Do you have a don’t-quit attitude?

Do you truly believe that no matter what you do, how many times you try, how many times you fail, that you will always succeed, in the end?

Last week, Sonja and I were watching the Jets beat Minnesota 29-20. I’m a huge Jet fan as all of you know, huge Brett Favre fan.

It was a boring game in the beginning, both teams slugging it out, really not much of anything going on. Jets should have been more up at the half than they were — they were up 9-0 at halftime — but they just couldn’t score, they couldn’t put the Vikings away. In the second half, Brett Favre — 41 years old, broken bones everywhere; he looks like a bag of bones when he’s back there — limping, elbow tendinitis… guy is a warrior — rallied the Vikings back to within a few points. He threw three touchdowns, and would not quit. So the Jets marched down the field and silenced the Vikings. They scored what looked like the game winning touchdown. They were up by a few points again. But Brett Favre never quits. He marched them right back down the field and came within a few points, again. The Jets couldn’t put the Vikings away, but what happened next? Brett Favre, with his don’t-quit attitude, threw an interception, the Jets ran it in, and the game was pretty much over at that point.

The bottom line is, in sports, two teams will fight to the end, the better team usually wins, and the one that never quits never ever looks at their mistakes. A quarterback throws an interception, and he thinks to himself, “Man, that was embarrassing — I just did that in front of 75,000 people… 75,000!” He goes back out the next series and doesn’t think anything of it. He leads his team down the field, and what happens; they get a touchdown and they win the game.

Do you ever feel like Fireman Ed is leading a cheer against you?

Let’s say, in life, you have a big sales presentation, and it doesn’t work. You don’t close the deal, you’re obsessed with it for three weeks; thinking about every mistake you made and what you could have done. Or, say you’re a man and you see a woman standing there in the supermarket, or in the elevator, and you want to talk to her, but instead you spit out some words and the woman doesn’t respond. You can get this in your head, and for the next few weeks, you end up thinking about all the things you could have done, or what you did wrong.

That’s not having a killer attitude in life. You go out on a date, and it’s not a great date and the person doesn’t call you back. What do you do next? You think about what you did wrong. You even call your friends, and they become the assistant coaches of your life, and you recap the entire date; could I have done this, should I have said that? Should’ve, would’ve, could’ve. Athletes don’t do that, ever. Sports teams don’t do that, ever. But people do that all the time. And I know some of you are thinking right now – “But this is my emotional life. This is my livelihood.”

Hello! Is Brett Favre not emotionally invested in the game of football, is this not his livelihood? Is this not his passion, is this not who he is? Come on, folks! It’s just a date, it’s just an approach, it’s just a total stranger — get out there and start enjoying this process and start failing!

I remember I was coaching a woman a few years ago, and she says, “I really want to get married in the next year.” I said, “Do you have a date this week? If you have a date a week, 52 men a year, don’t you think you’ll meet somebody fantastic?” She says, Absolutely.” So what did she do? She went on 5.2 dates for the entire year because she was obsessed the other 49 weeks with what went wrong on the 5.2 dates.

Life is nothing more than a numbers game. You need to keep trying, and you need to develop that killer instinct. If you don’t develop the killer instinct, you’re not going to be able to find the person you want. Not only that, you’re just going to be obsessed with every little move you make… and that is not a method of success in business, in life or in sports.