REFLECTION
Three of the greatest athletes to ever live, who are widely considered the GOATs of their respective sports, had careers that were filled with errors. Michael Jordan missed 15,000 shots and had almost 3500 turnovers. Tiger Woods has carded nearly 1000 bogeys in his career. Serena Williams committed more than 2700 double faults.
Their many titles and trophies float amidst an even greater number of failures, at least by volume. My career was no exception: in between my Super Bowls and MVPs, I threw more than 250 interceptions, had 150 fumbles and more than 5000 incompletions.
That’s a lot of mistakes. My point is: everyone makes mistakes. Even the best of us. We all fail. Often. Mistakes are part of the game. But accepting that mistakes are a fact of life DOES NOT mean you should accept your own individual mistakes, ignore them and do nothing about them.
Mistakes are a vitally necessary part of the game precisely because they are the beginning of the improvement cycle. You only get better when you recognize why you made a mistake, and work the problem until you’ve fixed the underlying failure and incorporated the solution into your process. If you ever want to learn from your failures so you can grow and get better, maintaining that any mistake, however small, is an exception, and then dismissing it as an anomalous rarity is the last thing you should do.
When I threw a bad interception or missed an open receiver, I didn’t chalk it up to tough luck and tell myself it was okay because it was just one throw. As soon as possible, I was on the phone to our offensive coordinator, I was watching replays, I was looking at the all-22 film, and I was figuring out what precipitated the mistake and why it happened. Once I understood it, I could drill the footwork and visualize the routes in my head, I could re-run the plays in practice, I could meet with my receivers to communicate what we needed to improve on—whatever I needed to do to improve the chances that this particular mistake never happened again.
That’s really what we’re talking about when it comes to learning from mistakes: it’s reducing the odds of failure by going back and doing things the right way. It’s using good habits to prevent individual bad decisions from becoming chronic bad habits.
LESSON
Teams that underperform and individuals who consistently struggle to live up to their potential are really bad at learning from mistakes, and really great at making excuses. In the huddle after a bad practice rep, or in the film room after a bad loss, these are the guys avoiding and downplaying their mistakes.
The thing is, these aren’t bad people. It’s human nature to want to hide from our mistakes. It’s very difficult to call ourselves out. There’s a lot of fear that comes with raising your hand and basically saying, “look at me, I messed up.” Growing up, most of us were not rewarded for that kind of vulnerability. We were scolded, made fun of, sometimes even ostracized. Nobody wants to put themselves in that position voluntarily. It’s much easier to brush off mistakes, to minimize them.
It was just one play, one half, one game.
It was just one missed tackle, one missed assignment, one missed signal.
The problem with this approach is that it’s never just one. Especially when you have a support system full of people who love you and have your best interests at heart, but who also believe they are protecting you when they let you get away with excuses like this. When they start to echo this “just one” mantra, or they shun personal accountability by shifting blame to other people on the team, that’s when mistakes start to compound and the disease of losing takes root.
You can learn a lot from people who deflect their mistakes instead of having the confidence to stand up and take responsibility for them. What you discover is that people who minimize the importance of a mistake, instead of trying to understand it and nip it in the bud, eventually start lowering their expectations for themselves, until perfection is no longer the goal, excellence is no longer the target, and ‘good enough’ becomes a job well done.
This lackadaisical attitude leaves the door open for one-off, one-time mistakes to happen again, and more often. “Just one” play in a game, becomes just one play PER game, which becomes just one play per HALF. When this attitude is allowed to fester, it behaves like a disease. It’s a virus. It just continues to spread. Before you know it, you’ve got a bunch of guys convinced that as long as there’s “just one” mistake per SNAP per unit, then the play wasn’t a total failure.
In my experience, this is a losing attitude.
Ironically, it’s worse when this attitude starts to develop on a winning team, because there’s a sense that if you’re winning then the mistakes couldn’t be all that bad. If they were truly bad, then you would have lost. That’s the logic. But this isn’t about logic. It’s about the emotional contagion that spreads through an organization when you have people who excuse failure instead of learning from it. Because when the losing starts, which it inevitably will, nobody can figure out what went wrong, fingers get pointed, and excuses really start to flow. This is when good habits go bad, the right values get abandoned, and a positive culture becomes virtually impossible to cultivate.
APPLICATION
It’s easy to see how the problem of “Just One” can spread to other areas of life:
It was just one bad meal.
It was just one kiss.
It was just one time.
It was just one missed meeting, one missed bus, one missed flight.
It was just one missed recital, one missed game, one missed family dinner.
It can take years to develop trust between people in a relationship. According to James Clear, it takes anywhere from 2-8 months to form a new habit. It only takes one bonehead mistake that you don’t take seriously to blow all of it to smithereens. Before you know it, your whole season, your whole life, everything you’ve worked for, can come crumbling down around you because you made excuses for mistakes you never bothered to understand.
MJ, Tiger, Serena, myself—we all understood that mistakes were going to happen. We knew we were going to screw up. In fact, we kind of courted failure. We pushed the limits to see how far we could go, understanding that mistakes would be how we found one of those walls I talked about last week.
During my playing career, I tried new things all the time in practice looking to see if there was some kind of unlock that would make us better. When an unlock didn’t materialize and mistakes started to happen, then I knew where I was progress-wise and I got to work fixing the problem, getting through that wall.
I never ran from my failures, and I never let them define me. You shouldn’t either. Instead, YOU define the failures–as chances to learn, as opportunities for growth, as the beginning of the next improvement cycle.
I made a point to acknowledge every mistake, individually, and to look at it with clear eyes. I sought to understand my mistakes, to dissect them, and to solve their root causes. More than that, I wanted to feel my mistakes. I remember sitting at my locker for forty-five minutes after one of those Super Bowl losses to the Giants and not moving. I wanted to sit in the anger and the disappointment and the pain, until there was no gray area left in my mind. This was my mistake, nobody else’s, and now I was going to spend the next six months putting actions behind these feelings so that this mistake never happened again—or if it did, never for the same reason.
It’s okay to make mistakes. More than “just one”, even. But it’s not okay to absolve yourself of responsibility for those mistakes. That is not what a leader does. That is not what a winner does. Excellence and high performance demand clarity, accountability, responsibility, and commitment. Together, this is the antidote to the problem of “Just One.” It cures excuses. It helps you live in the solution. It makes growth possible and success more likely.
If you’re still trying to figure out your New Year’s resolutions for 2026, I can’t think of a better place to start than right here.
