YOU MUST DISCIPLINE YOURSELF - Tom Brady Motivation | Best Motivational Speech
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It is hard.

It's hard when you're young to wake up in the off-season at 6 a.m. to go train and work out, knowing that all your friends are sleeping in and eating pancakes. No one's good at everything. I mean, that's just not the way life works. We're all talented at certain things, but we can really continue to...

improve our weaknesses if we're humble enough to identify them and we can build on our strengths. And I think we're all trying to find a more well-rounded aspect to ourself. But a lot of that has to come with this understanding about yourself that what you know is very limited and what you don't know is limitless.

It's hard to throw, catch, block and tackle and hit kids when they're way bigger and way more developed than you. Only to go home that night bruised and battered and strained but knowing you have to show up again the next day for just the chance to try again. But understand this, life is hard.

I think most people probably know a few things about me, but I was never, I would say, like a prodigy. I wasn't like the kid where you see Tiger Woods swinging on the Johnny Carson show at two or three years old, and his swing looks as good as it did at three years old as it did as he grew older. Or certain players that had this unbelievable talent

prodigy aspect to themselves. I saw myself as someone who probably had some other traits that maybe were hard to identify, but that were really sustainable over time, which was, I would say, work ethic and discipline. Consistent discipline has been one of those prodigy-like strengths that I had.

So I didn't have the arm that could throw the ball 80 yards. I didn't have the three speed that Michael Vick had. I didn't have the, you know, the size that a lot of guys had. But I did have something inside of me that no one could see from the outside. This level of discipline that I could accomplish something that was really important and really special. Man, it's great to run the first probably four miles of the marathon.

And it's really fun to cross the finish line. But man, those middle miles probably really stuck. And if you want to be good at those middle miles, you've got to work really hard in the whole offseason to prepare yourself for a real big challenge, which is the NFL season. And you don't think everyone's watching. The whole competition's watching.

A lot of people can be really consistent, let's say with your diet, because it's always on people's mind. Like I want to get healthy. Well, most people could say, man, I want to eat healthy for one day or I want to exercise for one day. I want to be more hydrated for one day. Well, can you do it for a week? Well, that's more discipline, right? Can you do it for a month? That's more discipline. Can you do it for a year? That's even more discipline. So I was so blessed to have this experience

discipline over a really long period of time. I didn't know how to put the pads on in my pants when I tried out for freshman football. I mean, I had never played until that point except in the streets. So I went on the field and I was like, I'm going to get killed out here. You know, and my freshman year, I didn't even play. I was the backup quarterback on a team that went 0-8. That says a lot. I couldn't get on the field and we never won a game anyway. Going into my second year in high school,

there were workouts in the morning at 6 a.m. before school. And I was like, okay, I can get up at 6 a.m. and I can go do these rope drills where you'd run through the ropes. You see a lot of people do that. There were these hills that we would run up. And there was probably less than 10 people there, but I was probably one of the three that were there almost every single day to try to continue to push myself to grow in these maybe physical areas that I was really behind a lot of other people at. Because naturally,

No one's good at everything. I mean, that's just not the way life works. I really started working hard with Tom Martinez to throw the ball better. My third year, I won the starting job in my high school. And I loved the sport so much that I stopped playing basketball and I just played baseball and football. But in the summers, I would go and my dad, who was very available to me, the greatest mentor ever,

the greatest dad I could ever imagine was so right there by my side to say, Hey dad, I want to be better football player. Great. Let's take you to the university of Arizona camp. Let's take you to the Cal Berkeley camp. Let's take you to the Stanford camp. You know, this is when you just sign up and there's a thousand other kids and you're just in a

And, you know, that's just the way it was. But my dad was there to say, go for it, son. And if there was a blessing in my life that I would say, you know, some of the things I blessed with hard work, discipline, you know, I was also blessed with being very naive. I had no idea how hard it was. And but I believed because I was like, I don't know, like I'm going to get better and I'm going to I'm going to be better. I got offered a scholarship to UCLA.

And then they turned me away at the last minute because another kid signed before me. And I really wanted to go to USC. That was probably my first choice, but they didn't want me either. They signed another kid who was one of the top recruits on the West Coast. So I get to the airport in Detroit and I call my dad collect and I go, dad, I think I know where I want to go to college. And like he started breaking down and he's like, what?

Leaving to go all the way back to Michigan. And he said, are you sure you want to go? And I said, dad, if I want to be the best, I got to beat the best. And this is where the best are. So I showed up on campus as a freshman in the fall of 1995. I was the seventh quarterback on the depth chart.

There were six other guys ahead of me. And Michigan is a great college. There's, you know, it competes for national championships. And I wanted to be a great football player. If I was going to be a great football player, I wanted to compete against these other guys. And they were all better than me. I ended up becoming the third quarterback in my second year. And it rotated a little bit there my second year. But I went from third in my second year to now my third year

I was competing to be a starter. I had learned these tools to compete and I said, whatever they asked me to do, that's what I'm gonna do to the best of my ability. And I went in there, competed really hard my third year and I lost the starting job to Brian Greasy. Going into my fourth year, I got a great opportunity to play.

And they recruited a kid named Drew Henson to who was one of the top prospects in the country. And I was like, the competition is relentless. At first, I was looking at the guys ahead of me. Now I got to be looking down at the guys behind me too.

But I said, you know what? I'm going to apply the same thing that I learned in those previous years. I'm going to go out there and compete as hard as I can. And I'm going to treat practice like a game. And I'm going to gain the respect of my teammates every day through my work ethic. I'm going to work hard in the weight room. I'm going to work hard in the film room. I'm going to work hard to be a good student. And going into my fourth year, it was a little bit of a battle. And my teammates named me team captain. And I won the starting job.

Sometimes it should go the other people's way. It shouldn't always go your way. So you get motivated by the losses. You stay motivated through the winning. What you can control is your process. You can control those intangibles. You can control the work ethic, the consistent discipline, your attitude, your culture, how much you care. All those things are in you. They just need to be drawn out of you. And really, when you're in that position that you feel like got those things,

pretty well under control, then you start passing those on to the other people that you're working with, that are parts of your team. You know, focus on what you can control. Focus on what you're getting, not what anyone else is getting. Whenever you get an opportunity, you take advantage of it. You treat it like it's the Super Bowl. You treat it like it's game day. Go out there and treat practice like...

No one else does. And I did that every single day. I'm trying to give you answers to the test. You know, this is a lot of athletes want to maximize their potential, maximize their opportunity. You guys want to maximize the potential and opportunity you have in your business. Well, that's a lot. That's a lot of consistent discipline. It doesn't mean that you can have one good month. It means that you got to do a lot more right than wrong.

It means you got to make a lot more good choices than bad choices. It means you have to be more disciplined than not disciplined. It means you have to surround your people with very smart people, not people that are going to help you think less. You got to challenge yourself, not challenge yourself less.

So we're all faced with those decisions every day and you get the opportunity just like I had the opportunity to choose. What do you want? What are your goals? What are your priorities? What do you guys want to achieve? You guys are sitting here as entrepreneurs, CEOs, leaders, running business, running families. What's the choice you get to make every day to wake up and say, all right, this is where I'm going to focus my time and energy. How disciplined are you to maintain that routine over a period of time? And I think

That will determine your level of success. We all have dreams. Dream home renovations, dream vacations, or sending our kids to their dream colleges. But finding straightforward ways to turn those dreams into realistic goals, that's where things get tricky. Merrill understands that. That's why, with a dedicated Merrill advisor, you get a personalized plan and a clear path forward. And having the bull at your back helps your whole financial life move with you.

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