. A beginning golfer usually cannot finish a round and if they do, may take many, many shots. It takes lessons and an effort to shoot a hundred. Getting down to the nineties is harder and it needs something akin to a golf swing. Shooting in the eighties needs you to learn to chip and putt around the greens, in addition to having a good swing. Scoring in the seventies requires you to master many skills. Beyond that, cutting down a single stroke becomes exceptionally hard. The better you get the harder it gets to get even better.
If you set yourself a goal in golf or any one thing you perceive as difficult, you begin to learn what perseverance it takes and how the difficulty increases disproportionately as you near your goal! This process of learning offers us life lessons is my friend’s take. I never did set anything close to lofty goals for golf, so I never suffered. But I am a regular runner and I have persevered and learnt. That is a topic for a future blog.
I return to Tom Brady. Brady would be the first to acknowledge that none of his achievements would have been possible without the offensive linemen in front of him. They are of every color, and they come together to protect him on every single down. In his retirement, maybe Brady will take leadership of a different kind and bring people together to overcome the toxic politics of his newly adopted state Florida. What a way that would be to welcome this year’s Super Bowl and February — Black History Month!
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