My experience that I want to relate with you today is that he changed my life, and he changed it in 60 minutes. When I started with the 49ers in 1987, for four years, it was Joe Montana versus me. And it was a battle. And it was a battle of epic proportions in San Francisco.
In many ways, it was David and Goliath. I was David, of course. Joe was Goliath. And I didn't have any rocks. I did my best and I tried to make it as competitive as I possibly could.
I hated being the backup. It wasn't personal between us, but it was like a cold war. And he forced everyone to choose a side. And so I didn't have many friends.
I mean, okay, you got to pick somebody. Okay, I'll pick you. I'm not the little guy. So those four years... were fraught with all kinds of dilemmas and anxieties and challenges that I was working through.
And in the interim of those four years, Joe Montana led the team to two Super Bowls and two MVPs. And so I had to watch. My most hated thing in the world, I was forced to watch. Finally in 1991, Joe got hurt and was going to be out the entire season. So it was my year.
It was my time. And I knew that there were going to be comparisons that already happened. Everywhere I went, it was, you know, well, you know... was Joe or Steve or I knew those comparisons and I knew that I inherited that part of my life I knew that was going to be a part of my life but I had no idea how insane it would get when I started to play regularly every Every game was dissected because if Joe had played, it would have been different.
And throughout 1991, the first six or seven or eight games, we were not great. We had just won the Super Bowl twice. We were supposed to be great. Because we weren't great, why aren't we great? Well, that's pretty easy.
Steve's here, right? And it was every game. Almost every game. series, every play, every word was compared. It became a thing that was like, it became so maddening.
I noticed over the weeks it started to wear on me. I started to not sleep well. I was struggling with anxiety. Week to week when we wouldn't play well, I would take this huge burden on myself.
And I started to build resentment for the situation. How unfair it was. How wrong it was.
How over-invested I was in this. success of the team and how under invested everyone else was it got so bad that in october of 1991 you can go look it up san francisco chronicle it's probably on microfiche at that point this point i don't know we'll have to see but but above the fold in the san francisco chronicle right under the headline of the banner was a headline and the gulf war had just broken out in 1991 where we were at war in the middle east you And the headline was, the Gulf War, it's Steve Young's fault. Super funny, right?
But for me, a guy that had built up now weeks and now months of continual anxiety and almost depression, when you stop sleeping well, and you're really struggling to eat, you're struggling at work, You're battling. You're fighting with everything you get. You give every ounce of yourself every week to no success. And everybody's knee-jerk, true response of why it's not going well is, Steve's not here. I mean, Joe's not here.
It's Steve's. Eve's fault and epitomized by this headline. I needed to get away.
I saw Christmas out in the future. I didn't know how I was going to get there. How in the world am I going to live long enough to make it through this season? So I get on the plane.
I sit down next to this ball guy. I say that because we've known each other for a long time, but I had never spent much time with Stephen. I'd been around him, I'd seen him at events, I'd known his kids, they were my friends, but I'd never really had a chance to spend time with him.
them. And so as I sat down, I didn't notice them. And you could imagine, I'm in my own little space and he nudges me.
He says, hey, Steve, Stephen Covey. Oh, hey, how are you? He goes, great, how are you? So I, for the first 30 minutes of the flight, just unload, right?
Because He asked, and I was at a place in my life where... You're going to hear, right? And I gave him every inch of it, how difficult it was, how painful it's been, how I can't, there's nothing, I just feel this huge burden that I can't even start to breathe in.
I'm not sleeping. I'm pretty sure I'm depressed. I don't know what that really means, but I know that if it is something, I got it.
So he listened and listened and listened, and that's one of the first things I noticed. He listened. And that's one of the great qualities of a human being. And he heard every ounce of it.
And I finished kind of exhausting myself of everything that I could tell you, tell him. And he said, wow, that is a lot. And man, I feel what you're saying.
I can feel it. Then he said, you know, Steve, can I ask you a couple of questions? I said, sure.
He goes, you know, I don't follow football, you know, too much. I know a little bit. My kids play. But I don't follow the pro game very much. I know you're with the 49ers.
But tell me about the owner. of the team. I said, well, that's Eddie DiBartolo. They go, tell me about him. What kind of guy?
Tell me about his management style, what he does. And I said, well, he's amazing. He said, let me ask you another question. Your coach, Bill Walsh, I know about him, but what can you tell me?
But in telling Stephen about Bill Walsh, he's forward thinking in everything that he does. Play calling, offense, how he treats us, how we travel, all that kind of stuff. all the things that you worry about to make sure that someone's healthy. Now, one last question, Steve.
Joe Montana, is he on the team? And I said, Stephen, that's the problem. He said, but let me ask you, if you needed to go to him as a mentor, I know he's one of the great players of all time.
If you needed to go to him as a mentor to ask him a question, advice, could you do it? Yeah, sure. I think he'd answer the question. I think he'd give me the advice. No question about that.
Hmm. I thought that might be the case. Steve, I don't know if you know what I do, but I travel the world looking for what I'll call platforms. that corporations, business, families, organizations, anybody that has built a platform where the human beings that are associated with that platform are given the opportunity to iterate, to find out how good they can get.
And I've got to be honest with you, hearing your story and you answering my questions, if I had to say The platform that you have with the 49ers, with the owner and the coach and the mentorship and the opportunity and the nature of their team, I got to be honest with you, Steve, I don't know that I've ever seen a better one. I was dumbfounded. I didn't...
I wanted someone to tell me how horrific it was, and how right I was, and how I should be... I'm victimized, and that this isn't fair, because that's human nature. And here was somebody...
very honestly but really effectively coming back and communicating back that I might be the luckiest guy alive. That's what he's saying. I travel the world and I don't know that I've ever seen anything better.
opportunity to have a platform to iterate to see how good you can get and then like yoda literally with a finger out and i i mean literally made make sure that he got me in his eyes you know and with his finger out he said and asked one last question do you know want to see how good you can get because not everybody does it's a risk there's a risk but do you and i want you to think about it do you want to see how good you can get i i processed it thought about it for a second and then there was this like spot in me this like i don't know that's how i got there You know, this part that's like, yes, absolutely, that's what I want. I want that risk. That risk is not too much for me. That's what I want to do.
That's what I, that's absolutely what I want to do. And then he said, it was unbelievable. He's just like, then go do it.
Just classic, right? My whole world just went like upside down. And what's amazing about it is he tapped into a part of me that could see that he was telling the truth.
It wasn't an inspirational story, so you can go... just change your emotion. It wasn't, you know, like something to just get your motivated.
No, it was truth-telling. It was foundational to the situation that I was in and he formed it in a way that lasted. From that moment on, I repeated to myself 10,000 times, do you want to see how good you can get? And repeated back to myself 10,000 times, yes, I do.
So no matter what happened, being the bread line... being at the grocery store in line trying to check out, and the person in front of me talking to the clerk as they're getting rid of their groceries, I just overhear him. What do you think of Steve Young?
He sucks. He's horrible. He's no joke.
Just constantly. But all of a sudden, hearing that in line with my bread, it didn't matter. It didn't hit me that way anymore.
Because I had this vision that I was about to find out how good I can be. It didn't matter anymore if I was Joe Montana. It just didn't. It changed.
And I give you this last little fact only to let you know the incredible difference it had made in my life. That next season, 1992, I won the NFL MVP award. Now look, you have to do it with a lot of people, and that doesn't happen overnight. That's not alone.
But from a depressed, anxiety-ridden pit that I had dug and lived in, I was given the perspective and the foundational elements of what is true. He didn't motivate me with some other example. He motivated me with what was true in my life, what was standing right in front of me.
The story, for me, is one that I think embodies Stephen Covey. Because he was rooted in a truth about human beings. About how humans relate and how we can be better. It's magic.
It's incredible. In today's society, in today's political environment, we are so fraught with zero-sum game thinking. Limited resources and we're fighting. And that relationship is adversarial, divisive, and someone's going to win and someone's going to lose. And that's how we look at it.
And so we're battling, and whatever I get, I get. And whatever you get, you get. And there is no healing. There is no abundance. None.
It's not possible. It's a zero-sum game. It's how it's looked at foundationally. We need Stephen Covey. We need abundance in relationships.
We need the ability, no matter how adversarial the relationship, that fact that it's a relationship needs to find the human values that allow for abundance. so that we can see each other, find the common ground, figure out how literally it's win-win. It's the only way, because if you win in a zero-sum game, you know what happens to the guy who loses? He spends the rest of his life coming back to revenge, because I got beat, and now I'm going to come get you. So nothing ever actually gets won.
It's always contested. And it continues to be contested into the future. There is no winning. The only way to win is in a spirit of abundance. Because both sides say, you know what?
That works. It's hard. It's difficult. But it works. And then I don't have to spend the rest of my life trying to battle back and beat you back.
And that's what Stephen spent his life doing. He spent an hour with me. And literally changed the trajectory of my life.
If I would have stayed in that hole, there was no other way to get out of that hole for me. No other way. I would have sat in there, and I might have beaten my way out of it and tried to claw it and tried to figure it out because that was my nature. But I would have not had that abundance.
I would have survived, maybe. Got into Christmas. But there's no way that we were going to feed a success story, one that could really find its momentum, its truth.
How good can you get? How many times have I said that to other human beings since then? How much do I beg my own kids to seek this quest, to find out how good you can get? Being good matters.
fundamentally. And if I could do anything today is to give you a sense that every relationship that you have, whether it's intimate at home with your kids, with your extended families, with your dear friends, or it's as extended as the person that you run into at the red light next to you in traffic, it's a relationship. And in that relationship, can you find the healing and the abundance in it?
Can you spend the next weeks, days, hours, minutes, breaths, looking in the relationships that you have, the millions that happen every day, not millions, but thousands, especially the most intimate ones that you own, can I find abundance inside of that? Can I be the healing agent that allows for that other person on the other side of the relationship to see how good they can get? Can I free them up?
Go do that. That is the legacy of Stephen Covey. It's the legacy that he affected my life.
Stephen truly believed. I knew it from just knowing him. He believed he could change the world. He knew it and spent his life doing it.
So let's keep it going. Thank you very much.