Tom Brady played professional football for nearly half of his life. And for most of it, he was neither the biggest, the fastest, nor the flashiest. He wasn’t perceived as a generational talent either, as evident by his selection as the 199th pick in the 2000 NFL Draft. But what Brady was — and has always been — is disciplined.
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According to the GOAT, greatness really begins with discipline and attention to the fundamentals — with the boring stuff nobody wants to do.
In the latest edition of 199, Tom Brady’s weekly newsletter, the seven-time Super Bowl champion started by wondering what made his recent YouTube video, titled ‘How To Throw A Football’, go viral and garner more than 860,000 views in a week. After all, it wasn’t a flashy, trick-throw highlight reel. It was simply a technical breakdown of the mechanics involved. He delved deeper into the “why”.
Brady realized that the video worked because fundamentals, he believes, are the real key. In it, Brady had explained how throwing a football efficiently comes down to sequencing. “Start from the ground up,” he wrote. “Everything is connected. Don’t get ahead of yourself.”
For him, that means power starts at the feet, flows through the hips, and finishes at the fingertips. That same approach — understanding and repeating the basics — applies far beyond football, the Patriots legend explained.
To prove his point, Brady referenced two of the most dominant athletes in modern sports: 4x NBA Champion Stephen Curry and 11x PGA Tour Player of the Year, Tiger Woods.
“During the season, Steph Curry takes 300 shots at the end of every practice, 500 during the off-season,” Brady wrote. “Spot-up threes, dribble pull-up threes, floaters in the lane. He takes these shots from the same spots in the same sequence over and over again, every day, with perfect form.”
Brady then described Woods. “He used to hit 100–200 four-foot putts in a row at the end of his range days,” Brady added. “As he got older and his back couldn’t handle the strain, he sped up the routine and hit 50 four-footers with just his right hand, then fifty more with both hands.”
Both icons, as the legend pointed out, weren’t chasing viral moments or social media applause when they honed those skills. They were perfecting their craft away from the spotlight — committed to the same actions, day after day, year after year.
The lesson here is that mastery is monotony done well.
“Part of greatness in anything is mastering the fundamentals,” the GOAT wrote. “It’s embracing the monotony of doing them well over and over again.”
And that’s the mindset that carried a sixth-round draft pick from Michigan to become the most decorated quarterback in NFL history. Not style. Not shortcuts. Just basics, executed like clockwork.
Because if Curry can shoot the same shots for years and Woods can sink the same putt thousands of times, maybe the path to greatness is just doing the boring things better than anyone else.
