May 19, 2025

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Every Monday, 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 power of a change of scenery

It was a big week for football fans with the release of the NFL schedule. I know where I’ll be for about a dozen weekends this fall. I’m gonna see a lot of the Lions and the Cowboys, that’s for sure. But right now I’m more interested in where I’ve just been than where I’m slated to go.

REFLECTION

I just got back from a week in Ireland. It was my first visit to the city of Dublin. I had a couple speaking engagements, I did a late-night talk show, and I got some golf in with some friends. It was a fantastic week. What has stuck with me the most about this trip, though, was not the events so much as it was my awareness of my surroundings and my reaction to them.

It didn’t matter whether I was walking the cobblestone streets of Dublin or the fairways of Royal County Down, everything was interesting, or noteworthy, or more. I noticed the green of the grass, the texture of the cobbles, the blue of the sky, the white and gray of the clouds. Even the wind was…better. I don’t know how to describe it.

I’ve played hundreds of golf courses in my life. They’re each unique and beautiful, but the grass is still green, the sand is still beige, the water is still wet, and the rough is still my nemesis. This time it was different. It was like I was 14 years old again, leaving home for the first time. The day we played golf, I must have said, “isn’t this just the most beautiful day?!”, fifteen times to anyone who happened to be around me. And here’s the thing about that: it was 64 degrees and cloudy! Where I live in Miami, that’s a shit day. People are walking around in sweaters and complaining about climate change when it drops below 75. In Ireland, it felt like I was walking inside a postcard.

I think a big reason I felt that way was because everything was new.

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LESSON

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to realize that traveling the world has been maybe the greatest privilege to come from my professional success. That’s because travel has exposed me to a tsunami of newness. New foods, new cultures, new people, new languages, new experiences.

Travel takes you out of the normal context of your daily life and puts you in situations you’re not wired for. Those things you take for granted–your commute, your routines, even simple things like reading street signs and buying a coffee–travel strips them all away and forces you to pay attention to the world around you. Really pay attention. It’s one of the big reasons food always tastes so different (and usually so much better) when you’re on vacation. It’s why we take pictures of sunsets on the beach and sunrises from plane windows. It’s the same friggin’ sun wherever you are, but it’s different when you’re traveling because you’re actually paying attention to it, looking at it, considering it from a new perspective.

That may be the greatest benefit of travel: encountering different perspectives and creating new ones of your own. The perspective you gain from travel does two amazing things for your life, no matter who you are or what you do. It allows for new inputs which create new outputs, and it expands time in a way that enriches your perception of each day.

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APPLICATION

Routines are great for efficiency and productivity, but they are not great for creativity and personal development. To grow and evolve, you need to experience new and different things. To innovate and to create something new, you need inspiration. That doesn’t happen when you’re afraid to leave your bubble or you become a prisoner to your routine. It only happens when you go out into the world and allow it to change your perspective.

The three-point revolution in basketball and the Moneyball revolution in baseball didn’t happen because GMs and coaches kept doing the same things they always did. Guys like Daryl Morey and Mike D’Antoni in the NBA, or Billy Beane and Theo Epstein in MLB, started talking to math nerds instead of gym rats and grizzled scouts. They didn’t just watch tape of their next opponent, they went to high school and college games where undersized or undermanned teams were doing things differently in order to win games. In the NFL, half of the four-wide shotgun sets that teams ran when I was playing were the byproduct of offensive coordinators watching Mike Leach put up a million points against Big-12 and Pac-12 defenses with his air raid offense when he was at Texas Tech and Washington State.

These new inputs created new outputs.

Now, I recognize that not everyone is able to travel widely, or at all. But you don’t need to go to Ireland or Vietnam or Argentina to see the world around you with new eyes. You just have to do things a little differently.

Do something as simple as take a different route to work every day for a week. You’ll be surprised how many new things you see that you didn’t even know were there because you’re not on autopilot and you’ve been forced to pay attention. Muscle memory isn’t getting you from Point A to Point B, so all your senses are firing.

If you take the bus or the subway to work and you don’t get to choose your route, take your earbuds out and put your phone down, and watch the people around you for a week. How many of the same people do you see each day? Consider the clothes they wear. How many wear the same coat? Carry the same bag? Sit in the same seat? Count how many people have wet hair, like they just got out of the shower and rushed to get to the station. How many people are sleeping? How many are reading? What are they reading? Does anyone look sad? Happy? Amused? Excited? Depressed? Is anyone talking? Listen to their conversations. What are they talking about?

When you do an exercise like this, it explodes time because you fill every moment with something new. By the end of a single day, everything you’ve taken in from the world you had previously drifted through with your mind closed is enough to fill a novel. In the space of thirty minutes to an hour, your world has gone from black & white to technicolor. Whereas the week before, I bet you could count on one hand the things you remember seeing on your way to and from work. Because time collapsed on you. You got in the car, you blinked, you were at work, you blinked again, and you were back home.

When people say they woke up one morning only to realize they were fifty, tired and miserable, this is how it happens. They became prisoners to the predictable routines of daily life and they never gave themselves the opportunities to discover new things or to see old things in new ways.

Travel is the key that takes the handcuffs off. It is the surest way to change your context and your perspective. So as summer approaches, think about taking a few days off of work, or if you can’t, taking a few different ways to get there.

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