Willpower, SAT Scores, and Success the T.O. Way
Most of the controversy about Terrell Owens is now history and the emotions generated subsided substantially. This musing is an attempt to ‘close the door’ on at least my own reasons for admiring how he lived a difficult life. It has been prompted by a lecture on will power by a Princeton University Professor.
Willpower is not just some vague unmeasurable concept. Willpower exists, can be measured in the laboratory, and has been measured for some time now. The relationship between willpower and success is better understood now, albeit many questions remain. What we do know is based, in this musing, on a lecture by Professor Sam Wang of Princeton University, a Professor of Molecular Biology and Neuroscience.
My own overdone defense of Terrell Owens is well known by those who know me well, a diverse cabal limited in number. To many reasonable enough people, Terrell Owens is an annoying self centered character with a split personality: Terrell Owens off the field or before a camera, and T.O. on the field. His success on the field is not debatable and he currently stands 2nd or 3rd in wide receiver stats in the NFL record books.
My own profession as a physiologist brought me into contact with hundreds of college students with a background similar to Terrell Owens. Terrell Owens was raised by his grandmother in a poor southern ghetto in Alabama. Students raised by single parents in poverty situations attending poor schools, with often the least competent teachers, and difficult family/ peer situations, arrive at college, if they ever get to college, with all kinds of difficult hurdles to overcome, if they are to achieve the kind of success students from better environments more easily achieve. That’s a long sentence, a consequence of condensation efforts.
When victims of such poverty pockets in this country are referred to as thugs, criminals, welfare leaches on society, lazy, and so on——usually when there are demonstrations or riots in these communities—it pains me to hear it, especially when it is obvious such shallow brained TV pundits have clearly never worked closely with this population. The truth is, at least for those in these environments who make it into college, they are more often than not some of the most admirable individuals we can ever meet. These young people did not earn a difficult family situation, did not earn the poor schools, the poor health care, the poor peer situation, their place of birth, the community they lived in, and so on. Many of these students are about the most honest, most dependable, most motivated, most eager for good advice, most forgiving, and most personable students an instructor will get to meet. Most of them haven’t been more than a stone’s throw from their own neighborhood and a more upscale college exposure is genuinely an emotional boost. They furtively hope they can see light at the end of the tunnel.
The reality however is this: they have endless hurdles to overcome which students from better environments never have to get over. It is not unusual for these disadvantaged students to work a demanding job for 40hrs a week, attempt to take a full load of courses, have heavy family obligations, poor health care, poor environments in which to study, personal social problems and pressures, and a long history of getting the short stick in almost every aspect of their lives. Yet there they are, struggling to stay afloat with a kind of effort that is genuinely admirable. I thought I had struggled in life to get anywhere, but the hand dealt to me in life was a cakewalk compared to what they had been dealt. Most of us ought to remember that, especially those claiming to be devoutly religious.
These multi-challenged young people often get help from certain others once in college, and they genuinely appreciate any help they get. Sometimes they succeed, but most of the time the endless pressures and hurdles wear them down—they become exhausted, just sort of give up, and end up in careers which are far below their potential. They may end up a mail person or in a lesser level position in a professional area they wanted to pursue. They didn’t fail, in that they escaped the extreme poverty, but they failed in that they never got to the level of their potential in a desired profession. Essentially, one can help them over some hurdles with delicate maneuvering, but in the end there are too many hurdles, and they run out of energy to fight on any further. Most of them never become outwardly bitter, and given their admirable personal traits they often live a more contented life then those who rose higher up the ladder in our ‘rat race’. Many of the people who have higher titles, higher salaries, more power over others, and whatever—are often the same ones who sustain the notion that ‘they earned their success the old fashioned way—they earned it”. The real successful are often trapped between compulsive behavior and self serving illusions.
There is much more to elaborate regarding all of the above, but the above is enough to explain why Terrell Owens is an admirable example of success. Terrell Owens is a less a product of his community than a product of isolation from his community and peers. His grandmother was an eccentric sort of dictator who didn’t let Terrell out of the house and yard except to go to school and play sports. He couldn’t even ride his bicycle outside the small yard, and explained to Terrell: “You are special, you are not going to be like the other boys. They do bad things and are bad people. If you are to get anywheres in life you have to do it on your own. No one else will help you, they will just try to keep you down. Never trust anyone else but God.” Hardly anyone from his home town or college community remembers much about Terrell Owens. He was shy, quiet, kept to himself, socially stunted, and just day dreamed about being somebody instead of a nobody. His physical ability for sports was limited; in high school and most of college he was a backup wide receiver, seeing game action only when the starter got injured. He received no favored treatment from anyone about anything, and Terrell Owens already had accepted the notion that any success had to come from himself. The first thing he did was devise his own workout sessions before dawn, running and working with weights on his own. He just listened to what the coaches would tell the starters on the team—a genuine fly on the wall. College was little different, and his social life was mostly phone calls every night to his grandmother who managed to instill in him in a very real way (to Terrell) that it was him against the world—never give in, fight any attempt by anyone to hold him back. There are few, if any, tales, from anyone, about Terrell Owens in high school or college. He was just there in a vague sort of way.
By the end of college he had really bulked up and understood the mechanics and strategies needed to be a good receiver, most of which he learned from what coaches told their starters. Terrell Owens was drafted 87th in the third round of the NFL draft by San Francisco. If his grandmother was the guru of his youth, Jerry Rice was the guru of his NFL career. It was Jerry Rice who got T.O. to realize that talent at wide receiver was only half the battle. The rest was finding a way to put pressure on quarterbacks and coaches to send the ball his way more so than any other way. In most other positions the game comes to you, for wide receivers a lot of success depends on creating pressure for the ball to come your way.
Almost overnight, after he came to pro football, Terrell Owens created T.O. This creation was going to be the ‘enforcer’, an intimidating presence who would make anyone uncomfortable if they tried to hold him back. As in his whole life, Terrell Owens was an ingrained loner. He lived in his own private bubble. He liked himself, and he liked being alone where he could focus on his dreams. Success to Terrell Owens was to be the best possible wide receiver, and achieving that would be his claim to success. His focus was so intense on his goal that no one, or anything else in his life, much mattered. Amazingly he succeeded. He got to the top essentially on his own. Every hurdle he either sailed over, ran through or ran around. It was a long complicated tense and lonely journey, a huge book if detailed.
The loud and persistent critics, almost always media commentators, players never on a team with him, and certain fans, never ceased in their attacks on Terrell Owens, or more precisely the T.O. persona. After all, T.O. was the only personality of Terrell Owens they knew. Few, if any of them, were able to get any closer personally to Terrell Owens than were teammates or coaches. And they attacked the T.O. persona with unrelenting vengeance. He was too self centered, bragged too much, was a bad teammate, a bad influence in the locker room, too full of himself, and some of these commentators, like Peter King of Sports Illustrated, claimed he should have been banned from football, while the adjectives they used to describe him were the kind we hear in ghetto neighborhood pick-up games. It seemed a tad strange to me that they could be so unprofessional in their attacks on him, whose performance on the field and in practice was 5 star professional. Perhaps their inability to gain any more access to him than anyone else, was the real thorn in their side. Terrell Owens was never one of those undercover sources of character assassination many media analyzers depend on for their stories. Unless someone was being unfair to T.O. (in his mind), T.O. simply gave little thought to others. If the song “I Did It My Way” ever applied to anyone, it applied to Terrell Owens.
Coaches and teammates were rather unanimously baffled by Terrell Owens. Most would say, in their own way: there is Terrell Owens—and there is T.O. Jerry Rice cautioned everyone not to cross T.O., he would never forget. Steve Young commented that whatever people wanted to say about T.O. off the field, no one was more prepared, tried harder, or knew his position better than Terrell Owens. Bill Walsh, who had plenty of opportunity to know T.O. well, commented that T.O.’s perception of what people are thinking about him does not always match the reality. He went on to say that things can be going along smoothly when all of a sudden T.O. tips over the whole boat. When someone sees all their struggles from the git go as being one of them vs the world, I guess the boat can sometimes be tipped over. It may well have been T.O.’s method of leveling the playing field. Once everyone is tossed into the water, T.O. figures he can stay afloat better than anyone else. And those around him learn to be careful so he doesn’t turn the boat over and make surviving in the water the level playing field.
Terrell Owens has always been a model citizen. No criminal record at all, no stealing, no assaults unless he was physically assaulted, and his personal ethics, which are strong, center around “fair is fair”. Any who think they can be unfair to T.O. because he/she has the leverage to do so find themselves badly mistaken. Just ask ask the Philadelphia Eagles owner and Donovan McMann. Much of the NFL operational rules favor the owners, and many players are paid well under their level of performance via disingenuous contracts. The contracts are one sided, bound by the players but not by the owners. When the owner ‘tricked’ Terrell Owens into signing a contract out of T.O.’s ignorance, the owner thought he had successfully made another killing. After all, even though underpaying Terrell, Terrell was still making big money. But the T.O. part of Terrell doesn’t care. And T.O. never buckled, played as well as he ever played but spoke to no one telling the Offensive co-ordinator “You don’t talk to me unless I talk to you first”. He didn’t talk at all to Donovan. He told Andy Reid “Don’t you tell me to shut up. You shut up. My name is Owens, I am not your son. You shut up.” Of course all this is outrageous, but in T.O.’s mind it was just like his grandmother warned him “They will try to take you down. Don’t let them.” They had to trade T.O. and he made far more money on the next team.
The vicious attacks on Terrell Owens came almost exclusively from media commentators, some fans, players on other teams, and with precious few exceptions, never from former teammates or coaches. Players mostly said, in their own way, “Terrell Owens is a good teammate. He doesn’t speak to me much, but we love having him on our side when the game starts. He speaks with his actions. That’s fine.” He drove most coaches nuts, but they all pretty much state, again in their own way, that they enjoyed coaching him, that he belongs in the Hall of Fame, and admire his preparation, his focus, his success once the game starts.
Now let me switch here and apply all of the above to the lecture by Professor Sam Wang from Princeton. What Terrell Owens has, more than anything else is willpower. While willpower can be tested and certainly exists, at the neuronal level much of it is still mysterious. It is finite, it can be used up, but the amount available can be built up over time with use. Whatever amount of willpower you have, with use, the willpower pool size can be increased over time. Willpower has been tested in young children and subsequent follow-ups have demonstrated that willpower is a better predictor of SAT scores and success in life than I.Q. tests. Ok, maybe most of us are not surprised at this, but now it is demonstrable. Multiple tasking can drain our willpower pool. And therein lies the mystery of Terrell Owen’s success. His focus early on was on becoming the best wide receiver possible, even though his raw talent in this area was not readily there.
It is probably fair to say that had Terrell Owens not lived his life with essentially a single focus—to be the best wide receiver possible, to be somebody instead of a nobody—that if he had multi-tasked his life, no such success would have been achieved as his willpower reservoir would have been drained. To achieve this focus Owens essentially created a bubble around his life and kept other people and other aspects of life at bay. He didn’t really bother or interfere with others, he just ignored them, kept them at bay, and concentrated on his life’s goal. Most of us use up our willpower reserve on many aspects of our lives. Not T.O. Football was his entire life. Had Terrell been a student in my class at the University, I would hardly have known he existed at all. He wouldn’t have come for help or advice with course work or any other part of his life. What Terrell had, compared to other students with similar backgrounds, was an olympic size willpower which was being centered on one aspect of his life.
According to Professor Chang, those young children with the strongest willpower not only had the most success in life but were also well liked by their peers. Again this fits in with Terrell Owens. By far and wide his teammates and coaches liked him despite his ‘uniqueness’. When T.O. ran up and down the sidelines, while the defense was on the field, his teammates were not irritated when he might keep yelling “I am going to love me some me” or “Who can make a big play, I can, I can.” To them, that was just vintage T.O. and part of his self concentration. To the media, some fans and some players on other teams it was simply infuriating to them. Imagine if T.O. had been the first player to jump into the stands after a touchdown. The league would have gone bananas. If many of T.O.’s antics were childish, well perhaps he was simply having the childhood he never had. All his life he wanted so desperately to be a somebody instead of a nobody, and with his self developed talent and his created T.O. persona, all the cameras and attention in the media was a dream come true. With such a strong willpower dominating his life, it is not surprising that he can be brought to tears easily. Early on, in interviews, some loved to mention Terrell’s grandmother just to watch him tear up (she was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease).
Somewhere in all this is a lesson for those youngsters unlucky enough to be raised in the kind of ghettoes which our society creates. When 43% of Americans don’t make enough money to be eligible to pay any federal income taxes, these kind of communities are all over the place. Saving all your willpower for a narrow goal helps achieve success in that goal, but it comes with a cost. Other aspects of Terrell Owen’s life have suffered substantially. He has lost much of his money earned at football thru bad business decisions and child support payments. He has few social skills for strong relationships and remains single. Then again, his goal was to be somebody instead of a nobody, and the persona of T.O. which he created achieved that, and it has carried over after football. Terrell is no longer young enough to play football, but he still gets attention from all sorts of people who use his name recognition to help promote various causes. For someone like me, it has never been his football play which attracted my interest, but the means by which Terrell Owens got to the top of the heap. If more of my students, from the same kind of background as Terrell Owens, could have generated more of the kind of focus and willpower of a T.O., then greater success for them would have been achieved. Like most diversity in life, the right way to do things gets complicated. It is necessary to remember that T.O. had a brother and a sister, both raised by the same grandmother. The magic didn’t work for them. And of course we need be cognizant that it worked for Terrell Owens in a very targeted way, and he paid significantly in other aspects of life, to which he gave little, if any, focus.
For one like myself who likes to write musings, the number of issues in life available to think a lot about are endless. Each day I try to learn more about something before the day ends. “What is the point?” could be legitimately asked. There probably is no real point except, as a hobby, it can be engaged in at any age, it costs no money, and for me, it brings contentment. That is, of course, about all anyone can hope to gain from life. In the end, no matter what roads we all take, we all end up 6 feet under, or our ashes scattered to the wind. What does matter is the amazing progress of the evolutionary process (the laws which govern this process created by God), and all we get, which is gift enough, is a chance, by chance, to play a bit role in the process for a “little gleam of time between two eternities”. That to me is reality. All of us, including T.O., deal with this reality or pay the emotional consequences.
