How to Be Like Mike: Go All In (Heroic +1 #1,602)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another arete plus 1 degree micro chapter from my new book, activate your heroic potential. Let's get to work. How to be like Mike, Go all in in our last plus one degree, we talked about the fact that Jerry Rice scored a touchdown every single time he caught the ball in practice. I smile and get fired up every time I think of that story. It makes me work just a little harder. In fact, I might have just banged out an extra set of burpees in Jerry's honor. Picture our hero, Jerry Rice, at his first practice as a rookie for the defending super bowl champions, the San Francisco 49ers. He ran a simple route, caught the pass, then he went full speed for the touchdown. He'd actually started doing that in college a long time before he arrived in San Francisco. And I think Michael Jordan and Jerry Rice must have telepathically traded notes when they were young, because they definitely played like one. Another side note, I just googled to see how old Michael Jordan and Jerry Rice are relative to one another. As it turns out, at the time I'm writing this, they are both 60 years old, born within four months of one another. In this plus one degree, we're going to look at Jordan in his early days. More specifically, let's rewind the clock to the year Jordan infamously got cut from his varsity team. We've all heard the story at this point. Jordan didn't even make his varsity team in high school. What? It's a true story. Jordan didn't make his varsity team as a sophomore in high school for a variety of reasons, including the fact that there were a ton of returning varsity players, including a bunch of players at his position. In any case, he didn't make the team, which devastated him. He. He cried a lot. And then he got to work. In the great biography the Life, Roland Lazenby shares a story about the day a varsity coach cruised into the gym while the junior varsity game was wrapping up. Nine players were coasting. One guy named Michael Jordan was going off with extreme intensity. The coach assumed his team must have been down by one point with a couple minutes to play. Then he looked at the scoreboard. Jordan's team was down by 20 points with a minute to go. But Jordan, he was all in. Even at 15 years old, Jordan was always all in, and that's what made him Michael Jordan.