It is hard. It's hard when you're young to wake up in the off season at 6:00 a. m.
to go train and work out, knowing that all your friends are sleeping in and eating pancakes. It's hard when you're on your way to practice way down with all your gear and it's 90Β° out and all the other kids are at the pool or at the beach. It's hard to throw, catch, block, and tackle, and hit kids when they're way bigger and way more developed than you, only to go home that night bruised and battered and strained, but knowing you have to show up again the next day for just the chance to try again.
But understand this, life is hard. No matter who you are, there are bumps and hits and bruises along the way. And my advice is to prepare yourself because football lessons teach us that success and achievement come from overcoming adversity.
I remember being downstairs for like the fourth round and and I came and gone and the fifth round, you know, was coming and going and all these other guys were getting picked and and and it was hard. I remember taking a walk with my dad and mom around the block. Sorry about that.
It was just a tough day, you know. You know, finally when the Patriots called, I was so excited, you know. I was like, I don't have to be an insurance salesman, you know.
All those experiences that we think are the hardest things in our life end up being the best experiences in our life because if you approach it with humility and you look inward, they become the the best opportunities for growth and learning. because I developed this work ethic in high school and I realized, man, if I want to be good, I got to I got to wake up in the morning and I got to do the extra work and I got to show up when other guys aren't and I've got to learn. I've got to continue to be open to learning to be successful at anything.
The truth is, you don't have to be special. You just have to be what most people aren't. Consistent, determined, and willing to work for it.
integrity, purpose, determination, and discipline that it takes to be a champion in life. No shortcuts. It was a It was a tough battle for me.
It was a tough go. It was tough in high school. It was really tough in college.
If I want to be the best, I got to beat the best. And this is where the best are. Said I wasn't the prodigy.
I learned about work ethic. I learned about resilience. I learned about gaining the trust and the respect of my teammates and coaches.
I learned about how to dig deep within myself a long way from home without a ton of support to still try to find a way to succeed in this situation that I really wanted to be in because it was the best for me anyway. Focus on what you can control. Focus on what you're getting, not what anyone else is getting.
Go out there and treat practice like no one else does. And I did that every single day. I I didn't care about going to all these different places and doing those things.
I just wanted to to be my best. The team believed in me. I didn't want to let him down.
What What's the choice you get to make every day to wake up and say, "All right, this is where I'm going to focus my time and energy. " How disciplined are you to maintain that routine over a period of time? And I think that will determine your level of [Music] success.
Be proud of that man that wakes up every day and does the best that he could do with his priorities. Did you always have an absolute killer instinct where I'm going to show you, I'm going to prove? Wait till you see what I'm going to do.
I'm going to kill this guy when we face him. Was it always like that when you were in high school or that kind of developed later on? Yeah, I think it developed over a period of time.
And I think there was a work ethic that was in me, but I was never, I would say, like a prodigy. I didn't have the arm that could throw the ball 80 yards. I didn't have the speed that Michael Vic had.
I didn't have the size that a lot of guys had, but I did have something inside of me that no one could see from the outside. This level of discipline that I could accomplish something that was really important and really special. I wanted to be a great football player.
If I was going to be a great football player, I wanted to compete against these other guys. And they were all better than me. Don't worry about all these things are out of your control.
Focus on what you can do. Focus on the two reps you got. your tired body.
That unmotivated mind and get out there and do it anyway. And the mindset is me verse me. It's no It was all about not making excuses.
It was about how do we go out and get it done? I was so motivated to be the best I could be that it wasn't I wasn't motivated to be the starter. I wasn't motivated to win the Super Bowl.
I just was motivated to give my best, do the best with the opportunity I got, and to never let my teammates down. Those were my motivations. I think you wake up every day and hopefully you can look at yourself and say, "Did I give it my best?
I wanted to be the best I could be. " Period. That's all I wanted.
I I just think winning Super Bowls was the result of a lot of great process. Like my view is like you can't control the outcome all the time, right? Like the ball's going to bounce the other team's way.
Like shouldn't always go your way. So you get motivated by the losses, you stay motivated through the winning. What you can control is your process.
You can control those intangibles. You can control the work ethic, the consistent discipline, your attitude, your culture, how much you care. All those things are in you.
They just need to be drawn out of you. And really, when you're in that position that you feel like you're got those pretty well under control, then you start passing those on to the other people that you're working with that are parts of your team. Cuz I don't care how good any one of you are sitting out there.
It doesn't matter unless you got a great team around you. You know, you could be great. You probably are great.
You need a lot of other great people to support you. It takes so many people to get to where we get in our life. Yeah, I was there doing some of the work, but couldn't have done it if I didn't have them.
When I was a quarterback, I was just playing quarterback. Yeah, it was me, the person, but it was it was me, the quarterback, that was out there, cuz I was doing a job. I wasn't the father.
I wasn't the dad out there. I wasn't, you know, the husband out there. I was the quarterback out there on the field.
I was a quarterback when I went to work. Nothing was going to get in the way of that. You've got to create a lot of different emotion to to to heighten your sense of awareness and focus.
Like for me, anger was good. Anger was good because it was motivating. The more I could create an enemy, the more I wanted to go out and kill those guys.
Now, I knew I was going to kill them physically, but man, if I could just What did they say? you know, and what did they look like? And do they disrespect me at all?
Those are little little little things that can get me right in the emotional frame of mind that when I ran on the field and I said, "Let'sing go. " It was really, "Let's go kick some ass. " That's what we were doing.
This is the moment right now. Let's get to work. The fundamental belief is I'm giving myself to something greater than myself.
something greater than me as an individual. If I look at that journey from where I was as a kid, I had my parents that were in my life to support me every step of the way. I had my junior varsity football coaches, my throwing coach and mentor.
I went to Michigan. I had coach Carr challenge me to say, "Those who stay will be champions. " So, I stayed.
But don't think that you're going to have a lot of success if all you do is care about yourself. You don't work that hard. No one's that accountable.
But in the end, what does culture mean to me? Do we care about each other? And do we care about what we're trying to accomplish?
Most people just care about themselves. Well, that's a lot. That's a lot of consistent discipline.
It means that you got to do a lot more right than wrong. It means that you got to make a lot more good choices than bad choices. It means you have to be more disciplined than not disciplined.
Physically, mentally, emotionally, all those little things add up. The man in the glass, that's the one that motivated me. He's the guy I was accountable to.
Nothing that anyone did took away from me. The only person that could take away from me is me. No one's good at everything.
I mean, that's just not the way life works. What you know is very limited and what you don't know is limitless. The man who led us to six Super Bowls.
Those who stay will be champions. War number 12, the greatest of all time right here at Tom Brady. If I want to be the best, I got to beat the best.
Man, if I want to be good, I got to I got to wake up in the morning and I got to do the extra work and I got to show up when other guys aren't. And I've got to learn. I've got to continue to be open to learning.
But I had to take it to a new level that the other guys wouldn't. Nothing was given to me. So, I'm going to go out there and compete as hard as I can.
And I'm going to treat practice like a game. And I'm going to gain the respect of my teammates every day through my work ethic. I'm going to work hard in the weight room.
I'm going to work hard in the film room. I'm going to work hard to be a good student. Whatever they ask me to do, that's what I'm going to do to the best of my ability.
I never once in my life ever said I wanted to be the best of all time. I'm just a story like everybody else. I wanted to be the best I could be.
Period. And I said, "Be proud of the man in the glass. Be proud of that man that wakes up every day and does the best you can do with his priorities.
" We're all talented at certain things, but we can really continue to improve our weaknesses if we're humble enough to identify them and we can build on our strengths. Focus on what you can control. Focus on what you're getting, not what anyone else is getting.
Whenever you get an opportunity, you take advantage of you. Treat it like it's the Super Bowl. You treat it like it's game day.
Go out there and treat practice like no one else does. And you have an opportunity every day to surround yourself with people to help you grow. You know, I always said we play for the name on the front of our jersey was a Patriots or the Bucks or and I play for the name on the back of the jersey, which was my family and the people that encouraged [Music] me.
I was so blessed to have this discipline over a really long period of time. It was a lot of tough competition. [Music] But I was never, I would say, like a prodigy.
You know, I wasn't like the kid where you see Tiger Wood swinging on the Johnny Carson show at 2 or 3 years old and, you know, his swing looks as good as it did at 3 years old as it did, you know, as he as he grew older or, you know, certain players that h that had this unbelievable uh prodigy aspect to themselves. I I I saw myself as someone who probably had some other traits that maybe were hard to identify but that were really sustainable over time which was I would say work ethic and and [Music] discipline. There was this discipline that I had that even as 13, 14, 15 years old where all these other boys were I went to an all boy school in the Bay Area and I remember showing up my first day as freshman year.
I didn't have much, you know, hair under my arms or anything like that. I was like, and these other kids came in shaving. I'm like, what the hell is this?
I didn't know how to put the pads on in my pants when I tried out for freshman football. I I mean, I had never played until that point except in the street. So, these kids came out there, they had, you know, helmets and shoulder pads that they had worn for 4 years.
I went on the field and I was like, I'm going to get killed out here, you know, and my freshman year, I didn't even play. I was the backup quarterback on a team that went 0 and8. I couldn't get on the field and we never won a game anyway.
I mean, it's one thing to be the starting quarterback and to lose. If they don't even think you're good enough to be a starting quarterback on a team that's 08, you must really suck. So, naturally, I was like, "Oh, cool.
I'll continue to, you know, work on my skill. " A lot of it was even going into my second year in high school. There were workouts in the morning at 6:00 a.
m. before school. And I was like, "Okay, I can I can get up at 6:00 a.
m. and I can go do these rope drills where you'd run through the ropes. " You see a lot of people do.
There were these hills that we would run up. And there was probably less than 10 people there, but I was probably one of the three that were there almost every single day to try to continue to push myself to grow in these maybe physical areas that I was really behind a lot of the other people that and I went in there competed really hard my third year and I lost the starting job to Brian Greasie. So I going into my fourth year and I was like now's my time.
I worked hard to compete my first three years. Going into my fourth year, I got a great opportunity to play and they recruited a kid named Drw Henson. And I was like, the competition is relentless.
At first, I was looking at the guys ahead of me. Now, I got to be looking down at the guys behind me, too. And going into my fourth year, my teammates named me team captain and I won the starting job.
We had a good year. We finished 10 and three, you know, beat everyone out. And then I showed up and coach Carr says, "Well, you're gonna compete with Drw Henson to be the starter going into your fifth year.
" And I was like, "You got to be kidding me. You want me to compete? That's what we're going to do.
" I competed really hard again in my fifth year. Took it to a new level. Thought about my conditioning, my strength, thought about how I was doing my making my decisions off the field.
I was starting to play really good and I thought, you know, I'm going to I'm going to have a chance. Coach Carr called me in. He said, 'Well, Tom, this is what we're going to do.
You're going to start, Drw. You're going to play the second quarter, and I'm going to decide at halftime who plays the rest of the year. Coach Car said, "The platoon's off.
Tom's playing the rest of the year. We didn't lose a game the rest of the season. " It was a tough battle for me going.
It was a tough go. It was tough in high school. It was really tough in college.
So, of course, now I'm going to the NFL draft and I'm like, all these pro coaches must have seen how good I was, man. I'm going to be a second round pick. Round one, two, and here we go.
Sixth round, pick 199. And I was like, "All right, I'm going to make all those other teams pay. " Like I said, I wasn't the prodigy.
I learned about work ethic. I learned about resilience. I learned about gaining the trust and the respect of my teammates and coaches to name me captain.
I learned about how to dig deep within myself a long way from home without a ton of support. I was so motivated to be the best I could be that it wasn't I wasn't motivated to be the starter. I wasn't motivated to win the Super Bowl.
I just was motivated to give my best, do the best with the opportunity I got, and to never let my teammates down. [Music] All those experiences that we think are the hardest things in our life end up being the best experience in our life because if you approach it with humility and you look inward they become the best opportunities for growth and [Music] learning. So those people could say man I want to exercise for one day or I want to be more hydrated for one day.
Well, can you do it for a week? Well, that's more discipline, right? Can you do it for a month?
That's more discipline. Can you do it for a year? That's even more discipline.
How disciplined are you to maintain that routine over a period of time? And I think that will determine your level of success. Fame didn't motivate me.
I didn't give a about any of it. I always took less money cuz I wanted a good team around me. I didn't care about going to all these different places and doing those things.
I just wanted to to be my best. I wanted to go out there and I the team believed in me. I didn't want to let them down.
If I want to be the best, I got to beat the best.
