by John Tamny
Like Buckingham, Jordan, and Bryant, he searched for and found his passion. As Buffett himself once said, “In the world of business, the people who are the most successful are those who are doing what they love.”8 Buffett may be an outlier when it comes to talent and brains, but that’s advice that everyone should take to heart.
But what about you? Are you lazy? You’ve probably thought so; maybe said so to others. And others may have said it about you. Maybe that’s why you bought this book. It’s a fair bet that there have been times when you’ve just gone through the motions, and you’ve known it. It’s easy to pinpoint days of light effort because after a day of not giving it your all, you don’t feel good about yourself.
“Blood, sweat, and tears” matter. Far from being the cause of emotional pain, they’re the path to happiness. Some people have a naturally sunny temperament, but no one is born with happiness. And no one can bestow happiness on you. It’s the result of developing your talents. Work itself is the surest path to happiness.
But work alone isn’t enough, as a visit to a poor country where people work unceasingly just to survive would attest. Biting your lip and soldiering on in your miserable job isn’t the only way to avoid laziness. You’ll never be consistently productive if you loathe your surroundings, your job, or both. You’re human, after all!
The central message of this book is that you’re not lazy, you’re simply in the wrong job. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Successful people will tell you that success springs from the pursuit of all kinds of work—with lots of failure in the process—on the way to finding what has you excited on Sunday nights, as opposed to what has you depressed.
As long as you’re doing work that you’re not interested in, you’ll never be a consistently hard worker, and you’ll never maximize your talents. Worst of all, odds are you’ll never achieve the happiness that could be yours if you pursued what you’re good at.
The essential question, then, is what are your skills? What work have you done that brought you joy, that earned you praise and admiration? If you see yourself as aimless, it’s likely that you’re working out of obligation, not passion.
If going to work is painful, ask yourself what it pains you not to be doing. What would you be doing if you didn’t have to earn a living? That’s probably the vocation that makes sense.
Of course, matching work with passion, making what it pains you not to be doing your professional occupation, is a luxury. It cannot happen without prosperity. But where prosperity is the rule, more people will be able to express their talents and intelligence in the workplace. It’s simply the case that a rising tide lifts all boats. The freer people are to earn as much as they can and keep it, the more likely it is that everyone will have the opportunity to make a living from his own unique skills and intelligence.
Don’t misunderstand me—doing what you love will not be fun all the time. Nothing worthwhile is ever easy. Pursuing your passion, you surely will encounter obstacles and criticism. And it’s not the work of a day: you will have to work long and hard to discover and develop your talent.
But here’s the great news: as the United States and the rest of the world advance economically, rising prosperity makes it increasingly likely that you will have the opportunity to do what you love. And the greatest gift of prosperity, beyond freedom from material want, is work that is engaging, absorbing, fulfilling—work that doesn’t feel like work.
I’m not trying to teach you how to work hard. I’m saying that people work hard when their work engages their talent and passion. You are not lazy or stupid. Whatever you’ve been told and whatever you believe about yourself, you have within you the work ethic, intelligence, and charisma that you marvel at in others. What’s missing is the kind of work that inspires the heroic effort of which you’re capable. I’m going to show you that that work is within your grasp and how to recognize it. Truly, the end of work is near.
CHAPTER ONE
Why College Football Players Should Major in College Football
“As a coach, I know I have to start with smart players. It might not have been so important in past eras, but today we’re asking players to do so much and to know so many schemes. Without basic intelligence, they simply can’t play.”1
—Hall of Fame football coach Bill Walsh
“I honestly have no idea what I would do without it.”2
—Christian McCaffrey, 2015 Heisman Trophy runner-up, Stanford All-American, 2017 first-round draft pick by the Carolina Panthers, on football
To illustrate the financial significance of being taken in the first round of the National Football League draft, Sports Illustrated compared the fortunes of Melvin Gordon of the San Diego Chargers and Landon Collins of the New York Giants. The fifteenth player picked in 2015, Gordon received a contract that included a $10.7 million guarantee. By contrast, Collins, the first player picked in the second round, was guaranteed $6.2 million less. To put that in perspective, the article pointed out that “the average U.S. engineer will make a little over half that [$6.2 million] during an entire working lifetime.”3
It’s good to be an NFL player these days. The average salary is $2.1 million annually, and the league minimum is $435,000.4 Needless to say, few people make that kind of money right out of college—not even engineers. Indeed, being an NFL player is a great gig if you can get it.
Even better than the salary average is the trajectory of pay. The NFL’s annual revenues of $10 billion put it on par with several countries. The league gets $5 billion a year for the rights to televise its games, $1–2 billion in sponsorships, and another $2 billion from ticket sales. It also reportedly earns $1 billion from licensing and merchandizing sales.5 As revenues grow, so do players’ salaries, which make the earnings of doctors, lawyers, and CEOs look trifling by comparison.
There are threats to the NFL’s prosperity, of course: cable TV “cord cutters,” concerns about the game’s violence and injuries, and the political fallout from players’ comportment during the National Anthem. What’s important here is that market signals belie the pessimism. As Kurt Badenhausen reminded Forbes readers in 2017 amid all the worry about the league’s health, “The Dallas Cowboys were the only NFL team worth $2 billion five years ago. Now all but five of the NFL’s thirty-two teams are worth at least $2 billion (the Buffalo Bills bring up the rear at $1.6 billion).”6 Team valuations help explain the surge in salaries. The mean salary of the top 5 percent of U.S. earners increased 31.7 percent from 2000 to 2016. Over that same period, the mean NFL salary increased 205 percent.7
Assuming continued growth in the game’s popularity, the “wealth gap” between NFL athletes and the rest of us will keep growing. The problem for the rest of us is that few of us have the intelligence—yes, the intelligence—to play football on the professional level. Not only do most of us lack the physical requirements, but it’s a fair bet that we lack the necessary mental skills.
Mike Holmgren is likely headed to the NFL’s Hall of Fame. After coaching two Green Bay Packers teams to the Super Bowl in the 1990s, winning one of them, he proceeded to turn around the fortunes of the hapless Seattle Seahawks in his native state of Washington, taking them to their first Super Bowl in 2005. Their loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers in a game marred by more than a few lousy calls by the referees did not diminish Holmgren’s reputation as one of the greatest offensive minds the sport has ever produced. In particular, he is an expert on the quarterback position. Here’s how he described the position that Brian Billick, another Super Bowl-winning coach, calls “the single most difficult position to master in the world of team sports”8:
Say you want to learn Chinese. You go to a class and learn it over a period of years, and you practice speaking it, and pretty soon, after a few years, you can speak Chinese fairly well. Imagine trying to learn something as difficult, an entire system of plays, and taking the knowledge and making decisions on what to call and where to throw, all within split seconds, and doing it with people running at y
ou trying to knock your ass off.9
Recalling his rookie year with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Jameis Winston—who had won the Heisman Trophy and was the number-one NFL draft pick—says he “had a lot to learn. Coach [Dirk] Koetter threw the entire playbook at me. The different names of the calls, I really had to study those so I didn’t mess them up.” For example: “Diablo right. H-Ram, 76, F-Chief, X-Hitch. It’s a freeze call. I’m trying to get a man zone read off the running back. It’s an easy progression. We have a lot of long play calls.”10
Football, particularly in the NFL, is about so much more than athleticism. In addition to the new language, players have to memorize a playbook the size of the Yellow Pages. Successful NFL players not only are good at the game but love it enough to master it—a staggering task.
Boomer Esiason is known today as a host of CBS’s NFL Today. He’s in the position to be a highly-paid sports commentator, however, because of his success in the 1980s and 90s as a quarterback for the Cincinnati Bengals and New York Jets. Having led the Bengals to within seconds of a Super Bowl victory over the San Francisco 49ers, he was denied the coveted championship ring by Joe Montana’s last-minute ninety-two-yard touchdown drive.
Explaining what a quarterback is up against after breaking the team huddle, Esiason describes a play against the Washington Redskins, then one of the NFL’s best teams:
The Redskins like to shift, and from the 45, they go right into the 46 look, the old Bear defense. And the forty-five-second clock is ticking down, and I don’t have much time to get the play off, and we’re inside the red zone, second and seven, and I’m thinking all of a sudden, “This is their blitz down. They’re coming.” So I’ve got to think of my blitz audibles. I’m in flip formation, I’m in strong backs, they’re running eight men up to the line of scrimmage, they’re coming.
I go, in a hurry, “2–80, 2 zulu, 2–80, 2 zulu, check 95, check 95, green, green, green! Everybody got it?!” They got it. What we’re going to try to do is hit James Brooks on a wide flare to the strong side, thinking Rodney Holman, the tight end, can get out and wall off the inside linebacker who’s man-to-man on James Brooks.11
Are you starting to regret the times you’ve booed the QB of your favorite team for a mistake? Esiason goes on to describe the extraordinary preparation leading up to each game:
[Y]ou have to know every play, every audible, every code word, every single nuance of the game plan, because 60,000 people will be screaming, with three or four million more watching on TV, with every eye on you, and coaches, officials, players all waiting for you, and you hardly being able to hear anything, and the clock ticking down second by second. I have to get every player in the exact right position with all these things going on around me.
You’ve got to know what you’re doing. It takes years to master it. It took me two and a half years to feel totally comfortable in this stuff. Now, I love it.12
When Dak Prescott was quarterback of the Mississippi State Bulldogs, he figured out that field skills were not enough. “I learned . . . that you win at this position by knowledge, by being ahead of the defense mentally,” he told Sports Illustrated. His knowledge impressed the Dallas Cowboys’ scouts and front office, who concluded that Prescott’s football IQ was the highest of the seven signal-callers they interviewed ahead of the draft.13 He’s now the Cowboys’ starting quarterback.
Tom Brady might be the best quarterback ever, but not because he’s the most athletically gifted. It’s his uncanny mind. Charlie Weis, a former offensive coordinator with the Patriots, recalls, “I don’t know if I’ve ever met anyone who reads coverages as quickly and correctly. [When I was there] you could count on one hand the times he saw something incorrectly.”14
Quarterbacks aren’t the only players who need brains. The center, for instance, has to know where every fellow offensive lineman is supposed to be and where every defensive player is lined up in case he needs to alert the offense with a line audible. And Anthony Lynn, a longtime NFL assistant, loads his backs up with homework: “Early in the prep week Lynn hands out packets of worksheets, with one page for each play in the game plan. For all running plays, the backs write in the formation, the defensive front and how the concept is blocked. They must draw one dot for the primary read and two dots for the ‘second-vision’ read, and they must highlight the big alert, if there is one.” If that sounds obscure, that’s the point. The great players are the students of the game. Hall of Fame running back LaDainian Tomlinson told Lynn that “learning how every run is blocked up front made him a better ballcarrier. ‘My game went to the next level when I learned what everyone on offense was doing.’”15
To the untrained eye, wide receivers simply run crisp routes with great speed. If only. Michael Irvin, the Cowboys’ Hall of Fame wide receiver, explains what was going through his mind during a particular play against the Washington Redskins’ defensive back Darrell Green. The actual catch was the easy part:
Look at how much went into that, and look at how many things could have gone wrong. I could have slipped. The pass could have been a split-second late. The pass could have been off to one side. The pass could have been high. If the pass is off, I still get the shit beaten out of me, and all for nothing. It’s amazing when you think about it, that so much goes into the catching of one ball. All the timing you build up with the quarterback, all the work you do to build that timing and trust in the offseason. . . . And it looks so easy. That’s the strange thing.16
Former wideout Haywood Jeffires adds that “it takes two solid years to learn the system, and three to get out on the field and do something. It’s not till your fourth year that most guys are ready to play instinctively.”17
For a time, Randy Moss teamed up with Tom Brady to form one of the most lethal quarterback-wide receiver combinations the game has ever seen. To watch Moss was to marvel at his athleticism, but that was almost to miss the point. Patriots players and coaches said about Moss that he had “one of the highest football IQs ever.”18 If being a successful wideout were all about speed, then agents would travel to each Summer Olympics venue with an eye on signing the fastest runners competing in each. But as evidenced by how few former medalist sprinters have starred in the NFL, let alone made it to the League, playing football at the highest of levels is about a lot more than speed.
As readers can probably imagine, as difficult as it is for wide receivers to learn the game of professional football, it’s even more difficult for the defensive backs covering them. Sure, backpedaling as some of the world’s fastest human beings race by you is tough, but it’s the mental aspect that’s a killer. Tony Dungy, a Hall of Fame coach and former defensive back himself, says, “It’s a mental position much more than a physical position.”19
Imagine preparing to line up across from Larry Fitzgerald or Odell Beckham each week. The film preparation is endless. Rod Woodson, a Hall of Fame defensive back, points out that it wasn’t enough for him to be focused on one receiver. He had to understand what the entire offense would do.20 Defensive backs are some of the highest paid players because, like the quarterback, they’re staring down the proverbial barrel of a gun every play. They have to make countless reads in a matter of seconds while chasing some incredibly fast people.
Ok, but how difficult can it be for defensive backs at least mentally to outplay Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski? Can someone with his reputation and nickname (“Gronk”) actually be smart? Actually, yes.
No less an authority than Bill Belichick has observed that the position Gronk plays at an All-Pro level “is, probably after quarterback, the hardest position to play in our offense. That’s the guy who does all the formationing. The running back is usually in the backfield. The receivers are receivers. But the tight ends could be in their tight end location, they could be in the backfield, they could be flexed. They could be in the wide position. To formation the defense, those are the guys you’re going to move. It’s moving the tight ends that changes the defensive deployment.” Belichick cont
inues, “Rob is a versatile athlete, but he’s also a versatile guy mentally. He can handle a lot of different assignments. Some guys can’t. Either they mentally can’t do it, or it’s just too much and their game slows down. They don’t play to the same skill set you see athletically because they’re thinking too much. That’s not the case with Rob.”21
Let’s not forget that Gronk is doing all this with more than seventy thousand fans looking on, millions more watching on television, and similarly smart and physically gifted players looking to hurt him. In short, Gronk is passing an exceedingly difficult test each Sunday.
What’s amazing about all this is that Gronkowski is doing more than learning myriad plays and formations that multiply into countless more plays and formations (as Belechick puts it, “Three different plays become 15 plays.”). Let’s not forget that Gronk is doing more than taking the proverbial test in the classroom and acing it. In his case, Gronkowski is passing his “formationing” tests, all this with more than seventy thousand fans looking on, millions more watching on television, and with similarly smart and physically gifted players looking to hurt him. In short, Gronk is passing an exceedingly difficult test each Sunday without any time to contemplate the answer to questions that, to an untrained eye, read as a different language. Importantly, this extraordinary knowledge attained by the Patriots tight end wasn’t automatic. It took time and repetition. As this football polymath told Sports Illustrated, “My rookie year I always got it wrong [reading the Safeties on opposing defenses]. But just learning the game, studying film, listening to my coaches, figuring out the techniques of the team I’m playing next week, to know if it’s a split safety or post high, was hugely helpful. Eventually you know it in a second. You won’t even have to think about it.”22 Gronkowski, Winston, Brady, Moss and others know an intensely difficult second language fluently, and in the split-second fashion. How many tests have you, the reader, aced while answering each question within a fraction of a second? We consumers of entertainment marvel at genius in movies like A Beautiful Mind and Good Will Hunting, but have perhaps too often allowed the physical grace of top athletes to cloud our worship of their mental brilliance.
