Predictions and Performance
I have never been a Tom Brady fan. Seeing him win again this week was a deep reminder.
Maybe this stems from when his team beat my favorite team, the Philadelphia Eagles, in the 2004 Super Bowl. At that point he had already won the championship two times and didn't need another one. Tom Brady just made winning look so easy. He was a winning machine that seemed to pick apart whatever new defenses threw at him. Tom continued the winning streak in the next decade by winning his 4th and 5th Super Bowls. Sports announcers anointed him the best ever title and my dislike of Tom Brady grew.
Eventually, 13 years later, the Eagles got their revenge against Brady and his Patriots and I mostly got over my Tom Brady prejudice (not fully). When he won his 6th Super Bowl in 2018, I started wondering how Tom Brady was so unstoppable.
As sports fans we see constant highlight reels displaying brilliant plays of our favorite players. It is easy to put them on a pedestal and tell ourselves that they are one in a billion, oozing with talent. But, what if there is more? Each year a couple of hundred players are drafted to NFL teams. The assumed elite players are picked in the 1st round, 32 players. So where was the beloved Tom Brady picked in the draft, way back at number 199, in the 6th round. A deeper dive into Tom's history shows he had unimpressive performance results at the pre-draft skills tests. At one point he was the seventh QB on his college team.
When he finally made it to the NFL, he was a back up again, until the starter went down. He then took over and made it look easy. In an interview in 2018 with his former coach, Bill Belichick, he said that Tom was not a great natural athlete, but he possessed three key skills:
Strong Work Ethic - no one trains harder and studies fundamental like him, relearning at each level as the competition gets stronger, being humble enough to reinvent his mechanics as a pro rather then rest on his previously-learned skills
Thinks strategically - see the field, "take and processes a large amount of information very quickly"
Stays in the Moment - focuses on short-term goals, then moves on to the next
These skills translate to most areas of our business. The first is about being humble enough to not rest on our previously learned skills and go back to fundamentals or acquire new skills when the market changes. This is about long-term strategy.
The second is about recognizing our opportunities faster than your competition. At Scythe & Spade, we use the expression that "success favors the prepared." We use advanced spatial analytics in our proprietary FarmBase software to help us see our field and prioritize where we move next. We strive to be on version 10 when others are on version 2.
The third, Stays in the Moment, is about implementing that strategy and keeping your focus. When Tom had trouble in college moving up the QB rankings, he hired a sports psychologist to help him cope with his anxiety and frustration. This may sound like a sign of weakness to some readers, but he had the guts to identify the problem and take it to resolution. In business when we are often surrounded by "yes" men and women, we could all learn from Tom Brady's ability to resolve conflict and focus on our short term goals.
See my next monthly blog post for how we at Scythe & Spade regularly resolve conflict in our business.
Interview source:https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/02/bill-belichick-tom-brady-isnt-a-great-natural-athlete-but-he-has-these-3-traits.html