August 26, 2025

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Every week, I sit down to reflect on the events of the week, extract their lessons, and gameplan how to apply those lessons toward greatness and growth. It’s a system that has always worked for me, it can work for you too.

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How to Learn from Relationships

My son Jack turned 18 last week. As I said in my Instagram post on his birthday, Jack has always shown grace, courage, love and kindness, and he has grown into a man of deep character defined by those values, not to mention a host of other admirable traits. It’s truly an honor and a blessing to be his dad.

When people hit milestone anniversaries and birthdays, like Jack just did, it’s natural to take a step back and reflect on how far they’ve come, how much they’ve grown and changed. Baked into those moments of reflection is a really important question that I think a lot of people sometimes forget to ask: who helped them along the way? Who did they learn from? Who helped guide them through early struggles, difficult moments and transformative periods of growth?

In this week’s newsletter, I want to talk about the relationships that make us who we are, how we cultivate and learn from them, and how we can pay it forward as we get older.

REFLECTION

Being thirty years older than Jack, the list of people who’ve helped me and molded me is a mile long. There were my parents, obviously, who raised us in a supportive household and embraced whatever dreams we had without tempering any of our expectations. It was maybe a bit naive, but it was a beautiful quality and a great gift they gave me because it taught me that I could achieve whatever I wanted in life if I worked hard.

Then there was Tom Martinez, the head football coach at the College of San Mateo, three miles from my house. I went to his camp in the summer of 1993 and 1994, because I wanted to be a better quarterback, and the way he taught mechanics really made me fall in love with the art of throwing the football. As a mentor, the influence he had on my life was incredible, and continued right up to the day he passed in 2012.

Of course, there was Greg Harden, who I talked about last week, who really helped me recalibrate my emotional state and fix a lot of the self-defeating attitudes I had in my first two years at Michigan. Greg didn’t know much about football, but he knew a lot about young men and the human mind, and his guidance was instrumental in my personal and emotional development.

Bill Belichick was the opposite of Greg inasmuch as he knew everything about football. Bill’s football and coaching mind is unrivaled. He really took me under his wing and taught me so much about how to play quarterback and how to be a great leader. I wanted to soak up everything he had to teach me, and he was willing, because he trusted that I could retain the information he had to share and that I would put it to use.

And then there was Alex Guerrero, who came into my life during my third season in the NFL thanks to Willie McGinest. What he taught me about commitment and physical health and questioning conventional wisdom changed my career and my life. And now, after 23 years working together, he's like a brother to me.

There are so many more people I could talk about, whose impact on this journey of life I will never minimize. Their stories could fill a book. And what they all have in common is that they took the time to teach me something, in their own ways.

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LESSON

Sadhguru has a great line: what we know is limited, what we don’t know is limitless. What this says to me is that if we want to grow and improve, we have to approach life with humility and self-awareness. We have to recognize that there are so many things we don’t know, and then most importantly we need to be open to developing relationships with people who come into our lives, for however long and for whatever reason, who might be willing to teach us some of those things. We have to be open to learning and willing to admit that we don’t know everything. As the saying goes: when the student is ready, the teacher appears.

This probably sounds like a no-brainer, but I am continually shocked by how many people in this world go the opposite way. They’re stubborn, hard-headed, closed off or close-minded. It’s a horrible trait to have because, at best, it produces stagnation, and at worst, it results in physical, mental, and emotional atrophy. One of the main principles of neuroplasticity is “use it or lose it.” When you don’t use your mind, just like if you don’t use a muscle or practice a skill, it slowly diminishes until it becomes a shadow of itself or it turns into deadweight.

Some people who are closed off to learning like this are arrogant know-it-alls. There’s no helping those types until their arrogance and their ignorance cost them something they care dearly about, and they are finally ready to listen to the people around them. Just imagine if I’d had that attitude when Greg Harden told me to stop complaining about other people’s opportunities and focus on my own. Maybe I walk out of his office thinking that everybody at Michigan is an idiot who wouldn’t know talent if they had a flashlight and a map. Maybe I never talk to Greg again, and as a result I never see the field, never get drafted, and have no reason to be talking to you right now.

Of course, not everyone who is closed off is like that. I’d say the vast majority of people who find themselves in this “use it or lose it” spot with learning, are there either because they think they already know enough, or they’re afraid of looking stupid with the inevitable failure that comes from learning something new. It’s understandable. The kind of openness we’re talking about requires a lot of vulnerability and it has a cost not everyone is willing to pay.

Just think about all those older parents and grandparents who never learned how to program the clock on their microwave or set up email on their iPhone, or set up an email account at all. To them, these tasks, which are simple to us, feel like being asked to pass a spelling test in a foreign language they never learned. And they never learned it, because early on they weren’t open to conversations with their kids and grandkids, co-workers or neighbors, about this “new” thing that they felt they didn’t need. They were too busy, too tired, too comfortable, or sometimes maybe just a little too vain to learn.

But that is an explanation, not an excuse.

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APPLICATION

None of us get here alone. We are each the product of our relationships and get where we are because of the impact those relationships have on our lives. As we get older, we are in a position to utilize that understanding, along with the wisdom gained from our experiences, to be a positive influence on a disproportionate number of people, young and old.

We can make conversations easier. We can be open with our knowledge and receptive to the curiosity of people who are too nervous or shy or ashamed to ask directly for help. We can pay attention. We can pay it forward. We can become the teachers…and continue learning in the process.

As the writer, James Clear, wrote in his newsletter just last week: “The person who learns the most in any classroom is the teacher.” The beauty of this idea is that both the student and the teacher grow as a part of the learning relationship, because they push each other outside of their comfort zones, which is where all transformative growth occurs.

As a parent, the home is the classroom and you are in pure teaching mode all the way up until your kids are about 13 or 14 years old. That’s when their friend group starts to have a huge impact on the shape of their social personality and you begin to learn what kind of teacher you really are. A parent is perhaps the most formative person in the life of a child, and who a child chooses as their friends during that transitional period from middle school into high school is a very reliable indicator of what they took from all those little learning moments with their parents—for better and for worse.

Going to Jack’s 18th birthday party over the weekend, it was really heartening and rewarding as a parent to see a room full of fifteen great kids with strong bonds and the right values. Nobody is perfect, everyone has room to grow and improve—this is especially true as parents—but seeing Jack with his friends felt like, hey, we got this one right!

How we got it right is its own question. And I think the key, whether you are the student or the teacher, the child or the parent, is understanding that there's a difference between being critical and being critiqued. To be critical is to say “you’re not good enough” or “your friends aren’t good enough.” To critique is to say “you can do better” or “you deserve better.” The goal, as the teacher, is to be the kind of person who offers constructive critiques, who says “I know you can do better and here’s how.” As a student, the goal is to be open enough to let as many of those constructive kinds of people into your life as possible, and then to listen to them and to learn.

My parents, my agents, Tom, Greg, Bill, Alex and the countless other invaluable people in my life whose opinions I trust—the other thing they have in common is that they are rarely critical and they always come with critiques that bring out the best possible version of me, because they make me aware of when I can do better and then they expect me to live up to that potential. I would not be where I am today without each and every one of them.

I’m a firm believer that the journey is more important than the destination, but that both pale in comparison to the importance of the company you keep along the way. I have been blessed to be in good company my entire life. My goal now, in this phase of life, is to be equally good company to Jack and Benny and Vivian, and in whatever way possible, to all of you reading this newsletter as well.

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