Escaping the Drift: How to Reclaim Your Greatness and Stop Settling for Good

The Enemy of Greatness

Good is the enemy of great. Anybody knows that quote from Jim Collins? He said it for many times. Like I like to twist it around for my athletes and say the number one enemy of great is good.

When you come out here to be an athlete, do your best, work hard, and work towards being great. Don't just be good like all your teammates. You want to be better than not only your teammates, but people in the city, people in the state. You want to be great, right? So for those of us that understand that, that understand being great, that's where we're at, right?

Defining the Winners and the Losers

So when I talk about us, I mean I'm talking about winners. Those of us that are winners, sometimes we spend too much time thinking about what we used to do when we were winners. Okay, so the first question you have to ask yourself is when I said winners, did you say, he's talking to me?

Or did you say, I I I used to win a lot, but do I really? Maybe I don't win like I used to win. Like, ooh, maybe that's a ooh, maybe that's an issue. If you're that person, that's who we're talking about today.

So my name is Alan De Graffenreid and this is the Running Routes podcast with Alan De Graffenreid. I'm your host. So what we're going to talk about today is what is going on with those of us that are winners that go through periods in our life where we just don't feel like we're winning.

Identifying the Drift in Your Life

It's like we used to do great work at our job and now we're just kind of doing, sort of kind of work at our job. We're not kicking tail and taking names like we used to. We've kind of fallen into this, this I don't know what it is.

Like I do know what it is. Actually, what it is is this—the drift. So many of us have come from greatness. We are great, but we find ourselves falling into what I call the drift.

We all were doing great things and just slowly, slowly, slowly drifted to average. Then we got down to mediocre. And some of us have started to dip further and further and further. Now understand, everything I'm talking about today is hypocritical.

And we're going talk about that because I've spent way too much time in the drift, right? And the drift has gotten me to a place I like to call loserdom. So people that live in loserdom, as we talked about before, are not losers. Because if you're a winner, you're a winner.

And winners that lose are not losers. However, if you're a winner and you're losing and living in loserdom, there's a strong possibility that the people around you might be like, ee, this guy's losing quite a lot. He's starting to look and resemble a loser, right?

But as winners, we need to always make sure that we're taking steps, strives to make sure everybody knows that we're winners, most importantly, us ourselves. So if you are questioning whether or not you're a winner or not, that's something we need to talk about.

Something we need to talk about is how to get you out of the drift into a system that's going to get you back to winning, knowing you're a winner, feeling like a winner, and being the winner that you are. Okay.

The Stagnation of the Rut

So the real question you have to ask yourself is when you think about being in loserdom and and and you hear that you hear that story where they say so many men die at the age of 35, but they're buried at the age of 68. In other words, they kind of just kicked it in and just kind of gave up on life.

They got into a rut and just stayed there. And the rut got a nice little groove and it just became a thing that trapped them. And they never made it out. And they're just living their lives.

They're just going through the motion. They're not trying to be great at work. They're not trying to be a great father, a great husband. They're just going through life.

I think the saying is go along to get along or get along. Just getting along to get along. They're not doing anything magnificent with their life. They're just here to spend the rest of their time doing what they're gonna do.

And one of these days they'll kill over, kick the bucket and die. Right. What you all need to think about is what is your legacy?

Facing Your Legacy

Like when they're at your celebration, your funeral, whatever you want to call it, the end of your life, do you want them telling stories about things you did when you were 20? 25?

I always said, if I pass away and I die and at my celebration, they spend all their time talking about what a great athlete I was. That was way back then. If I don't accomplish anything from the time that I'm a great athlete to the time I leave this earth, that's on me.

That's a huge failure, huge mistake on me. So you need to make sure you think about your legacy. When people are talking about you at your services, are they going to talk about what you did last year, three, four years ago, before maybe the ailment got you?

Are they gonna talk about what you did way back in the day when you were young and vigorous and and you were doing your thing? Because if all they talk about is how great you were as an athlete or when you're in your twenties, what did you do with those next thirty, forty, fifty years?

What did you do? That's where the challenge comes in. That's where the compounding effect of the drift takes people over and it gets people trapped, pinned down, and taken care of, right?

The Compounding Effect of the Drift: My NFL Story

So, as I said, for me to say these things is very much hypocritical. And we're gonna talk today about a couple of times that I found myself in the drift. Not so much loserdom, but in the drift, right?

The first story is when I was with the Bengals. Out of college, as many of you know, I walked on Ohio State, earned a scholarship after three years, after that became a starter, not a regular starter, meaning Chris Sanders, who's going to Ohio States Hall of Fame this next month, we shared time as a starter.

After that, I was fortunate. I worked my tail off and I got picked up by the Cincinnati Bengals. So I spent my rookie year with the Bengals. And I'm telling you, through camp, I was a dog.

Whatever they needed done, I got it done. I was the first guy out there running crazy routes, running fast, flying around, like I had my hair on fire, right? And then I get at the end of camp, then they make the roster and they say, Okay, Alan, we're gonna put you on practice squad.

Number one job in practice squad is to make sure the guys are ready to play on Sunday. Now, the Bengals, we weren't great at that time. They're not great like they are now. We were not that good a team, right?

But it's still your job to get the team ready, whether we win or lose. And we had a lot of L's, took a lot of L's that year. And what happened for me was I went from being this focused guy that had to make it.

And then once the checks started coming in and I was on the team and they put me in the team poster, if I'm on the team poster, that means I'm on the team, right? Wrong. That's not how the NFL or "not for long" works.

Losing Focus

And what happened is I started to slip. I started to drift, drift, drift. And so I'm sitting there, not thinking about, hmm, how can I sit down and figure out how to become better as a receiver?

How can I maybe help these guys get better by running better routes or whatever else? Instead of thinking that I started thinking, hmm, should I go see my lady in Indiana this weekend when the team travels to California? Or should I have her come see me?

Well, we could probably, there's a nice restaurant there in Indiana where she is. Or, you know, I started thinking about these things, and then you start thinking, on Tuesdays, my day off, that new that new CD came out. Yeah, I said CD. That new CD came. I think I'm gonna go buy that CD.

Man, and then maybe I'll get my tires rotated. Instead of thinking about Wednesday, Thursday, Friday coming out there kicking tail every day, I started thinking about the other things. And it made me fall into the drift.

You know, you're not working as hard, you're not lifting as hard. Started to gain weight. Not that gaining weight was a big deal back then. Started to put on a little bit of weight. Maybe I slowed down.

I don't know, but my film wasn't as good. And out of the blue, they cut me. And when you get cut and you're in the drift, you're more like, why would they cut me? I was working so hard and I was such a valuable member of the team.

Instead of taking a look at yourself and realizing, dude, you're you're being a bum out there. You should have been working harder.

A Kick in the Butt: The Importance of Accountability

Now, fortunately for me, I have a great great had the greatest agent ever, Rich Katz out of Cincinnati. And Rich landed me with Kansas City Chiefs.

So obviously there's a difference between the Cincinnati Bengals and the Kansas City Chiefs in that year. Since the Kansas City Chiefs are on their way to the playoffs. They wanted some extra legs, they brought me in.

And pretty quick after I got there, I realized things were different. Things were different and things were better. And my coach was very different. He, Al Saunders, you know, Al Saunders, great offense coordinator with the Chiefs for a lot of years.

This dude was on me from day one. And I remember early there, like within first two weeks of being there, we're in the facility and I'm running a go route. And I'm running 75, 80% down the field.

And I look back and Matt Blundon's throwing me the ball. So I find another gear. I drop it in the fifth and I go and get it. You know, go out here, make this big play. And I get back to the huddle.

The Cost of Effort

And all the guys are like, you run like that? Man. They start calling me track guy. They're like, you run so fast when you're a track guy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they're all celebrating me. this is great. This is great. This is great.

You know, and this is Albert Lewis I'm going against. Albert Lewis, one of the greatest cornerbacks I ever went against, is the guy I'm going against. So Albert is a dog, right? And I'm glad to get by the guy, right?

So they're celebrating me. And I'm like, this is great. I love it here in Kansas City. We get in the film and Al Saunders puts that on the film and he's running it back. He runs it back like five times and I'm like, yo, like what's going on here?

He says, Look Alan, let me ask me let me ask you a question, Alan. Alan are are you are you running as fast as you can at the beginning of this route? And I'm like, well, you know, I I didn't it's kind of a... yeah, it wasn't the primary.

Okay, so you're not run as fast as can. Sir, sir, no, no, sir. And he says, but then y'all suddenly find the gear to do this. He says, Alan, I've done the math on this thing, and and every time you run down the field, we're paying you $100.

For those of you don't know, $100 then is probably about almost like $1,000 now. So we're paying you $100 now. Every time you run down the field. Alan, did I get him $100 worth there? I said, no, sir.

And he said to me, he said, Alan, if we're not getting $100 worth out of you, you know that what that means, right? He said, you know where you end, you know where you end up when that happens. And I was like, Yes, sir, I do.

And after that, D-graph was a dog. Track guy was a dog. I had nothing to do, but I was giving them me and Dale Carter, me and Darren Anderson, we was we was going at it every practice. They gave me the ball.

They they put me on the card. I did whatever the card said to do. I got it done. Because fortunately for me, it's not coach's job to get me in line, but that coach got me in line.

Finding Your Truth-Tellers

And it's never a receiver's coach to get a guy to understand what he has ahead of him and what he should be doing. It's their job to teach you the plays so that you can go out there and perform.

So I was fortunate that Al kicked me in my butt really quickly and let me know that it was time for me to step it up and get things done, right? But in life, how often do we have someone in our life that's willing to kick us in our butt and tell us we need to change?

Most of us have that one friend. And that friend will take, we'll go out, maybe grab a beer or something like that. And they're sitting there talking to you about, remember back when you did X. Remember back when you did Y?

Remember how great that was when you're doing X and Y? And instead of saying to yourself, how can I go back to getting, go, go back to being able to do X and Y? Instead, we say, yeah, it sure was great back then when I could do X and when I could do Y really enjoyed that time in my life.

Instead of figuring a way to get it done now, and I ultimately our friend who's just trying to throw us a big hint finally just gives up and just moves on with their day, right? You just don't have that person in your life.

A Friend vs. A Relative

So here's two examples. Like I have one buddy, I'm a I'm in I'm up in Worcester, go to Worcester, visit my buddy, he's a farmer, Matt McCoy, play ball in college together. And McCoy, we're I'm in his truck and we're driving, driving out in the fields, do stuff like that.

He said, Let's go grab something to eat. So we're driving to grab something to eat. And McCoy, we kind of pull up to the restaurant. He kind of looks over at me and he looks at me up, looks me down, and then he reaches over and he pats me on my belly, on my little belly.

He said, you all right, dog? He said, Is that what's what's going on there? And I'm like, Yeah, you yeah, you're right, man. That's something I gotta work on now. He's like, Yeah, yeah, you do.

Now that's my buddy McCoy kicking me on the butt, right? And there's not a lot of people that have that person in their life that's kicking them on butt. So I tell you the other side of that same coin is I've got nieces.

I've got all these gorgeous nieces, and they love Uncle Alan. Everybody loves Uncle Alan. Al Uncle Alan walks on water. My nieces love me like no other. They love them some Alan. So my nieces are not ever going to do anything that might hurt Uncle Allen, because they love me, right?

So I'm out to lunch with one of my nieces and I say to her, Yeah, I'm I'm not eating as much because I'm trying to cut back. I need to lose some weight, right? I need to lose weight. And she says to me, Unc, you're just a big dude.

I said, No, no, no, wait, wait. And I explain to her how much I weigh versus what I should weigh. And she says, Well, yeah, Unc, but like you're just a big dude. And it's you you're big too. You're good looking, you you're a big dude.

Auntie Darzell doesn't care. Don't worry about it, right? Now that's what my niece says to me because she loves me. She wants me to feel good about myself. She doesn't want to be upset about how much weight I've gained.

So she had a little cousin with her. And I look at her little cousin who's like a fifth grader. This dude is a fifth grader. He's a cool dude. He's a fifth grader, right? And I look at her and I say, the amount of weight I need to lose is equivalent to his current body weight.

So what I'm saying to you is he's walking out here on this earth and he weighs how much weight I need to lose to be healthy. And she says, ooh, because he's not a little dude. He's not the smallest dude in the room, right?

She's like, ooh, Unc, you might need to do something about that. I didn't, if now you put it like that, you you yeah, you probably need to do something about that, right?

So again, when you're stuck in the drift, there's not a lot of people that are gonna kick you in the butt and tell you you gotta do something different. You gotta find a new system.

If you're in a bad system or you don't have a system at all, that's probably what your number one problem is. The challenge is that you are not using a system, you don't have anything going in your direction because you don't have a direction. That's a problem, right?

The Trap of Comfort and Underemployment

So let's get into my second story about drift. Back in the days, I was a mortgage guy. When mortgages got really, really super hot, teammate of mine, Dennis Ma got me into mortgages. And I said, hey, things are great in Ohio, but man, check out Arizona.

So me, I moved my family out to Arizona to be a mortgage guy. And it was the wild, wild west, man. The mortgages they were doing out there were ginormous. So you're making all this money.

I'm making like five figures a month out there in Arizona doing mortgages, right? They had this mortgage called the Option Arm. Option Arm gave you every month you had four options of what payment you wanted to make.

You can make a 15-year fixed mortgage rate, you could make a 30-year fixed rate mortgage payment. You could make an interest only payment or a number that was smaller than interest only. So the interest on the loan is still growing because you haven't paid enough to start getting the mortgage knocked down.

And the theory was the difference between the interest only payment and the 15 year mortgage, those numbers you're gonna put into the stock market. And when you put those in the stock market, the stock market's gonna run, run, run, run, run, and you were gonna be so rich in 30 years that you could have paid cash for the mortgage or whatever else, right?

Like I said. Wild, wild west. There was I I could be on this podcast all night telling crazy stories about mortgage people in Arizona. But I guess I digress. That's what I do. I digress.

From Five Figures to Underemployed

So I'm a mortgage guy, and then what happened? The bubble burst. You couldn't get a you couldn't get appraisals done. The everything just fell apart, right? So I'm a guy that's out, right?

And I become one of those guys and I get a job at Grand Canyon University, GCU, and I'm on the phones selling education to nurses of all people. It's like, boy. And I'm not doing well, but everybody there loves me, right?

And this is where the drift begins. So I go from making five figures a month to mid five, maybe a little bit high five numbers for the year. So I got a problem. So what do I do? I get a second job. So now I'm delivering pizzas for Pizza Hut.

I'm pretty sure I said something about that before. Delivering pizzas for Pizza Hut. And when you go into Pizza Hut in the evening after you go to job one, you go to job two. And you walk in the door and it's like cheers. You know, hey Norm.

Hey, Alan, how you doing? And everybody Pizza Hut loves you because you tell funny stories and you you tell jokes and things like that. You're kind of the cool older dude that everybody's like, I he's pretty cool, right?

So it it got so comfortable. Cause I was a king of getting tips, let's start with that. So I'm I'm making what's considered really good Pizza Hut money and I'm adding that to my other income and the bills are getting paid.

My wife, I think, took on a part-time job to kind of help out with the bills. And it just got really, really comfortable. I would do my little hustle. Pizza wasn't really like work. It was more like a hangout.

You know, you go talk to the people, you do them their pizzas. It became super comfortable. And then at the Grand Canyon, I'm doing whatever I want to do. I'm I'm damn near managing the team, but I'm not the manager, right?

I'm the one that's getting everybody to do what they need. I'm the leader, but not the manager, right? So I was what they called at that time underemployed. So you got a guy that's supposed to be leading groups of people and making all this money, but now he's just a guy.

And he's not making any significant money. He's just a guy. So I was what they called underemployed. So that was my my situation, right?

The Comfort of Loserdom

So the "Whoobie" got so very comfortable. And I was stuck in that Whoobie for almost two years. I mean loserdom was my address. My address was one, two, three, Loserdom Street, Loserdom State, Loserdom Country.

I mean I was in the middle of loserdom, but it was so comfortable. I didn't have any real responsibilities. No one was breathing down my neck to hit this number or that number.

You know, Pizza Hut, I like I said, I damn near ran the place. It was like you did whatever you wanted to do whenever you wanted to do and there was no real responsibility. And for a lot of us that's the the really attractive part of loserdom because we're at this level in our life, and everybody knows we have this set of skills.

But this set of skills, boy, it takes a lot of energy to create that. It takes a lot of work, a lot of this, a lot of that. It's not easy. But where we're at now, ooh, with our skill set, this is a cakewalk. When the music stops, we're hoping to get us a cake. And that's where so many of us land.

You get stuck in the fog of it all. It's like it's like that movie The Bird Box. Yeah, the bird box with Sandra Bullock and and she's going along fine. She's pregnant and all of a sudden everybody starts going crazy and everybody else can see this thing and this thing is creeping in on everybody, but it's not creeping in on her.

Like we're the reverse of that. The people that are in loserdom, it just crept in and got them. And they don't have it—it just slowly crept up on them and it got them. And it's it's taking them down, taking them out. It's it's, you know, loserdom is a tough place to be.

The Power of Your Community

So for me, I was fortunate after two and a half years of Pizza Hut, that I started, well, my wife helped me along. I figured out that I needed to do something different. Like I said, a lot of help from my wife.

And I realized what I needed to do was start to get around people that were winning, people that had skills, people that were here... not I'm knocking the Pizza Hut people. I'm not knocking the Pizza Hut people. I'm not talking knocking the Grand Canyon people.

I'm just saying I started spending more time around movers and shakers. Movers and shakers are people like... I was a a member of a group called Toastmasters. And the people in that group were professional speakers, they were business owners, they were salespeople, they were that type of thing.

And then when I got back around those kinds of people, it allowed me to raise my level up. So two theories about who you hang out with I want to share with you today.

The 5 People Theory

Number one is they say the five people you spend the most time with, your success will be equivalent to their success. What they're doing in their lives is going to become what you're doing in your life.

That's theory one is the five people you spend the most time around, whether it's family, friends, work, church, wherever it is, those five people are who's who are giving the influence to you and your subconscious to get you to do what you're going to do.

The Rule of Thirds

The second theory is you should spend a third of time with people that are at your level. You should spend a third of your time with people that are beneath you or less than you, but you're helping them get to your level.

So you're not talking bad about them because they're beneath you. You're just giving them additional skills so they can get to your level. And you spend a third of your time with people that are exceeding what you're doing in an effort to get to their level.

So you're you're always working on getting in motion. You're putting a hand down to help somebody up. You're reaching up for a hand to get to the next level. You're you're you're keeping yourself in motion.

You're getting yourself going, going and getting around people that can change what's going on with you. So community is a big part of getting out of loserdom is because you stop hanging out.

You're not necessarily handling people in loserdom that are losers, but it gets you to change your mentality so that you can get out of loserdom and you can elevate yourself, take yourself to the next level, and start working on your legacy, right?

The R.O.U.T.E.S. Framework for Recovery

Of course, can't end the podcast without talking about routes. R O U T E S.

Relationships

Let's start with the relationships. Why are your relationships drifting? What are the things around drifting in relationships? A lot of us want to talk about the relationship with our significant other, but you also have to remember those relationships with other people in your life.

The one thing I will bring up about this is if work it sucks, don't bring home the suck of work to home. You leave the work... work sucks, leave that at home and just bring yourself home. Find a way to get back to some kind of you level so that you're not being an idiot to your family. Okay.

Occupation

Relationships also you have to think about the work relationships. If those are bad, there's friction there. You've got to find a way to fix that so that work sucks less, right? Let's let's do that, right?

With occupation, you want to make sure your relationships are good at in your occupation. But if your job is terrible and you hate your job, you're just drifting at it. Maybe it's because you used to be the dog in the office, but now you're just a guy in the office and no one's paying attention to you because some young guy came in and took your shine.

Find a way to get back to being a dog or move on. Do something different to shake the thing up. If you have a one-on-one with your boss, manager, whoever, ask them, what can I do to be a dog around here? What can I do to improve my situation? And if their honest answer is you can't do anything because you burnt, then you need to start finding exit strategy. Do something different, right?

Upkeep

With upkeep, let's talk about upkeep from a health perspective. If you're like me and you put on some weight because you're sitting around more and more, you gotta find ways to get back into active. You gotta find ways to get to working out, doing some kind of training, eating right, all those things.

Also always like to talk about your mental health. A bigger part of mental health than people think about is what is your sleep hygiene? Are you getting to bed at a reasonable hour and getting upwards of eight hours a night, maybe you're getting less, but if it's systematic and it's regular, that still means your sleep hygiene is better than not.

But at the end of the day, you have to find a way to get enough rest and you have to find a way to shut it down, like fully shut your mind down so that you're not always running around on overload, right?

Training

That takes us to training. Training is all about what are you consuming? Are you reading books? Are you listening to podcasts? Are the things you're listening to and doing, are they positive things that are helping build you up, or are they negative things that are helping just kind of leave you in the blase blah of being in loserdom? Okay.

Enterprise

Then that takes us to enterprise. Enterprise, the first thing I think you should do with enterprise is look at your community. Are there problems in your community? If there are problems in your community, what are they? What can you do to fix them?

I myself spend a lot of time in my community. I work with this organization called Second and Seven. I go out and read to second graders to talk about literacy and how they should become great readers. I coach eighth grade football.

I do these things in my community because I think my community needs me, whether they do or not, they get me, right? I think the community needs more of us to step up, get out, and do that, right? So that's enterprise.

The other part of enterprise, of course, is when you look at your paycheck, is there anything else you're doing for self to build self? Be it a side hustle, be it a side business, be it something to make your legacy greater, something to take care of your family more long term, right?

Spirituality

And finally, spirituality. Are you a person that used to go to mosque, synagogue, church religiously? Sorry, pun intended, right? Or is that something you don't do anymore?

If it's something you don't do anymore, figure out why don't you do it anymore? Was it that specific church? Was it that specific pastor? Did something go wrong? Should you find somewhere else to go?

Because you don't want to drift so far away from your spiritual life, only to find that you don't feel like you can get back to it. You can always get back to it, but if you decide you can't get back to it, obviously you can't, you can't, then you've made the decision you can't get back.

So if that's the thing that's going on with you, other spirituality things, like I said, get yourself centered by the end of the day. And it could be doing things like Tai Chi or just anything to relax you, deep breathing, all those different types of things to get yourself back in line, right?

Take the Next Step

So today we talked about the drift. And the big part of the drift is community. I have started the Running Routes Podcast School Community. It's an opportunity for you to be around other people that are like yourself.

Maybe they're on their way up, maybe they're in the middle of what they're going through, or maybe they're already up there. But there's a lot of positive communication that's going on in there. We've got different courses that you can look into.

We've also got what I call the 18 question routes index. And that's what's gonna break down your life into the different areas of routes. Let you know where you're not doing as well, where you are doing well, so that you can really dig deep in the areas that maybe you're struggling in and you can find a way to improve your situation. Right.

So down below, click the button. You can either jump into our routes school community, which there's everything in there about the the different indexes as well. But just just join us, come talk to us, come check, check us out.

I'm on there on a regular basis. Every Friday we have a hangout. Just to see what's going on with people, to see how people's weeks have been. If anybody's setting new goals, we talk about those different things as well.

So, like I said, check us out below. Be sure and like this episode. Be sure and and follow us here at the Running Routes Podcast with Alan De Graffenreid. Always, always, always remember, legacy isn't what you've done, it's who you helped along the way. Thank you and have a great day.

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