There’s a line that pops into my mind when I talk to teams about their goals: “no plan survives first contact with the enemy.” You can think you’ve done the work, that you’re prepared, that you have things figured out, but then life happens, the games get played, and the world shows you that it has other ideas.
You can’t control whether your plans survive first contact with adversity, but you can control whether your values and principles do. Those are what you will need to lean on as you pick yourself up and continue battling in pursuit of your goals.
First and foremost, you have to lean into the fight. Embrace the arena. I’m not talking about the physical football stadium, or the soccer pitch, or the court. I’m talking about the internal battleground for the contest with yourself. Sports is a proving ground. It’s where you get to unleash your obsessions, push yourself and test your limits. It’s trial by combat, where it’s your own ass you’re kicking most of the time, just to see what you’re made of.
The arena is a gift because it’s hard—climbing Mount Everest, taking AP Physics hard. It’s like that on purpose. To show you that there are no shortcuts. That you get out of it, what you put into it. If you show up, if you compete your ass off. If you’re a good teammate and never, ever quit, the arena will teach you invaluable lessons that you can take with you for the rest of your life: consistency, accountability, preparation, determination, discipline.
I’m sure most of you already know this. I shouldn’t need to tell you not to be a lazy flake. You’re smart and talented. But you don’t know everything. In fact, the more you know as you get older, the more you understand just how much you have left to learn. I’m 49 and I’m still learning just how dumb I am every day—from my kids, from my social feeds, from a thousand different places. Your place on the infinite spectrum of knowledge should be humbling to you, and so should the fact that your coaches are a few notches ahead of you.
When they critique you, don’t take it personally. They’re not showing you up. They’re doing their jobs. More than that, they’re making an investment in you. They’re saying that your improvement is worth their time and effort, so they’re going to show you what you don’t know and teach you the skills you’ll need to eventually eclipse them.
If your coach’s critique pisses you off, don’t look all offended…look in the mirror. Maybe the reason you’re getting so defensive is that they hit on something you know is true but you’ve been trying to avoid recognizing in yourself? Maybe the only sin they committed was seeing right through your bullshit.
The first step in self-improvement is self-awareness. Be humble enough to acknowledge the deficiency a legitimate critique is identifying, and be coachable enough to try something new, something that works. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. That’s also the recipe for finding yourself on the bench.
And coaches, if your players can live up to their end of the bargain, then you need to live up to yours. Don’t pull punches. Don’t do everybody a disservice by focusing on the wins and telling your players how good they are all the time. There’s only so much you can learn from success, you learn a lot more in defeat. How do you expect your players to improve if they don’t know where they’re falling short? I know it can be hard to drop the hammer on a nice kid who tries hard, but it’s iron that sharpens iron, not kid gloves.
Every critique is an opportunity for improvement. Every player on your team should be trying to make the most of their opportunities. Because you never know how many you’ll have or which ones might be a springboard to the next level. The only thing you control is what you do when the opportunities come.
When I got to Michigan in 1995, I was at the bottom of the depth chart. I struggled the first couple years to get on the field or to get any practice reps with the first team. And I didn’t have a great attitude about the situation. It felt unfair, like the coaches were playing favorites.
Then one day I walked into the office of our sports psychologist, a man named Greg Harden who became both a mentor and a friend. Greg’s message was simple: stop worrying about what other people are doing and focus on the opportunities that you are getting. If you only get three reps at practice, make them the best three reps of your life. Treat them like a game. Bring that level of intensity, enthusiasm and leadership to your opportunities and make the most of those moments.
I took Greg’s advice and marched my way up the depth chart. But it wasn’t talent or hard work alone that got me the starting quarterback job, truly. It was also the trust I earned from my coaches and teammates when they saw that I would seize any opportunity given to me and get the job done. Greg made me realize that while it’s the coaches’ job to teach me the plays and show me how to run them, when I was under center—for three snaps or three quarters—it was my job to be the offensive coordinator of those plays, that unit, and ultimately of my own life.
You’re going to get benched at some point. You’re going to get sidelined—by injury, by bad luck, by some pretty boy two-sport, five-star recruit from up the road (hypothetically speaking). It doesn’t really matter why, let’s move on. What does matter is that when your number is called again, you prove that you can handle the moment and live up to your responsibilities. Do that, and you become a known commodity and a trusted member of the team. Do that enough times, you don’t just become indispensable, you become incomparable.
Just don’t think that makes you a star.
In my opinion, a star is the last thing you should want to be. In our social media-driven culture, highlight reels and personal brands are what get emphasized. Attention has become the commodity that matters most and it has produced a generation of athletes, artists and entrepreneurs who seek stardom over staying power. Winning has become secondary to being seen.
This is not the champion’s mindset! Champions do the unseen work, the dirty work. On the football field, they’re the receivers blocking downfield in the run game, they’re the gunners who fight through the double team on punt coverage until the whistle blows. On the basketball court, they’re the picksetters, the offensive rebounders, the defenders who pick up 94 feet. You get the idea.
People who become champions don’t have highlight reels. They don’t end up on the SportsCenter Top 10. Their footage looks like a mistake. It’s an infinite loop of them doing the same things over and over again. The same drills, the same warm-up routines, doing their job the same way every time. Champions practice not until they are perfect, but until they are sure they will never get it wrong.
Champions are we-first, not me-first. They put in the work, they don’t put on a show. They’re Daniel LaRusso from Karate Kid, not Danny Zuko from Grease. They sand the floor, they don’t dance on it. They’re in early, out late. They run the extra hill. They go the extra mile.
Champions court failure and the critiques that come with it, even though it doesn’t feel good, because they know that’s the best way to learn. Stars fear failure and run from accountability because it doesn’t look good on the ‘gram.
Make no mistake, stars burn brightly, and they capture our imagination, but they fade away as quickly as they burst onto the scene, and then they disappear from our consciousness altogether. Champions are eternal. They’re names are etched into trophies and their accomplishments are etched into our memories forever. Choose to be a champion, don’t settle for being a star.
How do you become a champion? Besides taking to heart what I’ve just shared with you—and winning, obviously—you do it by getting better every day. Greatness doesn’t happen all at once. It’s the end result of a long incremental process defined by the pursuit of excellence. That pursuit is a daily exercise in self-improvement—physically, mentally, and emotionally.
Physically, every day you should work to get a little stronger, a little faster. Eat a little better. Drink a bit more water. Improve one of the foundational skills of your sport. Be sturdier, be steadier.
Mentally, be a little bit more prepared each day. Know your job. Learn your opponent. Communicate a little bit more or a little more clearly. Be locked in sooner and longer than you were the day before.
Emotionally, learn how to deal better with failure and loss. Bring a competitive edge even on the days when it’s hard, not just when it’s easy. Bring more optimism into your team. Level up your resilience. Let pressure convert you into a diamond, not crumble you into dust.
This is the path of nearly every great athlete you’ve admired. They’ve all started out as the worst guy on a unit or the weakest link in a chain, full of talent and energy, short on experience and perspective, but dedicated to getting a little bit better every day—and not for the reason you might think.
As a Bay Area kid, one of my favorite players growing up was Jerry Rice. I’ve had the privilege of getting to know him a little bit, and he said once that the reason he worked as hard as he did to improve every day, even toward the end of his career, had nothing to do with money or rings or legacy. He just never wanted to let his teammates down.
If you do everything I’ve just told you to do, you will become a better player, a good leader, and with a little luck, a champion. If you do it for the guy to your left, for the girl to your right, not only will you become a better teammate, you will become a better person.
That’s what matters most of all. Because the ultimate prize of being part of a team isn’t the trophies or the accolades—it’s the memories you make with the people who fought alongside you in the arena.
