Tom Brady didn’t become Tom Brady the GOAT by accident. The Patriots legend’s seven Super Bowl rings, 10 appearances on football’s biggest stage, and more than two decades of sustained dominance were built on his obsession with preparation. And he tapped into various sources and avenues to get an edge… No stone, or rather SEAL, was left unturned.
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In Brady’s own words, greatness has been about eliminating chaos long before the clutch moment arrives. And how does one eliminate the chaos? Through sheer dedication to training and practice.
In the latest edition of his weekly newsletter, 199, Brady shed more light on how head coach Bill Belichick instilled this mentality in him and his teammates by bringing a Navy SEAL to speak to them. It was to give an insight into how preparation is carried out at its most extreme level.
“One year on the Patriots, they brought in a Navy SEAL to talk to us about how they prepped for missions,” Brady wrote. And the interaction, and what he gathered from it, stuck with him for the rest of his career.
The SEAL explained that before any major operation, they rehearse it so thoroughly that nearly every detail is already accounted for.
“He said that before going on any big mission, they practiced it so many times that by the time they actually went out on the mission, 90% of the variables were already accounted for in their thinking, and all of the specific tactics were carved into their muscle memory,” TB12 recalled.
The takeaway for the Patriots locker room was invaluable: Focus. “That [lesson] left them with 100% of their conscious brainpower to focus on solving the 10% of unknown variables that crop up in any mission,” Brady explained.
And Brady quickly saw how the SEAL words correlated to the Super Bowl. “For a football player, the Super Bowl is the ultimate mission… It’s also an absolute circus,” he wrote, pointing to the two weeks of travel, Media Day, sponsor events, ticket requests, and family obligations. Distractions are everywhere.
This made Brady realize that a Super Bowl-bound player won’t survive a chaotic environment like this by reacting to it. A champion survives it by preparing so thoroughly that it doesn’t matter.
“That’s the purpose of training and practice,” explained Brady. “It’s not to get a little bit better each time. It’s to eliminate variables so you can focus on the ones you don’t control.”
That’s exactly how Brady approached every Super Bowl run. While the noise and pressure outside the building increased, he went in the opposite direction.
“I stayed longer at the facility. I focused more on film. I lived inside my playbook,” wrote Brady. “While others were getting distracted by the sideshow, I was getting ultra-focused for the main event.”
According to the winningest quarterback in football, these habits not only helped him perform well at the Super Bowl but also gave him the mental satisfaction of knowing he had done everything in terms of hard work and involvement in the process.
“My memories from all ten of my Super Bowls are sharp,” Brady said, “because I was truly present for all of them.”
That Navy SEAL session, arranged by Belichick, captures the Patriots’ philosophy perfectly. Because preparation is equally about confidence as it is about freedom. The more one rehearses, the less one has to think. And the less one has to think, the better one plays, even when everything is on the line.
