It has taken me a few days to digest what happened over the weekend. 49ers beating the Saints? With that offense? Wow. That was amazing.
And Tom Brady's mad and angry. Wonderful, I think it's fantastic. You know, let him go to another Super Bowl. Let him win. All we need is another Patriot victory.
The one I had trouble digesting the most is the Packers. It seems like Tom Caughlin really buys into the "Any Given Sunday" mantra. But Tom Caughlin's even better than that, because he's a really good coach and he really believes in himself.
They actually gave the Packers a scare in the regular season, barely losing that game. They were actually up, I think, with a minute to go before Aaron Rodgers led the Packers down the field for the win, with -- I think -- two seconds to go.
But what that game did was set the Giants on this path that they're on right now. The same thing happened to the Giants in 2007 when they were on that Super Bowl run. They played the Patriots in the last game of the regular season when the Patriots were still undefeated. They took the Patriots to the very, very end and lost a really close game. But that gave them the confidence going into that Super Bowl that they can beat them.
The Giants were an extremely confident team the other day. You thought the whole game they were going to win. Even when they were up 20 to 13 in the fourth quarter, you felt like it was more like 30 to 13. It just felt like it wasn't the Packers' day. So even though I'd love to be a sportswriter, and write about sports endlessly, I'm going to tell you why you need to apply the "Any Given Sunday" rule when you're going out and meeting people.
Here's the deal: for those of you that have the "St. Louis Rams mentality", you know, the mentality that when you go into a game you just think you're going to lose, and the minute something goes wrong, you think, "Ugh, here we go again. I can't believe it. We're going to lose."
You know that mentality? It's probably the same mentality that you have when you go off and try to meet someone. As you do the approach, as you walk over to the person, you think to yourself, "They really don't want to talk to me, and they look like they don't want to be bothered. They just don't look like they want to really engage in a conversation."
So immediately when you throw the ball, or in this case "throw out words", you throw out those words with no confidence. So, of course, the words are incomplete. There's no succession, there's no conversation, because the person you're talking to feels that they're with somebody that has no confidence.
Life is no different than sports. It's about gaining momentum. When the Giants lost to the Packers in the regular season that was the last time they lost all year. They started to believe in themselves, and they started to say to themselves, "That team is undefeated? No way. We could have beaten them. One more stop, one more throw, whatever it might have been, we could have beaten those guys."
And look at the Giants right now, playing the 49ers in the NFC Championship game. Do you doubt them any more? Do you not think they can beat the 49ers?
What about you and your life? How do you gain momentum? Do you gain momentum every single day? How do you react when you approach somebody? Do you look at it as a win?
When you talk to somebody for a little while and then ask them out, if all of a sudden they say "No, I'm in a relationship" do you look at that as rejection? Or do you think to yourself, "Wow, I did it. I asked somebody out. I asked out a total stranger that I was attracted to, and I wasn't afraid anymore. The next time I'm going to do it with even more confidence, because next time I know I can do this part. I can drive down that field and I can go and ask for that phone number."
Here's the deal: love and dating is about building up your confidence every single day. It's about putting the time in to practice your skills. It's about starting conversation with people you meet everywhere, so on any given Sunday you can end up with a phone number. You can end up with a date with somebody you never had the guts to ask out before.
Be like the New York Giants: get that momentum going and jump-start your dating life.