How loving the struggle leads to ultimate success

I thought I would share this short video which talks about the career of Tom Brady, the multiple Super Bowl winning quarterback of the New England Patriots. Brady's story is pretty familiar to most people with even a passing interest in American Football. It is the true hollywood underdog story of a player that was never identified by scouts as being particularly 'talented' because of his lack of physical and technical prowess and as a result was drafted very late in the NFL draft programme and yet has become one of the greatest quarter backs of all time.

The piece illustrates nicely one of my central principles about the weakness of talent identification systems in that that they are very inefficient at making predictions of who might 'make it' at the top as they do not allow for accurate asessments of the true drivers of high performance which eminate from what I call the 'internal factors' of drive, dedication, determination.

The section that really stands out for me is when one of the contributors of the piece states that Tom Brady understands that the game is a struggle and he epitomises someone who loves the struggle. I think that this has to be a message that we get across to our players...if they can't learn to love the struggle and embrace the challenge of trying to continously improve then they should understand that they are not likely to reach their true potential.