kathy silver

After his second year at Michigan, Tom Brady wanted to transfer. He wasn't playing in games, and he was so low on the depth chart that he only got 2 reps in practice. Brady met with his coach to express his frustration, “The other quarterbacks get all the reps.” Coach replied, “Brady, I want you to stop worrying about what all the other players on our team are doing. All you do is worry about what the starter is doing, what the second guy is doing, what everyone else is doing. You don't worry about what you're doing.” Coach reminded him, “You came here to be the best. If you're going to be the best, you have to beat out the best.” And then he recommended that Brady start meeting with Greg Harden, a sports psychologist who worked in Michigan's athletic department. Brady went to Harden's office and whined, “I'm never going to get my chance. They're only giving me 2 reps.” Harden simply replied, “Just go out there and focus on doing the best you can with those 2 reps. Make them as perfect as you possibly can.” “So that's what I did,” Brady said. “They'd put me in for those 2 reps, man, I'd sprint out there like it was Super Bowl 39. 'Let's go boys! Here we go! What play we got?'” “And I started to do really well with those 2 reps. Because I brought enthusiasm, I brought energy.” Soon, it went from getting 2 reps to getting 4 reps. Then from 4 to 10, “and before you knew it,” Brady said, with this new mindset that Greg instilled in me—to focus on what you can control, to focus on what you're getting, not what anyone else is getting, to treat every rep like it's the Super Bowl—eventually, I became the starter.” Takeaway 1: Greg Harden telling Brady to just focus on being great during his 2 reps reminded me of a piece of advice from the entrepreneur Mark Cuban. “People come to me all the time and tell me they're stuck,” Cuban explained. “They're stuck in a job they don't like. They're stuck working for a boss they don't like. They're stuck on a team they don't like.” “I just tell them, 'Be great.'” “The reality of life is that you can't just always quit your job. You can't just always go to your boss and say, 'Give me the promotion, or I'm out of here.'” You can't just always go to your coach and say, 'Give me more reps, or I'm transferring.' “So when you're stuck, you've gotta find it within yourself to say, 'Ok, this is where I am. And if I'm going to be here, I'm going to be great.' Because if you're great at your job, typically other people and companies find out, so it creates opportunities.” Takeaway 2: I've written before about “lead measures”—the actions and behaviors that predictably drive success. The core characteristic of a lead measure, the authors of The 4 Disciplines of Execution (4DX) write, is that “a lead measure is influenceable; it can be directly influenced by you.” To achieve your goals, they recommend (echoing what the Michigan Coach told Brady), apply a disproportionate energy to the things that are in your control. Starting at Michigan and for the rest of his career, that’s what Brady did, that’s what drove his success. In his first media call after he was selected by the New England Patriots with the 199th pick in the 2000 draft, Brady was asked: “Are you aware that [along with starting quarterback, Drew Bledsoe] there’s another quarterback here that they drafted last year?” Brady said he was aware of that. “And I know he’s a heck of a player,” Brady said. “But I’ve always really concerned myself just with the things I can control. I don’t put a lot of thinking into the other guys because I know I’m not at my best when I’m not just thinking about playing as well as I possibly can.” - - - “I never once in my life ever said I wanted to be the best of all time. Ever. I wanted to be the best I could be, period. I learned that in college. It didn’t matter what the other guys were doing. It mattered what I was doing.” — Tom Brady Follow @bpoppenheimer for more content like this!

On the 27th straight day of filming “Forrest Gump,” Tom Hanks was tired & worried. During a scene on the famous park bench, Hanks stopped & said to director Bob Zemeckis, “Hey, Bob…is anybody going to care about this movie? I don’t think anybody’s going to care.” Bob replied, “It’s a minefield, Tom. You never know what’s good…It’s a minefield! It’s a goddam minefield! We may be sowing the seeds of our own destruction.” Tom Hanks told this story after he was asked, “When I ask for a memory from your career, what’s the first thing that comes to mind?” He said that what Zemeckis said was true of every movie he’s worked on: “There’s never any guarantee...You do not know if it is going to work out.” Takeaway 1: Hanks is the 5th-most highest-grossing actor of all time. And yet, the stickiest memory of his career is the feeling of uncertainty. Rarer than talent or work ethic, the poet John Keats wrote, is the ability to step into and push through doubts and uncertainties. In 1817, Keats wrote a letter to his brothers to share this exciting realization. “At once it struck me,” Keats wrote, “what quality went to form a Man of Achievement … Negative Capability.” Keats explains that “Negative Capability” is “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Takeaway 2: Those who possess Negative Capability, who can sit with uncertainty, who can spend months or years in the minefield that is working on something while knowing that there is a real possibility no one will care about it—they often possess another quality. They do what they do, not as a means to some end (money, fame, awards, etc.), but for the sake of doing it. When asked about one of his movies that commercially failed, Hanks said, "I loved making that movie. I loved writing it, I loved being with it. I love all the people in it." As Ryan Holiday once told me, "The work has to be the win." You control the effort, he says, not the results. "So ultimately, you have to love doing it. You have to get to a place where doing the work is the win and everything else is extra.” - - - “Life is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you're going to get.” — Forrest Gump Follow @bpoppenheimer for more content like this!