May 13, 2025

Every Monday (and maybe Tuesday!), 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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The blessing of being overlooked

Last week, my great friend Julian Edelman was inducted into the New England Patriots Hall of Fame. I was going to say that it couldn’t have happened to a better, more deserving guy, not only did he deserve it, he earned it.

REFLECTION

There’s a lot about Julian that people remember. The punt returns. The playoff receptions. The hockey playoff beard. The greatest catch in Super Bowl history on the game-tying drive in Super Bowl 51 against the Falcons. Now they know him as an NFL analyst on the FOX pregame show and as a successful podcast host who gets to hang out with Gronk in his pool house talking sports twice a week and get paid for it. Living the dream!

But there’s a lot about Julian that people don’t know and don’t remember. They don’t remember that he was drafted in the middle of the seventh round. They don’t remember that he was a scrambling quarterback all through high school and for three years at Kent State…and he was great at it. His senior year, he broke the school’s single season yardage record. They don’t remember that he was drafted as a pure athlete and had to fight to figure out his place on our team when we were already three Super Bowl wins deep into our run.

And what most people don’t know is that from almost the very beginning of his tenure with the Patriots in 2009, he and I would go at it like big brother, little brother. He was one of the few guys in our locker room who could give it to me the way I gave it to him, and I was very giving!

I think one of the reasons for our connection is that we had a lot in common. We are both Bay Area kids. We were both underestimated coming out of college. And we both carried a chip on our shoulders our entire careers that drove us to incredible success despite our perceived physical limitations.

LESSON

Julian and I were lucky to be born the way we were, with what I would call hidden blessings. Him, being undersized. Me, not being able to run or jump. I think the chip on the shoulder it gave us has been far more valuable than if we were blessed with all of the great physical attributes, because it forced us to develop those intangible mental and emotional traits that are the difference between good players and great players, and between great players and champions. They are the traits that produce sustained success beyond the point at which you’ve met your match physically and athletically.

Oftentimes, having all the physical traits actually makes it hard to develop the intangibles. The mental game and the emotional game—the IQ and the EQ. If you’ve been able to do it all with ease since you could walk, where’s the motivation to become a better tape watcher or to understand yourself and how you deal with your emotions? Where’s the need, even? Young athletes are still growing. Eighteen year olds—especially boys—are some of the dumbest people on the planet. If they can’t see the need to add something to their game because they’re already the best in their district or their state, you’re not getting through to them usually until it’s too late and their bad habits are ingrained and hard-wired.

I guarantee, if you go to any city or any college, and you pick any of the major sports programs, then ask the people there who was the greatest athlete they’d ever seen, at least half the time they’re going to give you the name of someone you’ve never heard of. And most of the time, that person is going to be a naturally gifted, transcendent athlete who never developed the other skills necessary to be truly great and to win consistently at a high level.

This is the curse of giftedness, which shines a light on the blessing of physical limitations. Physical limitations guarantee a degree of failure that provides untold opportunities to deal with adversity, to manage stress and disappointment, and to grow as a result. And everyone is different. One person's limitation might be their bench press. Someone else's might be how recklessly they play when they WANT it too much. Each person has to figure out a different strategy to transcend their limitations. Mine was emotion, energy, discipline, determination, and positivity. I willed myself where I wanted to end up. Julian’s strategy was work ethic, intensity, effort, and stamina. Everything with him was max effort.

APPLICATION

This dichotomy between natural ability and acquired skill isn’t just limited to the physical, mental, and emotional realm of sports. You see it in business all the time. I talked about this the other day on Logan Paul’s podcast, Impaulsive. They asked me whether I thought talent or hard work was more important—you know what my answer was—and I mentioned my friend Mike Repole at NOBULL. Mike is a hardworking guy from Queens, who went to St. John’s right in his backyard, and then co-founded Glaceau and BodyArmor SuperDrink and sold them to Coca-Cola for multiple billions of dollars. He told me once, “I had a 2.2 GPA, and all the Harvard guys work for me now.”

That’s no knock on the Harvard guys, but their 4.0 GPAs and perfect SAT scores aren’t driving them to invent entirely new beverage verticals as a way to make a name for themselves, the way Mike did. For many of them, I suspect, getting into Harvard had already done that for them. And I’m sure they’re leading good lives and doing interesting things, but it doesn’t change the fact that when you look at the teams you love, the memories you cherish, the clothes you wear, the businesses you admire, the products you swear by, or the music that inspires you—it’s almost always created by someone who wasn’t chiseled out of marble by God, but was built by their own hands with the support of humble, equally hardworking people who pushed them to be great and do their best.

Do I wish Julian possessed greater natural ability to read the playbook and remember his assignments? Sure. But his energy, effort and grit produced some hilarious moments, some historic wins, and even more amazing memories.

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