When Your Back's Against the Wall: Fame, Football, and Lessons Learned Through a Lifetime of Adversity by Michael Oher & Don Yaeger

Author:Michael Oher & Don Yaeger
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780593330920
Publisher: Avery
Published: 2023-08-08T07:00:00+00:00

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Tangled up in my recovery is one simple concept and I’m afraid it’s lost on today’s generation: patience.

I kept up my routine. All it took was for me to see the number on the bathroom scale go down one time and I was locked in. What made the weight loss process even more satisfying was the ownership I got to take in it. For once, I was doing something that someone wasn’t going to pop up and take the credit for.

I’ve always been a big guy. Sticking to a diet, even losing some weight, is something I’ve long been familiar with, but this time was very different. It wasn’t just that I needed to shed a few pounds to help me run faster or make weigh-in. This was a life-or-death kind of different. On Sundays, I’d been about 310—and more of it was muscle back then. I was a hundred-plus pounds from a healthy weight. To see that first number on the bathroom scale go down not once, but twice, was going to take time. There was something Coach Matsko had said to me during a training session that suddenly came back to me: Stack good days on top of good days.

So that became my mantra. Just one good day after the next. I knew that if I could just lose a pound a day, those pounds would start to add up. This was a game plan I could understand. It went all the way back to my roots: If I could go to that one class. If I could do that one rep. If I could make it through the night to the next morning. If these single actions could stack up, over time, I could really have something to work with. Victory is won in inches.

That’s the thing: you gotta be willing to put in the time, even if the desired result isn’t within sight. That’s my fear these days. Kids are being raised on fifteen-second TikTok videos. Their minds don’t know how to wait. How to dig deep for the fortitude to play the long game. And now, as I’m looking back on it, as I’m thinking about how to advise my own son, I can see that situation even more clearly. The driving factor in all of it for me is a quality that, in today’s world, is going the way of the dinosaurs.

Patience.

That fruit you planted is going to grow, but what it requires is months and months of staring at dirt.

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