I hate football, but it taught me how to level up my skills (and my life)
Okay, I don’t hate football . I actually didn’t even know how to play until my father-in-law taught me a few years back. Sports weren’t very popular in my house growing up. But now that I understand the game, the appeal is a little more obvious to me. The lights. The announcers. The music. The crowd. It’s pure spectacle.
NFL players spend incredible amounts of time studying film while training. Everyone in the league watches hours and hours of games to prepare for the season. Marc Lillibridge, a former linebacker who has played for six pro teams across three leagues explained the importance of film study this way:
“Proper film study is vital for any NFL team to win. Players that can take what they see on the screen and transfer that knowledge to the field will always have their ‘eyes on the prize.’”
But the game that you and I watch on TV aren’t what professional NFL players watch. Broadcast games are packaged for public consumption. They’re more for entertainment than study.
Pros watch coaches film, All-22, and other team-only footage that the public generally does not have access to. The camera angles show more of the field. There are no distracting announcers. It’s a completely different experience.
Pros consume a different level of information than everyone else.
You can’t be an A player if you’re reading the same content that B and C players do. If you want to be an A player in your industry, you need find out where A players are getting their information and feed on those sources.
Most people turn to things like…
- Reading blogs
- Watching YouTube videos
- Following people on social media
- Listening to podcasts
These information sources are easily accessible and readily available. But like broadcast football games, most of them are tailored for public consumption. They’re entertaining, but can often be pretty light on value. Most A players I know don’t even have time to consume them.
They’re too busy…
- Doing the work
- Conducting experiments
- Getting mentored by experts
- Failing
These are the data sources that yield the highest quality insights. They also require a lot more effort.
Once A players have taken in information from these sources, they distill them down into blogs, videos, and podcasts for everyone else. At that point, it’s comparable to processed food. It’s tasty, but we’re missing out on a lot of the nutrients.
There’s an old expression that’s used in the computer science world:
Garbage in, garbage out.
In other words, bad input results in bad output. The fitness world uses this phrase as well. People realize that the quality of the food and drink they put into their bodies has a direct impact on the way they feel, look and perform.
This principle, though, applies to nearly everything: the things we read, the people we hang out with, the conversations we have, and even the thoughts we think!
Increasing the quality of anything we take in, whether physically or mentally, will have a measurable effect on our lives.
Read low quality books? You’ll have low quality ideas.
Hang out with low quality people? You’ll have low quality support.
Have low quality conversations? You’ll have low quality influence.
Think low quality thoughts? You’ll be in a low quality mood.
So learn from NFL players.
The easiest way to level-up your skills, and even your life as a whole, is to increase the quality of what you take in. Apply that rule to everything. By raising your standards across all of your input sources, you’ll soon find yourself in the big leagues.
Shout out to Mike K, Andrew Slate, and Richard Spicer for their feedback on this piece.
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