On May 16, Tom Brady stood on a graduation stage and spoke to undergraduates in the McDonough School of Business.
The seven-time Super Bowl champion encouraged seniors to overcome doubt and adversity, reflecting on his own moment of hardship and a comeback victory during the 2017 Super Bowl game against the Atlanta Falcons.
Brady won the most Super Bowl titles of any quarterback in NFL history and is now the lead analyst for Fox Sports’ NFL coverage. He also co-owns the Las Vegas Raiders and Birmingham City Football Club and has founded several wellness, athletic clothing and media companies.
Read an excerpt of his speech below.
“Sitting here, looking out at this amazing crowd of business majors, getting ready to start your careers, I realized something: Sports was a very strange way to make a living.
People screamed at me all the time. They gambled on my performance, and they celebrated all my failures.
One way that sports is a lot like business, though, is that when you do it long enough, your life gets defined by numbers.
Twenty-three: that was the number of pro seasons I played. Seven: those were the Super Bowl wins. Three: those were the Super Bowl losses. D*** it, Eli Manning! I heard that back there.
But here’s a number for you guys: 99.7. What’s that number make you think of? It’s an A+ — I didn’t get many of those. It’s a low-grade fever, maybe.
But it’s also virtual certainty. If something has a 99.7% chance of happening, the outcome is a foregone conclusion.
Well, let me take you back to Feb. 5th, 2017. Super Bowl 51. Patriots versus Falcons. Excuse my language at some points here, I was an athlete, so you might feel like you’re in a locker room a little bit.
There’s 6 minutes left in the 3rd quarter, and we’re losing 28 to 3, and it’s fourth down at midfield. And at that moment, the Falcons had a 99.7% chance of winning. Not exactly how I thought things would go when I woke up that morning.
But you know what, it happens sometimes. You guys are going to see that. You’re going to think that you’re better than your competition. You’re going to work really hard, and it’s still not going to go the way you want. You’re gonna find yourself on the short end of that 99.7%, wondering just how the hell you got there.
My Patriots team got there by fumbling the second play of the second quarter, and then right before halftime, somebody threw a devastating pick six. Look, it’s not important who threw it, the point is, it was thrown. So I’ll move on.
This Falcons team was young; they had a new coach. We were the veteran team. We had the Hall of Fame coach. We’d been there before. We’d already won four Super Bowls at that point.
But the experience or reputation only takes you so far. And it’s true beyond sports. History is littered with businesses — mature ones — that took their competition for granted, and then got disrupted by ambitious, young entrepreneurs. Do you guys remember Blockbuster? Kodak? Nokia? Blackberry? I didn’t think so. Maybe some of your parents do. The point is, nothing is guaranteed.
We were the favorites going into the game and now, with 8 minutes and 31 seconds left in the third quarter, down 25 points, we were the underdogs. And I found myself on the bench staring blankly at the ground in front of me in very deep thought. With fate seemingly already decided, I was asking myself, What can I do to get us back in this game?
I had to trust my ability and harness whatever optimism I still had, even if it was just 0.3%. I had to draw on all my experience and all the lessons I’d learned from overcoming years — years — of fear and doubt. And the question I have for you graduates today is: How much doubt and how much fear have you faced in your own life?
College can be a little bit of a cocoon sometimes, so maybe you haven’t found the limits of your ability or the boundaries of your comfort zone yet. And you don’t know what’s possible on the other side of them. Trust me when I tell you, overcoming fear and doubt in the face of those challenges is where you’re going to gain the confidence to make your best choices when things aren’t going the way you want.
When the odds are stacked against you, when you’re facing your own 28 to 3 moment — and believe me, it’s coming — you will have a choice to make: to quit or to fight your ass off.
The choice seems pretty obvious, and it’s easier said than done. I mean, why expend all that energy fighting, when it’s virtually certain you’ll lose? Why not quit and live to fight another day?
Well, sometimes there isn’t another day. Super Bowl 51, there was no other day. That was it. With a lot of the most important moments in your lives, when you have a chance to do something truly special, it’s going to be the same way. You may only get one chance to impress your boss or land a promotion. Or to close a deal or not. So what then?
You better have prepared yourself in advance to deal with the adversity you’re gonna face in order to give yourself the best chance to succeed.
Down by 25, in the biggest game of my life, do you think I just stumbled randomly into my decision to keep fighting?
The previous 25 years of my life had prepared me for that moment. Just as you guys have been meeting the daily challenges of being a student, I’d been meeting the daily challenges of being an athlete every day, just for a chance to do something special.
The whole reason I went to Michigan was the idea of taking my abilities to an elite program and seeing if I could compete with the best. A lot of you made a similar choice coming to Georgetown, and you’re gonna make it again, going out on your own or in jobs with great institutions like Deloitte or Goldman or Google or many others. And these places, guess what, they’re gonna challenge you to be your best. And you better be prepared.
I fought really hard at Michigan. I fought even harder to stay there, and I competed against a lot of guys who were just as good as me, if not better. I didn’t get a chance to start until my fourth season. It was tough. It had me questioning whether I was at the right school. Maybe Michigan was too tough?
Where you choose to work might also seem too hard for you. You’ll be up against a lot of people from equally great schools who are just as smart and talented as you, and they want it as much as you do. You’ll be asked to do things you’ve never done before. To work long hours, harder than you ever have, with people you might not like — like guys from Duke.
But what makes it too hard is exactly the thing that makes it the perfect place for you, because it will offer you the greatest opportunity of all: the opportunity to face your own fears and doubts and develop the skills and abilities necessary to overcome any obstacle you’ll face on the path to being successful in life.
And this is the key: You don’t quit and you don’t make excuses. Every hard choice is a brick in the path toward the life you want. But every excuse is a brick in the wall that will stand in your way.
When the opportunity to do something special presents itself, the people most prepared to meet the challenges will be the ones who’ve made the most hard choices. Who’ve faced adversity and overcome it. They certainly won’t have won all their fights. But they never quit.
I stayed at Michigan. And then I got chosen in the sixth round of the 2000 draft. My numbers were pretty unimpressive. If there was a 99.7% chance at anything, it’s that I’d be behind the counter at Ben’s Chili Bowl before I was behind center in an NFL game. And who knows, that could have been fun too, but no one could have imagined I would end my career with seven World Championships.
Maybe because none of those people knew that I would never, ever quit.”
Watch the rest of Brady’s speech here.
