What's Tony Thinking

Are You Trying Too Hard?

Here’s a story I liked from the world of sports, but which applies to life generally. It is from writer Michael Silver in The Athletic, via friend Dave Zahl at Mockingbird. Headline at the Athletic was

“How Jared Goff hitting rock bottom became his and the Detroit Lions’ salvation.”

Summoned to Detroit Lions coach Dan Campbell’s office on a late-October Tuesday in 2022, Goff feared the worst, and with good reason. Two days earlier, in an ugly road defeat to the Dallas Cowboys, he’d been responsible for almost as many turnovers (four) as points (six). The Lions were 1-5, and 4-18-1 since Campbell had taken over as a rookie head coach and Goff had become the starting quarterback. It felt like the whole world wanted him benched, and that Campbell, if only out of self-preservation, would imminently grant that wish.

As Goff entered Campbell’s office, he braced himself for bad news. “I know how this thing goes,” he told himself. “I’m not naïve. Is this it for me?” Yet Campbell, an outside-the-box hire with an unflinching nature, told his struggling starter he was sticking with him. And as Goff began to exhale, he had an epiphany.

“Man, I’ve got to stop trying to do too much,” Goff told Campbell. “I’ve been trying to overcome certain things throughout the game, constantly thinking that this is the moment we’re gonna turn it around. I’m squeezing so hard trying to help us win, because we all want it so badly. I have to release that a little bit and just do my job, one play at a time. I’m just gonna do my job and not worry about the rest of it.”

Campbell stared back at his quarterback and smiled. “Jared,” he said, “that’s all I’ve wanted you to do this whole time.”

The conversation fortified his bond with Campbell and laid the groundwork for a connection with a famished fan base that would come to view his redemption story as its own. “It’s like you squeeze so hard, and the actual answer is to release,” Goff explained last week … “It’s ironic that when you try to do less, more happens.”

Most of the football world viewed [Goff] as a declining quarterback who’d be a stopgap starter — at best — for the Lions, but Holmes and Campbell saw things differently. “Everybody created that monster and that was never the case with us,” said Holmes, who called it a “lazy narrative.” Goff, who’d gone 1-11 as a true freshman starter for Cal in 2013, viewed it as a chance to do something epic.

“The opportunity that I have to be at the ground floor of something is something that most guys don’t get in their career,” he recalled thinking. “You can either see it as something that’s happened to you or something that’s happening for you.”

I (Tony) have certainly had plenty of times, especially when it came to sermon preparation, when I was trying too hard, and the needed thing was, to quote Goff, “to release,” or as it is put in recovery circles, “let go.” Especially at high holidays like Christmas and Easter I would often get wrapped around the axle by trying to do too much or squeeze too hard.

I sometimes resorted to the wisdom of another sport, baseball, for an image that was helpful to me. Stop, I would say to myself, trying to “hit it out of the park.” Just hit “a single,” just “make contact.”

It occurs to me that not only preachers but all sorts of people get caught up in trying too hard, trying to do too much especially at this time of the year, Christmas. We want to make it “perfect.” We try to achieve perfection in our home, our gifts, the meals we serve, the decorations. Unless you’re Martha Stewart, good luck with that! And, yeah, there was the prison thing for her.

Which reminds me of the wisdom of St. Augustine, “The only way to be perfect in this life is to know you cannot be perfect in this life.”

But Goff gets the last word and it’s a good one for sure. “It’s ironic that when you try to do less, more happens.”