Tom Brady—who was a sixth-round NFL pick, at number 199—is a strong proponent of failing in order to succeed. He’s perhaps the best-known football player past or present, and is the winningest player in the league’s history, holding a record seven Super Bowl titles. At Fortune’s Global Forum in New York on Tuesday, Brady—a father of three—extolled the virtues of letting your kids fail, even if that’s no longer the norm.
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00:00I have a son who's who's six foot five and wants to play basketball.
00:04He's taller than you.
00:04Yeah, he's a little taller than me.
00:06He goes to school here in New York.
00:07He's 17.
00:07And unfortunately, he jumps as high as I do.
00:12But I tell him, dude, you're going to be a stud.
00:15I said, wait till you hit your growth spurt.
00:16You're going to be jumping higher.
00:17You're going to be dunking.
00:19And whether he does or not, who cares?
00:22But I want him to know that his dad's got his back.
00:24And, you know, my middle son, it has, you know, to be a boy
00:27sucks to be Tom Brady's son in so many ways.
00:29And I try to empathize that with them.
00:31And all the parents in the room know that being a parent
00:33is probably the hardest job all of us have.
00:35And we screw up a lot.
00:36And I've screwed up a lot as a parent.
00:38So I don't want to seem like I'm some expert in parenting
00:41because I'm certainly not that.
00:45I mean, I have three amazing kids that I just try to be there.
00:48I try to just be dependable and consistent for them.
00:51And honestly, whatever our kids choose, as we know,
00:53to do whatever they want to do in life, we got to support.
00:56And again, the blessing my parents gave me was when I was
01:00that long shot as a kid who was a backup quarterback
01:03on a freshman team, they never said, man, don't do that.
01:06It's going to be too hard.
01:08Let's do something different.
01:10Let's think about another backup plan.
01:12They kind of said, you know what?
01:13Go for it.
01:14So in the difference in today's world, if we think about how
01:17we're screwing these kids up, anytime they face a little
01:20difficulty, what do we do?
01:21We send them to an easier place to succeed.
01:24I had to grind my freshman year, my sophomore year,
01:27my third year to even get a chance to play in my fourth year.
01:31And in my fourth year, I thought, okay, I was the backup
01:34last year.
01:34We won the national championship.
01:35The guy who beat me out is now a professional quarterback.
01:38I'm going to step into this role as a starting quarterback.
01:41And the coach was like, nope, we recruited this kid
01:44out of Michigan.
01:45He's the top rated quarterback in high school football.
01:50And he's going to come in and you guys are going
01:51to compete to start.
01:53And I was like, shit.
01:56So I knew how to compete because that's what I had continued
01:59to have to do.
02:00And I competed with him.
02:01And I started every game that year.
02:03And we finished 10 and 3.
02:04We had a good record.
02:05And I was going back for my fifth year.
02:08The team made me a team captain, which is probably the greatest
02:11honor I ever received in all the sports because all my boys,
02:14all the guys that I really looked up to and they looked
02:18up to me, they named me captain.
02:20They wanted me to be their leader.
02:22They saw how much it meant to me to be the starting quarterback.
02:25So I go in there before the season starts.
02:27And the Tuesday before our first game of the season,
02:30the head coach Lloyd Carr calls me and he says,
02:32hey, this is what we're going to do.
02:33Tom, you're going to start.
02:34But Drew, Henson, this other quarterback who they recruited
02:37the year before, you're going to play in the second quarter.
02:40And I'm going to determine who's the quarterback in the third
02:42and fourth quarter by who plays well in the second quarter.
02:45And it felt like a big gut punch because I thought
02:48I did everything right.
02:49I thought I worked really hard to get the things that I wanted.
02:52But you know what?
02:53In his eyes, it wasn't enough.
02:54So what did I do?
02:55I had to go out there and prove it.
02:56I hate the fact that you can go to the easy place and try
02:59to succeed at the easy place.
03:01And I think in some ways, the amount of money that's being
03:04made in sports and football, they're not even accountable
03:09to winning anymore.
03:10The clubs make so much money.
03:12I know people that just, hey, man, I made money.
03:15We're doing good.
03:16We did win the Super Bowl.
03:17Did you see how much money we made?
03:19And that's a different part of sports.
03:21You know, there's so much money for players.
03:23These kids now are getting paid in college.
03:26So how can you say, hey, is money is the only thing we value?
03:30I mean, to me, that wasn't.
03:32I always felt like I took less money so that we could win.
03:35So to me, it was like when I see the NFL in general,
03:38there's a developmental issue because in college,
03:41a lot of these players, they don't have to learn
03:44to be competitive in college.
03:46If you're not playing here, just go to the next school.
03:49That's the shittiest lesson we could actually teach somebody.
03:52You got to find ways to dig deep because the reality
03:55of your business and your career is overcoming adversity.
03:59And the only way to do that is to fail.
04:02And the only way to fail is to put yourself
04:04in uncomfortable situations because you're always
04:06in your comfort zone.
04:07You're not going to fail.
04:08So if you fail and then you figure out a solution
04:11to the people you work with to overcome the failure,
04:14you gain a lot of self-confidence.
04:16And if you gain self-confidence, then the next opportunity
04:19you have to succeed, you got a much better opportunity
04:22to do just that.
04:24So to me, failure is amazing because it teaches you
04:28and really forces you to look inside yourself
04:30about what you need to do better.
04:32I see so many athletes who are always blaming other people.
04:36They ask the quarterback, what happened?
04:37Oh, I blame the receiver.
04:39I literally am like watching the screen.
04:40What did he just say?
04:42I see other athletes blame the coach.
04:45I see coach blame the other guys behind closed doors.
04:48It's the player's fault.
04:49That's all.
04:50It's the player's fault.
04:50Oh, really?
04:51You got beat by 40 points and you had
04:53a magical coaching performance.
04:56Is that right?
04:57Instead, and then there's other leaders that I see go,
05:00I got to do a better job.
05:01I got to communicate better.
05:03I got to work harder.
05:04We got to overcome more.
05:05We got to practice harder.
05:06We got to do more of the right things.
05:08So to me, it's always pointed back at yourself.
05:10What do I need to do better to help us be more successful?