Rule #15
Don’t approach your personal renovation without the right partner in your corner, not only encouraging you but also telling you the hard stuff, someone who will be brutally honest with you.
AFTER IMPLEMENTING THE strategies I’ve laid out, such as having a few lines in the water, as I reference in chapter 2, using visualization techniques to envision what it was that I wanted to do with my future, I decided to pursue a career in television. There’s a side of me that is a real introvert. I take in energy when I’m alone. But there’s another part of me that is enlivened and energized when I am interacting with others. I first tapped into that side of myself when Jay Glazer invited me to this speaking gig at a synagogue in Long Island. I was cool with that. I’ve got the military kid thing nailed down; I can get along with anyone. The youngest person in the audience that day was about eighty-two. I was cool with that too. I don’t remember exactly what I said to them. I remember keeping it real, talking to them as if they were my parents and their friends and we were all sitting around the table playing cards in Houston. I was bringing the house down when suddenly Jay got nervous. He passed me a note that said, “Stop making them laugh so hard. These old people are a cough away from a heart attack.” The feeling I got when I connected with them was something that I wanted to explore more. Broadcast, the field in which I was gaining some experience, especially at FOX, seemed like a good fit.
Although it appears as if I jumped seamlessly from the NFL to FOX Sports to LIVE with Kelly, in reality that couldn’t be further from the truth. I remember doing shows that nobody would see—either because my bit was edited out or because the show was canceled before it was broadcast. The first time I was ever asked to interview anybody was when the local FOX station called me and asked me if I wanted to go to the Sports Illustrated party for their swimsuit issue. Who wouldn’t? I walked around, just happy to be there, thrilled for the perk. Then when I least expected it someone put a microphone in my hand and told me to interview the models. It turns out they didn’t just want me to have a good time, they were putting me to work. Words tumbled and stumbled out of my mouth; if I’m honest, I didn’t make much sense—in fact, I was hopeless. God knows, I hope nobody ever finds that footage, because I was so nervous and so bad that the supermodel Vendela Kirsebom took hold of the situation by grabbing the microphone and interviewing me. Bless her!
Things got better when I did a series called the Best Damn Sports Show Period with Tom Arnold, John Salley, Rodney Peete, Chris Rose, Charissa Thompson, and Rob Dibble. On the show, ex–hockey, football, and basketball players talked, joked, and mixed it up with the main host. I had fun, and it was an immersion course on getting comfortable in front of a camera. I would do a quick ten- or fifteen-minute hit from New York when I wasn’t able to travel to Los Angeles, which taught me to sit and interact with a camera without being able to see the reaction of the other host, and how to create energy with facial expressions as well as words. I also learned on that show how to laugh at myself. We were doing Halloween shows, and one time, they sent me a costume—it was a giant tooth. I’m sitting there doing this show in this giant tooth with my head popping out. I was Count Gap-ula. The April Fools’ Day prank in which Tom Arnold and I pretended to get into a knock-down, drag-out bar brawl still ranks as one of my favorite memories. (You can look it up on YouTube.) At the time, I was still playing football. I hadn’t a clue that a job could be so much fun.
As Jay grew in his broadcasting career, he always brought me in as one of his first guests on whatever show he was hosting. So it was a lot of fun when we took over as cohosts of the Spike TV show Pros vs. Joes. On the show, three professional athletes, the “Pros” took on three average guys, the “Joes,” in a series of challenges. If the Joes bested the pros, they won ten thousand dollars.
Just when it appeared I was making headway, however, I encountered another setback. I appeared on a sitcom called Brothers. It ran only one season, but it might as well have been a graduate program in broadcast television. I learned about memorizing scripts, comedic timing, multiple takes, and interacting with true actors. The show was developed by Don Reo, who created the Chris Rock show Everybody Hates Chris, and it starred me as a former NFL star player (not a big stretch there) and Daryl “Chill” Mitchell as my brother, whose once promising football career ended after a tragic accident left him paralyzed. The great CCH Pounder played our mother and Carl “Apollo Creed” Weathers played our dad. It was canceled after just one season, and though it was a career setback (there went my embryonic acting career), to my mind, it was in no way a failure. It was a line in the water.
In the first few years after I retired from the Giants, Constance and I were bootstrapping. Even though I was working at FOX I wanted to be more involved in business and television. I needed to find my new set point. I could see myself working in broadcast, but how could I stomp out the gap between seeing it and doing it? Our production company was in an office borrowed from a friend. There were just the two of us and an intern who answered the phones. We kept our expenses to a minimum—we didn’t want to go over budget on this renovation we called my career. So we had some of our best meetings not at fancy restaurants, but at the International House of Pancakes—i.e., IHOP. One idea we mapped out at the IHOP—where my savvy friend and business partner would bring her own 100 percent pure Vermont maple syrup—was a talk show in which I would cohost with one or two other people. We put feelers out and waited for the phone to ring. Walk in the park, right? By now, after all, I had had some television experience and had vastly improved from the time I couldn’t even interview a model at the SI swimsuit party.
Not at all. Not only did the phone not ring. The response was so lackluster one Hollywood personality went so far as to tell us she’d be doing us a favor to even take the meeting and hung up before we could utter a polite thank-you.
As I say in chapter 10, good can and will follow bad. After being dissed by the A list, the B list, and the C list in Hollywood, I got a call to fill in as a guest cohost for LIVE with the incredibly skilled Kelly Ripa. And I learned something from the experience. I realized, with hindsight, that in figuring out what my post-football life was going to look like, I was renovating my career from the ground up. And I know a thing or two about renovation.
I’ve renovated almost every home that I’ve lived in over the past fifteen years. Some hate the process; I love it, perhaps because it reminds me of team sports, where everyone needs to work together to create the flow that makes the project come together seamlessly. You can’t put in a basement media room unless you make sure the basement is free of mildew and moisture. The painter can’t start painting until the electrician has wired the house and closed up the walls. I’ve come to see the choreography of it all as akin not just to football and other team sports but also to life, particularly when it comes to architecting your second or third act. It’s a life lesson about dreams and executing those dreams. Anyone who’s ever renovated a house will give you some tips about what they learned in the process. Here are my top five tips for renovating, indeed transforming your life.
When you’re renovating a house, you learn that while you want to focus on the exterior and superficial aspects—the beautiful lighting, the breathtaking pool—you’ve got to start with the basics, the foundation, the plumbing, the electricals. If you don’t get your priorities straight, you will ultimately spend more money circling back to replace old pipes or fix faulty wiring that you should have replaced from the start.
For me, taking the time to fix the stuff you can’t see meant taking the time to really work on my relationships with my family and friends; being on the road, chasing glory on the gridiron, meant that I wasn’t always around to spend real quality time with the people I loved.
Before I started to test out what my next career move might be, I took the time to work on my personal life, to make sure that my infrastructure was tight, because first and foremost, my number one goal in life is to be a loving dad, a father to Tanita, Michael Junior, Isabella, and Sophia. If nothing else happened for me, I figured I could sit on the beach in California and enjoy life with my four kids. As long as I had enough money to get them through school, as long as I could muster the will and the skill to help them set sail toward their biggest dreams, the way my father had helped me, then I would be able one day to look in the mirror and give myself that Babe pat on the back. I’d be able to say, “That’ll do, Michael.”
It’s a good check-in to have with yourself; outside of money, outside of career—is everything well in your home and your heart? Setting aside time to just spend with my family and friends did as much for my growth as anything else.
Anyone who has ever had a contractor run out on them or hired a project manager who couldn’t keep the project on time and on budget knows how important it is to have someone capable running your team. Constance Schwartz was the first person I called when I retired. Having seen her in action at the NFL, having seen her run all of Snoop’s business, I knew she’d be a great person to help me navigate the next stage of my career. She had vision and she understood how to negotiate big deals and manage people. But there are a lot of people who can do that. What set Constance apart then and now is that she is fiercely loyal to the people she has committed to. I thought, “Who’s the one person I know who would put my interests first?” As selfish as that sounds, she honestly would put herself in harm’s way to save me. I wouldn’t want her to do it, of course. We’re not remaking The Bodyguard or anything. But knowing how much she would protect me meant everything to me. I needed more than a manager. I needed a business partner whom I could trust like family.
A lot of people in the workplace talk about the importance of mentors. When I hear that, I often wonder if what they are looking for is a fairy godmother or fairy godfather—someone who’s going to open doors and make the path easy. That’s not been the experience of anyone I know. In Constance, I have not a mentor but a peer and a partner, someone with whom I can dream, with whom I can brainstorm and plan. The kind of friendship I have with Constance is something that all of us can cultivate in our own professional lives, and I believe that it is just as valuable, if not more so, than finding one specific mentor.
I can tell Constance anything. She always says, “If you tell me everything, I can help you. If you don’t, then I can’t.” There are no secrets between us. When you’re in the hunt to achieve your biggest dreams, what people in the corporate world call a BHAG—a Big Hairy Audacious Goal—you need to know that you have someone in your corner.
Just as you wouldn’t start a major renovation without giving considerable thought to whom you’ll select as your contractor, a person with whom you can discuss ideas, budgets, places to splurge, and places to compromise, don’t approach your personal renovation without the right partner in your corner, not only encouraging you but also telling you the hard stuff, someone who will be brutally honest with you.
Renovating a home is a lesson in patience and compromise. You wouldn’t expect to walk into a fixer-upper and then five days later have it somehow magically transformed into your dream home. In the same way, when you’re renovating your life—overhauling your career or setting any other major life goal—make sure you give yourself enough time to get where you want to go.
I’m very close to my nephew Brett. I love him like my son. Brett’s had his struggles, but he’s worked hard and now he’s in his twenties and has two jobs: he works at GNC and he works at Sunglass Hut. I joke that he sells everything I need: protein shakes and sunglasses. I know that he is anxious to get a shot at something bigger and better. When you work for an hourly wage, it can take two jobs just to keep food on the table, gas in the car, and a roof over your head. I encourage Brett to take the long view. “This is not for the rest of your life,” I tell him. “Know where you want to go—that’s where the visualization comes in—and keep building toward that dream and you will get there.”
I remember those hourly wage jobs well, and I know the importance of having a vision and being able to execute it. When I was in high school and on vacations from college, I worked at the NCO (noncommissioned officers) Club in Mannheim, Germany, as a busboy and dishwasher. I’m telling you I have washed enough disgusting dirty dishes to last a lifetime. There were two cooks at the NCO Club. They had served in the military, and when they got out, they took jobs in the NCO kitchen. Every year the two would say, “I’m just doing this for one more year. I’m going to go back to school and get my college degree.” And every year I’d come home from college and the two guys would be there, not happy, barely making a living, talking about “Just one more year and I’m getting out of here.” It made such a huge impression on me because I thought, “I know one thing. I never want to be that person, stuck in rewind, always talking about next year but never making it happen.”
Anyone who’s ever had a renovation that goes on and on knows that you need to give yourself a timeline and a way to enforce it. Brett can’t work indefinitely without a plan or his dreams will go unrealized, but at the same time he has to develop a strong work ethic as a foundation for his future goals. I like to give myself SMART goals:
• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Realistic
• Time-Bound
Whenever I’m renovating a house, I take great inspiration from visiting the homes of my friends. It’s one thing to walk into a design store and see something that looks cool. It’s a whole other thing to walk into someone’s home and see an interesting design element and know that they’ve lived with it and it really works. One night I went to Mario Batali’s house for dinner, and I saw that he and his wife had this metal slide built into their kitchen island in which they safely stored their knives. I immediately called my contractor and said, “Let’s put in one of those.”
I think the same philosophy applies in life. Tony Robbins said it best when he said, “Success leaves clues.” From the days when I was reading Herschel Walker’s workout book as a kid growing up in Germany, I have been looking at the lives of others to give me inspiration on how to shape and design my own. Funny story. When I was a chubby kid looking for inspiration to trim a few pounds so I could shed my moniker, “Bob,” I discovered the book by Walker that I talk about in chapter 1. Years later, I actually had the opportunity to play with Walker before he retired. I played with him for the Giants, then against him when he played for the Eagles and the Cowboys. When I first met him, as an adult, I showed him the picture I’d taken with him as a kid.
I said, “I got this picture of you and me when I was thirteen in Germany.”
He remembered the event, which had happened more than fifteen years before, perfectly. He said, “Oh yeah, that was the Polaroid promotion tour.”
I said, “You know what that means? You’re old.”
He said, “Stop lying. Look at how big you are in that picture. You must have been twenty years old then,” he teased, my weight adding a few years, no doubt.
Then I said, “Plus I bought your book. I just got to say, it didn’t do anything for me and I want my money back.”
He said, “Look at where you’re at now! The book worked.” He was right. The book did work.
My point is, don’t think you have to reinvent the wheel. Look for role models in your field. Read their stories. Buy their books. Copy what works and make it your own.
There’s an African proverb that says, “Move your feet while you pray.” For me that means that after you’ve taken the time to architect your dreams, with all the meditation, visualization, and positive energy that entails, then you’ve got to switch gears and get into execution mode. Be forewarned, it’s messy and unpredictable, and you never know what you’ll find once you start taking down walls.