Some forget that there’s a mental game one likely has to play when pursuing goals
I think it’s easy to fixate on building technical skills to improve performance but I’ve seen the dangers of this one-sided strategy in my professional life that I’ll briefly cover. Afterward, I’ll share how I think this often unspoken mental game is why other QBs in Tom Brady’s draft class didn’t produce the same results that he did.
After close to a year as a new product manager–I was previously a software engineer–an opportunity to create and lead a new product suite that was in the company’s top 10 strategic investment areas opened up and I volunteered to lead it despite it being a role for a product manager with more (I’d say 3) years of experience. One of the reasons I took the role is because I believed it would lead to new and sustainable income growth for the business, cementing the fact that I had a tangible impact on the organization. The opportunity was great but taking that role put me through a gauntlet of personal challenges of worry, anxiety, people-pleasing, and imposter syndrome. After self-reflecting on the cause of those mental health challenges I realized that technical aptitude alone isn’t always enough to perform at desired levels in places of high expectation.
How did Tom Brady, the last picked QB in his draft, win more games than the other QBs drafted before him?
Many forget that Tom Brady was the last QB selected in his draft class and was one of the few to go on to start for an NFL team and win a Superbowl. This film analyzed Tom Brady’s success and examined why his draft counterparts didn’t produce similar results. Interestingly, all QBs selected before Tom were seen to be athletically superior to him–judged by NFL physical tests–but most of them failed to make it past one NFL season and, in some cases, their first preseason.
Even the coaches of the highly acclaimed QBs could not understand why their highly recruited draft pick crumbled under the limelight.
One coach spoke on how their top QB pick never played the same after his first pre-season game. “Something happened to him.” My theory is that “something” was an internal battle of self-doubt, imposter syndrome, and worry at a level the QB hadn’t experienced before and could not overcome.
I speak with experience because I faced similar internal strife when I took on that high-profile project at work.
Do you actually want what you say you want?
A question that I think is overlooked when someone is pursuing a difficult goal which many of the analysts in the Tom Brady video didn’t ask is: Do you really want what you say you want? I think it’s a greater challenge and in some cases, impossible to overcome the mental hurdles a goal presents when you don’t genuinely want the outcome you’re striving for. A number of the other QBs that were expected to be high performers in Tom Brady’s draft class may have realized that they didn’t want to be QBs bad enough to endure and overcome the challenges that come with the job.
