REFLECTION
I have thrived on a schedule for as long as I can remember. Even in high school, waking up every morning at 6am to do footwork drills in my backyard and then looking forward to the beginning of practices in July, I found comfort and motivation in knowing the steps I would be taking to get better at this game I was growing to love.
As I got older and rose through the ranks of organized football, working and living by a schedule became an unlock for productivity and improvement. I knew what I had to do, I knew what order I was going to do it, and I trusted that once I put all that stuff together in practices, and then in games, I was going to perform better and our team would play better. We would win more.
I continued with that approach into the NFL, where my responsibilities as an adult and my opportunities as a pro increased exponentially. Some athletes—especially young guys—can get a little loose with their lifestyles when they first get to the pros. So much of your schedule is dictated for you in high school and college, this is the first time you are in control of the lion’s share of your choices. With a little bit of money, and even less oversight, you end up having A LOT of choices—not all of them are aligned with your professional goals.
My choice was to double down on my schedule. I created what was effectively an annual calendar out of my life. 24/7/365. (Maybe not that extreme, but not far off.) For some people, being hyper scheduled like this can be a problem. It’s an inconvenience at best, suffocating at worst. Not for me. As a pro, having a full schedule went from being an unlock to a superpower. Sure, I couldn’t do everything I wanted to do all the time, but by doing everything I needed to do in a timely manner, I was able to pursue excellence at the highest possible level on the football field. At the same time, the schedule helped me to identify every bit of available time and match that time to the highest leverage actions and behaviors that served all the other priorities in my life.
LESSON
Obviously, you don’t need to be as wedded to a schedule as I was, or as I liked to be. But you do need to understand that there are phases in the calendar that lead into one another, and then into the proving season. They’re shifts in priorities that you shouldn’t ignore.
With football, for instance, the end of winter and early spring was about rest and reflection. I had to let my body recuperate from six months of getting knocked around and I had to let my brain slow down from six months of constant information processing. I needed time to let the cortisol dissipate so I could more effectively reflect on how the season went.
This led into late spring and summer, where I recharged, gave my attention to all my other priorities, and focused on maximizing my inputs. This was about filling up the social battery, and doing whatever was required to get physically, mentally, and emotionally prepared to put in the work.
The fall was about the work. Practices. Preparation. Experimentation. Building camaraderie with the team. Fall was when you got back on the horse to make sure you could still ride, and once you remembered that you could, it became about figuring out just how fast. The winter, then, was where you learned whether you could ride fast enough, long enough, to win races.
The football season was the proving season. It’s where you found out whether or not you improved from the previous year. It’s where you learned whether your processes were right; whether your strategies for improvement were right; whether you were doing these things well; whether you were learning from your previous mistakes; and whether you were applying those lessons to the next day’s practice and meetings, or next week’s game.
Most every team goes into training camp with the hypothesis that they’ve improved. When a season ends, the reality is that the next season begins the very next day, And the assumption is that every move management makes, every workout a player does, every change in scheme the coaching staff considers…is meant to improve the team. But you never know until you put in the work and then you put that work-in-progress out on the field.
One of the awesome parts of football season for me is that it runs parallel to the start of the school year, and there are a lot of analogs between improvement on the field and improvement in the classroom—from elementary school all the way up to graduate school. Just as every practice or meeting is built on top of the ones that came before it, so is every school day and every lecture built on the ones that came before. Every game is a test of that week’s prep and improvement, just as every quiz is a test of that week’s instruction. Finals are the playoffs of the academic year.
At some level, I think I’ve always understood this, at least from the player-student perspective. But once my kids got to be school-age, I started to see it from the coach-teacher perspective as well. Coaches come with new schemes and motivational techniques every season, the same way teachers come with new lesson plans and activities. They’re all trying to find new and improved ways to help their players and their students get better. Games and tests are the proving ground for those strategies and techniques. The score and the grades are the evidence of improvement—or lack thereof.
That’s the beauty of school and of football. There’s a very easy way to see if you actually improved: the results. Grades. GPA. The win-loss column. Are you winning more games than you’re losing? Are you winning more games than you did the year before? Are you doing better on tests? Are you writing better papers? Giving better presentations?
Wanna know if you’re getting better? Check the score.
APPLICATION
For a pro athlete, the proving season is always the season itself, but we all have our own versions of it. They vary in length, in frequency, and in magnitude, but they are all the same insomuch as they are your chance to put yourself to the test and show what you’re made of.
The irony is that the key to a successful proving season is less in how you perform, and more in how you prepare. Preparation helps you get over the anxiety and fear that so many people confront when they’re put to the test. It’s walk-throughs before the big game, it’s dress-rehearsals before the big show, it’s dry runs before the big meeting. That’s all about preparation. Obviously, if you don’t execute in the game, or in the moment that matters, there are still issues to iron out. But the likelihood of successful execution when it matters most is almost entirely dependent, in my opinion, on how well you prepare, how well you practice—and practicing well should happen all the time.
In sports, business, the performing arts, practice is essential. In my experience, how you execute in practice becomes the reality of how you execute in a game. If you don't practice well, there’s very little chance that things will go well in the game. In fact, I believe that if you don't practice well repeatedly, every day, you’re lucky if you get to game day and anything goes well. Whereas, if you perform well in practice every day, my belief is that the results you’re searching for will show up in the game more often than not, because you've proven to yourself and your teammates that you can handle things. You can adapt. You can respond to adversity and the unexpected.
It’s funny, whenever I talk a lot about practice, that famous Allen Iverson clip always pops into my head:
“We’re sitting in here talking about practice. Not a game. Not a game! Practice. We talkin’ about practice!?!”
AI was one of those special talents whose unique gifts didn’t require a lot of practice to unleash effectively in a game. But I think what AI wasn’t accounting for enough back then was that he was part of a team. He could get 30-5-12 every night if he wanted. But what about the team? A team needs to practice together, in order to play well together, in order to play at its best.
In a team sport, everybody working together is the most important thing. There’s that saying: if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go with others. That’s the beauty of team sports and why they’re so easy to fall in love with—as a player or a fan. The burdens and responsibilities of winning fall on the whole team, not just one person. It’s not about ‘I’ and ‘Me’, it’s about ‘Us’ and ‘We’. You share the pain of loss and the pleasures of victory together. And when you subjugate your own interests to the interest of the team, you always accomplish more. That’s especially true when your team has a generational talent like Allen Iverson who is a wizard on the floor. If the other fourteen guys get familiar with the wizard’s whole bag of tricks, they all become unstoppable.
Preparation prior to performance is all about making sure that you’re doing all the right things, that you’re learning all the right lessons from your failures, and that you’re doing and learning those things together. It’s planning. It’s practicing. It’s keeping a schedule of what you’re going to work on and sticking to it until it’s done.
This is true whether you’re a professional athlete in a team sport, a single parent, a boss or an employee, a student or an entrepreneur or a business partner. You can tell your coach or your kids, your teachers or your investors, that things will be better next time. That you will be better next time, next quarter, next fiscal year. But those are just words. What are you going to do?
How are you going to do it?
Well done is better than well said. It’s process over outcomes, always. Because the process of practicing is the thing that will lead to better outcomes. Indeed, proving season only becomes consistently positive when our processes get prioritized.
If you want to be a better parent, for example, it’s not as simple as promising to not do the thing you did last time that didn’t work. Nor is it always doing more of the thing that did work. Your kids are older now, even if just by a week or a month. You are older. As the Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, “no man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” You are both different people, so you have to do things a little differently. You have to figure out what those things are, and you need the strength and the courage and the patience to try them. You need to build on the days that came before, like a good coach or a great teacher. This is the parental version of the spring and summer seasons I talked about earlier.
The key is, you just can’t quit. You can’t accept the status quo, and you definitely can’t accept failure. There’s a great line from Thomas Edison: “I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.” That is the mindset we all must take into our own individual proving seasons. “Our greatest weakness lies in giving up,” Edison said. “The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.” Try to improve our process, try to increase our margin of error for success. Try, try, try. Especially when it comes to things that are important to us.
The proving season is almost here for 32 NFL teams. It could be here any time for you, in whatever capacity you feel like you need to improve. It could be here every day, multiple times a day. With three kids it has certainly felt that way at times as a parent. But that’s life. It’s a challenge—in the best possible sense of the word. And I’m always up for a challenge. After all, that’s where the growth happens.
I hope you’re up for the challenge of getting better at the things you’ve prioritized, and that you’re prepared to prove you have what it takes. If you’re scared or intimidated—that itself is something to work toward improving as well. Trust me, you can do it, along with whatever else it is you want to get better at.
My advice: put it on the schedule. Give it your best effort. And never, ever quit.
