9 Lessons Tom Brady Taught Me

Back in another career, my third, I ‘met’ Brady. Everything was brand new: The marriage, the career, the faith and football.

It was 2002. January and my new husband insisted I watch the Playoffs between his beloved Patriots and Oakland. We were living in Connecticut, cold, snowy Connecticut. I’d decided to leave my career in academic medicine where I’d built a national reputation and join my husband in an online business about which I knew nothing. About sales. Or marketing. Or excel spreadsheets.

You know that stress scale? Where a move and loss of a job is about the highest? Add a new marriage and new faith to those two and there is most likely no measurement for the strain I had myself under.

My husband knew I didn’t like football and seemed to have no problem with it. Until the night of that game. When he insisted I stop working and come upstairs to watch Tom Brady’s first Playoff game. Now known as the ‘Tuck Rule’ game, the Patriots had no chance against Oakland. They were outmatched and had no chance of winning, a Patriots Super Bowl win was a pipe dream.

As I reluctantly climbed the stairs, watching the television as I did so, the camera happened to capture an expression on the twenty-three-year-old quarterback’s face. Mesmerized, I stopped and stared. At what was one of the more profound depictions of grit that I’d ever seen. The intensity, determination, and sheer will screamed out of the screen at me.

And I was hooked. Football was nothing like what I’d thought. Always I’d dismissed the game as exactly what it appears to the uninitiated: Chaotic pushing, scrambling, and mindless mayhem.

But I was wrong. First and foremost, it was a mind game. Just like everything I had done before, a matter of digging down deep and refusing to be bowled over. A matter of wholly changing the way reality is perceived. This, I got, I lived here, exactly what my new faith demanded of me, like everything that had come before.

Fifteen years later, the kid is known now as the best quarterback as all time. Despite a massive, incapacitating knee injury in September of 2008, the notorious claim of cheating resulting in huge fines of Deflate Gate, Brady is the only quarterback to have won five Super Bowls.

The most recent Super Bowl game reminded me of that long ago snowy night in Foxboro. There was no chance, the Patriots were outscored, and Brady had been hit something like 16 times. It was impossible.

But then the camera happened to catch Brady’s face. And there it was again. That same expression I had seen back in 2002. And I knew, by God, Brady was going to do this– impossible but he would win this game.

I’m in my 4th career now. After mastering that internet business, I decided to fulfill a long-ago dream as a novelist and am now writing the fourth in a medical mystery series of novels. The first novel took six years to write and publish. The next three were written and released within two years.

Why that remarkable difference between the time of publishing the first and then the subsequent books?

Fear: “I can’t do this,” “This is impossible,” “It’s too hard,” “I don’t know what I’m doing,” “Stick to non-fiction where it’s safe,” are only a few of the voices which took up residence in my mind and heart.

What have I learned from Brady?

1. Don’t listen to the ‘experts.’ Not when they say you’re great nor when they say you’re finished. They don’t know what you know. After the 2008 injury, physicians at two of the nation’s best medical centers told Brady he’d never play football again. The damage done to the ligaments in his knee and by the subsequent infections could not be overcome.
2. Food is medicine. Much of the chronic illness crippling and killing Americans derives from the SAD (Standard American Diet.) Extensive research has revealed the influence of high carbs, sugars and inadequate fat in causing arthritis, heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.
3. If you are not the arbiter of your well-being then no one else will be. Negativity merely hinders what you are trying to achieve. Stay away from it, way away.
4. Life isn’t fair – sometimes people like Roger Goodell walk into your life. And never leave. How we deal with the unreasonable people and events is chosen by us. Do we empower the injustice through claiming it as our reason to fail? Or do we perceive it as just another obstacle waiting to be overcome?
5. Discipline is essential, in the way we eat, exercise and think.
6. We live in a soup of pundits who pitch fear, about the latest disease, catastrophic storm, political crisis. And consume it sometimes on an hourly basis letting it destroy our focus and health. Refuse the message and focus.
7. Absorb our wins. And celebrate.
8. Share what you’ve learned. But not for free.
9. Nothing is impossible.