I recently finished reading a book titled "The QB: The Making of Modern Quarterbacks" by Bruce Feldman. It was a fascinating read about what goes into a good quarterback these days through the eyes of development "coaches" that work individually with the athletes. But the chapter "Manningland" was worth the cost of the book alone, taking a look at some of the things that makes Peyton Manning great. Over the next few days I'm going to share a few outstanding passages from Feldman's book on Manning. You can read the first part here. The second deals with Peyton's work ethic including watching practice video immediately after workouts:Florida offensive coordinator Kurt Roper was a young assistant coach at Tennessee when Peyton was the Vols’ quarterback. Roper, himself the son of a coach, said the college kid taught him more about preparation that anyone he’d ever been around. “When I played at Rice, nobody watched practice right after and took notes like he did.”
“His work ethic, and his ability to be singularly focused on winning from week to week and controlling his mind and preparing for his moment was amazing. Nobody I’ve ever been around, coaches included, have the drive that he has to prepare. He is just different than anybody else.”
Here is a great passage from "The Maxwell Daily Reader" written by John Maxwell. Each calendar day there is a message and it is always amazing how it fits in with something going on in your life today. Today's, March 11, spoke about how we view failure and how our thought process in this regard goes a long way towards success. To make his point, Maxwell used one of my favorites, Tony Gwynn as example:
On August 6, 1999, a major-league baseball player stepped up to home plate in Montreal and made another out -- the 5,113th of his professional career. That's a lot of trips to the batter's box without a hit! If a player made all of those outs consecutively, and he average four at bats per game, he would play eight seasons (1,278 game straight) without ever reaching first base!
Was the player discourage that night? No. You see, earlier in the same game, in his first plate appearance, that player had reached a milestone that only twenty-one other people in the history of baseball have every achieved. He had made his 3,000th hit. That player was Tony Gwynn of the San Diego Padres.
During that game, Tony got on base with hits four times in five tries. But that's not the norm for him. Usually he fails to get a hit two times out of every three attempts. Those results may not sound very encouraging, but if you know baseball, you recognize that Tony's ability to succeed consistently only one time in three tries has made him the great hitter of his generation. And Tony recognized that to get his hits, he has to make a lot of outs.
One of the greatest problems people have with failure is that they are too quick to judge isolated situations in their lives and label them as failures. Instead, they have need to keep the bigger picture in mind. Someone like Tony Gwynn doesn't look at an out that he makes and think of failure. He sees it within the context of the bigger picture. His perspective leads to perseverance. His perseverance brings longevity. And his longevity gives him opportunity for success.
