REFLECTION
A while back, my son Benny and I got to spend a little time talking to MrBeast, the biggest YouTuber in the world. We asked him how he got started—a pretty standard question—but then we asked him how he got better, and eventually became great. What’s the secret, basically?
is answer was simple, though by no means easy. He said you have to accept hat your first 500 videos are going to suck, but you just have to keep making them, trying your best of course, and incrementally changing and improving things as you go.
It was a great answer, and not what you might expect from a young person active in social media and content creation today. Think about it: making videos that you know will suck, just to make them, just to get the reps in and build the muscle memory? That’s a completely alien concept in today’s culture of short attention spans and instant virality. So much of productivity, personal development, and hustle culture is about hacking the process to avoid failure and rejection. Too many people want the growth without the learning. They don’t want to do things that suck. They don’t want to do the work that creates improvement, they want to be good right away.
In becoming the biggest YouTuber in the world, MrBeast learned the hard way—the right way—that you can’t do that. You can’t avoid failure and rejection, you have to work through it. You have to allow the lessons that emerge from it to continually rewire your thought process and build new neural pathways, because those lead to improvement. If you want to get better and maybe someday be great, you have to use failure and rejection. You have to persist.
I’ve always understood this about football—at the individual level and the team level. I never let age or injury or other people’s opinions stop me. Backup QB on my 0-8 high school freshmen team? Seventh on the depth chart at Michigan? Fourth on the depth chart in England? It didn’t matter. I was always working to get better. I was always adding something to my regimen or to my skillset.
On the Patriots, especially on offense, we never accepted that a defense could stop one of our plays or our scheme. If a play didn’t work in a game, we never said “chalk one up in the win column for the defense on that one.” We went back to the drawing board and, like MrBeast with his videos, we incrementally changed and improved the play until it became unstoppable (if we nailed the execution). We never stopped trying to get better.
Once you’ve set your mind to something, you have to keep going. The only truly bad decision you can make is to quit. I’ve carried this mentality from football into every area of life I care about and want to be better in, broadcasting included.
LESSON
From a distance, persistence can seem exhausting and pointless. The process of getting knocked down and getting back up, only to get knocked down again, is sometimes too much for people. Especially those who’ve been through some things in life. Been there, done that, they’ll say to themselves, just stick to what you know.
This attitude develops when we allow getting knocked down to drain our confidence and to obscure the fact that getting back up is the ultimate confidence builder. Indeed, every knockdown, every rejection, every “No” is an opportunity to grow and build confidence if you don’t let it keep you down. Unfortunately, there are a lot of smart, well-meaning people who choose to stay down, and it explains a lot of things. For example, why older people can be so stuck in their ways sometimes and why they struggle with, and then abandon, new technologies. But it’s also why you meet so few people who are great at multiple unrelated skills.
Learning new things and getting really good at them is hard. And as we get older, especially if we’ve been successful in one area, we sometimes behave as if becoming good in another area should be easier. We act like we should be able to port over all of our success and skills from the old thing we’re good at to the new thing we’re trying.
One of the greatest lessons I’ve learned as a byproduct of launching a second career after football is that the only skills you can consistently and reliably transfer from one thing to another are the soft skills, the intangibles: resilience, self-sufficiency, perseverance, hard work, positivity, and of course, persistence.
When we forget, or ignore, that the learning curve for new skills starts at zero for everyone, the first time we face failure or rejection or a hard “No”, the tendency is often to quit. We take the “no” as a final judgment. Rejection feels like the end of the journey. And it makes the act of persistence feel like denial or delusion or a fool’s errand.
Except the only thing that’s delusional is expecting to be fully formed right out of the box. I wasn’t as a football player when I was younger, and I wasn’t as a broadcaster now that I’m older. My first broadcasts, like my first starts, were never going to be great. I didn’t know enough. I hadn’t put in my 10,000 hours, as Malcolm Gladwell would say, and as a result I hadn’t failed enough yet to learn everything I needed to know.
To get better at something new, you have to understand that “No” is not the end of the process, it’s a feature of the middle. It’s the driver of the entire learning journey. It’s the spark for growth. And the only way that spark can build into the competitive fire and obsession you need in order to become great at something, is if you persist through the “No’s” that created the spark in the first place.
APPLICATION
But what does it mean, exactly, to persist?
I’ll tell you what it doesn’t mean; it doesn’t mean ignoring the rejection, or pretending you didn’t hear the “No”, and then continuing to do exactly what you were doing before. That is denial. That is a fool’s errand.
To persist is to continue pursuing your goal and doing whatever it takes to get there—while learning from your failures and accepting your rejections but reframing them as guidance. When a client of your new business rejects your plan or a customer says “No thank you” to your offering, when you’re a jiu jitsu white belt and you keep getting submitted by someone with more experience—they’re not telling you to stop trying. They’re telling you to not do it like that. In their own way, they’re directing you toward the solution, toward the right plan, toward the better move.
That’s the thing about rejection and failure. The resistance you feel from it isn’t the “end”, it’s just the limits of your ability and your understanding pushing back on you. It’s the dividing line between your comfort zone and where all the growth and learning happens. Just as you can’t get stronger until you wrestle with a weight you cannot lift, you can’t get better until you hit your limits and push through them.
If you’re paying attention and you don’t quit, every “No” you hear, every rejection you receive, is potentially one step further down the path toward progress and success. Or as MrBeast might put it: you’re one sucky video closer to your first great video. In that sense, you should never be afraid of failure, you should be courting it by fearlessly trying new ways to do things, to get better.
Every fiber of your being might be screaming “No!” to that advice, rejecting the premise outright. Don’t ignore that voice. Listen to it. Figure out where it’s coming from inside you and what it might be able to teach you. Then move in that direction and don’t quit until you reach it.
