Take Advantage of Every Opportunity - Danny Wuerffel

[00:00:05] Speaker A: Hey, everybody, thanks for joining us today on the worst advice I ever got. Our guest today is former college national champion and Heisman winning quarterback Danny Werfel. After his career in the NFL, Danny became the executive director of Desire Street Ministries, whose mission is to revitalize under resourced neighborhoods through community development. [00:00:25] Speaker B: It. [00:00:25] Speaker A: Danny, thanks for joining us today. [00:00:27] Speaker B: Well, it's great to be with you. Thanks for having me, Danny. [00:00:30] Speaker C: We don't beat around the bush on this podcast. We just jump right in with asking you to tell us about the worst advice you ever got. [00:00:37] Speaker B: The worst advice I ever got was to take advantage of every opportunity. [00:00:44] Speaker C: Okay. Wow, that sounds like really good advice, actually. Let's unpack that. Tell me what's bad about that advice. Help me understand. [00:00:52] Speaker B: Well, I think it's like a lot of things. It can be good advice. It can be very helpful advice. I think especially when I was younger, this is sort of a culture ethic I picked up from parents, coaches, teachers, mentors that try everything, try new things, explore. Don't just play one sport. I had some coaches say, make sure you play all the sports because you never know which one you're going to love. And I was a basketball player more at heart, and I'm glad I tried football. So I think there's some good advice to it. But I also think as you get older, in particular, and as you begin to figure out life, there's a way that there's sort of a dark side to this advice in which it can really impact you negatively. And I have a feeling we might dive into that a little bit deeper. [00:01:40] Speaker C: Yeah, that's a great lead into a natural question of. So you followed this advice. It sounds like at one point, and it led to maybe not so good results. Can you talk about that a little. [00:01:51] Speaker B: Bit again, like I said, it's not always bad. It's just there's something called balance. There's something called over extremes. On a lot of things, you can miss the mark, right or left, and sometimes the answer isn't on either extreme. And so I think for me, this desire to, as a competitor, to win. So I trained really hard. In fact, one of the things I really worked on was my throwing motion. As a quarterback, I never maximized my power in my throwing efficiency. Think of it like a golfer who maybe had a bit of a slice and could never quite overcome that. So, fortunately, I was smart, I was accurate, it worked really well. But because of that, I decided to really work on my throwing motion. And there's some guidelines to how many throws you should throw a day that's good for your shoulder. Well, I obliterated that. And I would say for about five or seven years, there's no one on the planet that could have possibly thrown as many footballs as I did. And now I can't lift my arm. And that came back to bite me later in life. So there's just one example of how that hit me. [00:03:03] Speaker C: Yeah. So the opportunity was presented to you to be successful at something, and you just went all in and never stopped and never took a break. And it just went on and on and on. And that's what I hear you saying from this. [00:03:19] Speaker B: Yeah. In that example, I think my son is similar. I have a 17 year old son who right now his goal in life is to get as big a muscles as he can. So he's in the gym all the time, but he's not recognizing the value of rest for building muscles. Like you have to rest the muscles for them to recover, to grow the most, as well as possible fatigue and even worse injuries. So our minds, our bodies, our souls, our spirits have to have rest. I mean, we all know what would happen if you never slept at night. You wouldn't last very long. But emotionally, mentally, physically, to be able to have these different times to kind of check out, to kind of rejuvenate, is so important. And I think what we do, I work with leaders that live in very stressful environments and underresourced neighborhoods, working with kids and families, and they're burning out like crazy because they're always trying to help someone and they're never taking time for themselves. I love the illustration where you get on an airplane and they say, if the oxygen masks come out, they say, make sure you help the kids first. No, that's not what they say. They say, get your mask on before you help anybody, because if you can't breathe, you're not going to be around to help anybody. And so this idea of taking some space and to make it even a bit more personal for me. Years ago, I was probably in one of the highest stressed times of my life. I was going so fast, working so hard, like being on a treadmill, going too fast for too long, and my body shut down. I caught a weird autoimmune disorder called Guillauan Beret syndrome. I was paralyzed for a couple of weeks, for the most part, for a couple more months, I was very limited in my mobility. And then for a year I was tired and it was so hard, but it was so good. Like it forced me to slow down. It forced me to take a little bit of an inventory of how much of my time and energy was just going everywhere. I said yes to everything, took advantage of every opportunity to raise money or speak here or do this or help this person, and it just caught up with me. And the interesting thing happened as I was recovering. So I would wake up each morning and think to myself, what's one thing I can do for my work today that would be impactful? And, like, how can I give some good energy to my family? And the weird thing was, I was really productive because I was very focused and I wasn't caught up with a lot of things that maybe didn't matter as much. But the most important thing each day I did. I think you only have so much kind of grade a energy, tier one energy. We think we have a lot of it, but we really only have so much. And where are you putting that? Each day is so important, and often it's for people. You work hard all day, you go home, and you're grumpy with your kids. I mean, that's not good. Or you spend all your time answering emails, and then when you have an important meeting, you're frustrated and impatient with somebody who needs a little bit extra time. We're not wired to go a thousand miles an hour forever. It'll catch up to you. [00:06:49] Speaker C: Danny, how does an individual. I mean, it's capitalist society. It's America, right? If an opportunity is in front of you, grab ahold of it. There's a lot of fear of missing out, right. If we don't do that, how do we make those decisions on what to take advantage of and what not to, when to say yes and when to say no. It seems like a very hard exercise. So what's your perspective on that? [00:07:12] Speaker B: I think that's part of the challenge of life, is recognizing that just because something is worth doing, it may not be you who needs to do it. It may be somebody else's journey to move into that space. And there's a book I read recently called I think essentialism. And it says, most of the time we think of, should I do something? Is it a yes or a no? He said, add an extra category. Add the sort of the heck yes. Or he had a different word for it. And he goes, only do the heck yeses if you can, because those are the things that are uniquely for you. For me, one of the ways I think about this is, what am I passionate about? What is moving my heart or what's breaking my heart that matters? I pay attention to that. I've learned over time sort of what I'm good at and what I'm not good at. And so when those two things mix, if I'm passionate about something and I feel drawn to it or it's breaking my heart, something that feel like I need to get involved in and it sort of fits with man, I think I can actually step into that. Then those get my antenna up that maybe this is a heck yes. And honestly, it's a tough to really know. So I have found having some great advisors around me, whether it's board members or personal mentors or just good friends that know me and processing these things out loud, I get great feedback. And there's been some things that I was really excited about doing. But after hearing some people close to me, I thought, you know, maybe this isn't the best space for me to invest my time. [00:08:56] Speaker C: It's very interesting. Right. You told a very poignant story about when you were in the NFL and on a daily basis going to practice. I believe this is when you were in New Orleans and you were having to make the decision of whether to take a left or take a right, and that know there was opportunity in those turns. [00:09:15] Speaker B: Yeah. I would drive down our street and every morning. I had started working at the nonprofit Desire street ministries, where I still work. I loved spending time with the kids. I loved investing energy and time to make a difference in a really difficult space. But every morning I go down to the street, and if I wanted to go that direction, I'd have to turn left. But to keep pursuing my NFL goals and dreams, I'd turn right to go to practice and train. And probably, like we said earlier, overthrow overtrain. But I just remember in February of 2004, each day it just got harder and harder for me to keep turning right. And so I decided to retire in that direction. It was a tough decision, but by saying no to the one opportunity to walking away from a professional football career, it opened up the opportunity that then led to so many other things through Desire street. And I think that's really the key. Like, every time you say yes to something, you may or may not know it, you're also saying no to something else. So I think you just have to guard those yeses well. [00:10:24] Speaker C: That's really interesting. Every time you say yes to something, you're saying no to something else without intention. But it is happening. How are you evaluating opportunities now, Danny? [00:10:35] Speaker B: I have some guidelines on how one, just how many days a month I'll travel that helps protect our family. So usually, unless a real strange things happen, there's usually no more than six nights a month that I'm gone, which really helps me really protect trips and then family time each day or throughout the different weeks, making sure that that's solid on the calendar time, that even if there's nothing scheduled, that I'm around and having dinners together. And so I think that matters. And then keeping a lot of open prayer around what other things maybe should get into the mix or not? But mostly, does this line up with where I'm sensing I've been called, the things I've thought through, the way that the mentors have guided me? Actually, there's even a couple of things right now I'm undecided on, and I'm running it by some mentors to give me some good feedback. And we'll see if those end up on the calendar or they don't. [00:11:44] Speaker C: Yeah. So just a follow on to that, Danny, is, you said you have a son that's 17. I have a 23 year old, a 21 year old. Sounds like her children are very close in age, probably that point in their lives when they're having to make important decisions and take opportunities or not take opportunities. So how are you helping them and others evaluate their own opportunities? Advice you give to others? [00:12:10] Speaker B: Yeah, well, my oldest son's in college, and he is trying to meet and visit with as many people as he can, and I think that's great, but he's still got to go to class and he's got to handle his main business first. So in some ways, we're trying to rein him in. He has a high level of FOMO, so he does not want to miss anything. So he's one. We're encouraging, but trying to rein in my 17 year old son. He's more introverted. He'd be much more happy to hang around by himself. And so we're actually really trying to push him to do more things. He's on the other side of that spectrum. So I think the advice, it's very personal. Where you at in the season of your life? There are many kids and many adults who are afraid to do new things, and they need to hear the opposite advice that I'm giving. So there are some people that need to have some courage. Their anxiety is limiting what they're doing, the fear of failure. There's all sorts of reasons why people probably should say yes to more opportunities, but for me, I kind of landed on the opposite side of that as well as I know a lot of people do, too. [00:13:22] Speaker D: How do you define the word opportunity? What is that to you? [00:13:27] Speaker B: I think one, it's anytime someone asks you to do anything, that's a straight opportunity that's come to you. Maybe someone you know, maybe an email, maybe anything like that. So that's one. I think if you're thinking about dreaming, vision, planning, where you could do what you could be, you're going to start thinking. Like, for instance, one of the biggest changes for me and my whole experience was at Desire street, we were doing a lot of things. And when you work in an underresourced neighborhood, there are a lot of needs. And what happened was that was just too much. Like we had to figure out what's our niche in this? What can we do well? How do we do that really well and efficient. And so now desire street is thriving. We are in the tail end of helping impact 20 neighborhoods over five years, which has been an incredible journey. We're doing it very efficiently, but we're not doing everything we said. These are many of the things we could do, but we're going to do these few things. We're going to do it well. Chick fil a said we're going to make chicken sandwiches. That's what we're going to do, and we're going to do it really well. And most people, including myself, would say they did. [00:14:47] Speaker C: Danny, the message I'm taking from this a little bit is that many times opportunities lead to imbalance. All right? I have an opportunity to be a professional athlete, so I'm going to be very maybe imbalanced on how often I throw the ball or how often I go and work out. I have an opportunity to make a difference in an underresourced neighborhood. So I'm going to dive all in and go all in to do that, to make a difference. It sounds like when we take advantage of every opportunity, we lose balance. [00:15:22] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's it. I think that's just sort of the flip side to doing too much is there is a cost to pay. There's a cost to not doing something, and there's a cost to doing something. And I think so often we don't even evaluate what is this going to cost me, my family, my health, my mind, my body, if I automatically assume it's a yes as opposed to at least wonder? I think that's a very important question to be asking because if you're not asking it, if your personality is wired a certain way, you may be doing too much. [00:16:03] Speaker C: Yeah, no, it's a great point. We try to message something like that at our office, we set goals each year and you can't have ten goals, you can't have twelve goals. That's maybe another way to look at it. Taking advantage of every opportunity. Opportunities may come today and that doesn't mean they're gone forever. You might just need to put it on the back burner. That opportunity could be there a year or two from now, but we always feel like it won't be, right? [00:16:32] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, that's very much the case. I think I had a great conversation yesterday. The whole sales world and marketing world is designed to make you think, if you don't do this now, it's gone. So then that anxiety is like, I got to do it now. It's like, jump in now or you'll never get this opportunity again. But that's just sort of how that game is played. And so I think just recognizing that and thinking maybe not, that's the evolution. [00:16:58] Speaker D: I think, of the whole take advantage of every opportunity with this show that we've noticed. It's absolutes. Whenever you say always, never should, that's become a problem because you have to step back and think about it. So when you tell people, hey, looking for these opportunities, you've got kids and they're growing up and there's going to be a lot of opportunities that come their way. How do you avoid saying take advantage of every opportunity or you should or you would. [00:17:29] Speaker C: Where's the line with the absolutes? [00:17:31] Speaker B: I guess, yeah, I mean, we have a thing that we do at work called the middle way. When it comes to a lot of things. There are definitely some black and white right and wrong things in life, but so much more of that life is nuanced and it's about wisdom. And often sort of, you can be a pushover or you can be a jerk. There's so many things that if you could sort of land in the middle way of processing, I think you can lead to better decisions. And so typically those words should, ought have to the absolute things. As I get older, there are some absolutes for me, but there just aren't that many as I used to think there were. And to really be nuanced and trying to have wisdom in each situation is so critical. And to me again today, this is in one way taking advantage of every opportunity is just a little bit imbalanced. And so just asking the question I think is very important. [00:18:35] Speaker C: Yeah, well, Denny, I know that your advice today, the worst advice you ever got was to take advantage of every opportunity. I am glad you took advantage of the opportunity to join us. Good. I feel like what you offer today is so sage and so valuable to our listeners. And I just can't thank you enough for sharing personally about how this impacted you and for being our guest today. Danny, it's been a real treat. Thank you so much for joining us today. [00:19:06] Speaker B: I'm glad to be on it. I think you guys have a real creative idea to get out some great content. So thanks for having me. Keep up the great work. [00:19:14] Speaker A: Wow, JB, that was a real treat for me personally. [00:19:17] Speaker D: Fantastic. And we got your don't beat around the bush line in there. [00:19:21] Speaker A: Yeah, let's not beat around the bush with that right now and talk about how great Danny was. What I took from Danny's message was the risk of extremes. [00:19:33] Speaker C: Right? [00:19:33] Speaker A: Absolutes. And also, I mean, here's a guy who reached the pinnacle of his position, of his team winning the national championship, and we all think, okay, lather, Rinse, repeat what that guy did and we'll reach the pinnacle of what we do. But there's some long lasting impact to that. [00:19:52] Speaker D: Absolutely. Him talking about how he, for five, six, seven years of his career, no one threw a football more than him. That's what he's saying. He can't lift his shoulder now because that's what taking advantage of every opportunity. And even the way he said it, you heard him say, take the advantage of every opportunity. You knew he was really harping on that word. Every. Every time you're saying yes to something, you're unconsciously saying no to something else. That's such an interesting thing to think about. It's like you really do. It's not take advantage of every opportunity, it's take advantage of the right opportunities. [00:20:25] Speaker A: Tongue in cheek at the end about thanking the good Lord that he decided to take advantage of our request. But he went through a process, I'm sure, of saying, do I really want to do this or not? And that's important to making good decisions. [00:20:40] Speaker D: A really good thing I hadn't even thought about till just now that he had to evaluate this opportunity. And I'm glad he said yes. [00:20:47] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. I'm sure our listeners are glad he said yesterday, too. Hey, thanks, everybody, for joining us this week. Tune in next week for the worst advice I ever got.