Chris: How long were you in the NFL?
I was blessed and fortunate to play for ten years.
Ten years.
Yes, I got ten.
Nice! Give him a round of applause, guys. That’s awesome.
What teams?
I was with Seattle Seahawks for the longest, six years, and Chicago Bears for two, and finished my career with the Tennessee Titans.

• What was your favorite?
• Seattle.
• Okay, cool. Nice, nice.
• Wow, some people like Seattle in here. I like this.

How do you stay super disciplined, ultra-healthy, and consistently outpace others?
I think my discipline started early on in life as a kid growing up on a farm in Mississippi. My family had about 1,000 acres of cotton and soybeans, and so my granddad couldn’t afford to buy the chemicals and things you need to kill the weeds. He would give six of us a hoe and a sharpener to go out and chop all the weeds around the cotton. When you look at those rows, they go forever, and you’re trying to figure out how to do this. So you start to figure out strategies. I had to figure out a lot of strategies to get to the end of these rows. Thinking about a thousand acres over a summer, it takes a really long time to do that. I think my discipline came from that, and then it carried over into sports. My granddad was always a firm believer that hard work is gonna take you so much further in life. With those farming strategies and then taking that into sports, it really set me up to stay disciplined and stay ahead of the curve on a lot of things. One thing I didn’t want was to go back to the farm, so... (laughing)

• That’s some hard work though.
• Absolutely.
  I used to work for my father’s company. That was fun though, taught me a lot of lessons.

What do you invest in, and what business holdings do you focus your energy on?
I invest in a lot. I invest in real estate. I also have a distribution company that distributes GE capital equipment to a sense of healthcare. But the thing that really takes up a lot of my time right now is a psychometric company that I developed over the last four years, taking language, audio, video, and processing it, and looking at personality behaviors based on people’s words. We can give you about 70+ data points on who you are as a person, from personality behaviors to thinking style, stress tolerance, using only 350 words. A lot of my “why” in doing this and building this platform was, when you look at the number of athletes who are broke or divorced within five years of leaving the league, I wanted to debunk that theory. I wanted to focus on how you take an athlete’s skill set and show them that it’s transferable. I believe the way to do that is to help them identify who they are as a person. We’re not taught that because we’ve been told that we’re the best thing since sliced bread for a long time. So, how do we take those skill sets and help them transfer to different environments? Using this platform is a way to do that and help organizations that have a lot of resources available for athletes. It helps them understand them faster because, as an athlete with walls up, it’s hard to tell someone what your needs are and how to advocate for yourself. This tool is helping teams by bypassing a lot of the Likert scale assessments, using their own words, and giving them the ability to put resources in place for athletes and how they’re gonna fit in the culture and the environment. Hopefully, as you’re planting those seeds, those guys start to learn, “Oh, my skills are transferable. Oh, I am a D communicator. Oh, I get stressed when it comes to test-taking. I didn’t know that.” Now, how do I start to develop tools around these areas to help me succeed?

So, you video/audio tape somebody’s face, and it spits out the results?
No. What we do is, let’s say you do a press conference. Like this conversation here, we can record my words and take that and filter it through a series of language models that we’ve built and designed. From those language models, you can get to what are the different frameworks we want to look at from a personality standpoint and how you communicate with someone else. You can overlay a coach and a player and say, “Hey, this is where you’re gonna miss from a communication standpoint.”

Every company in this room needs that for their employees.
Well, we’re getting there. We’re building a very strong platform right now to go corporate with it.

Awesome. What visualization, affirmation, goal-setting rituals, and strategies do you use to be a top 0.1%er?
You know, I’ve had to learn how to really do that well from a visualization standpoint and goal-setting because I was a very visual person. I would think these things, but I never would write them down. Once I started to really understand how the brain works and how positive affirmation works, how I can visually see it written down from my own handwriting, I think it really changed how I moved through different areas of my life. I was constantly set up not to go back to the farm life. So, I kept telling myself, even as a first-round draft pick, “I can’t get hurt. I can’t get hurt. Oh, don’t get hurt.” But what happens is, you tell yourself these negative things, and then you end up getting hurt. So, as I started to realize, the positive side is really important. It took me back to, “Okay, how do I set these goals? How do I look at these goals over a two-month or three-month period and stay on top of those things?”

That’s awesome. What’s the million-dollar lesson that you learned from being a pro athlete?
It’s actually a lot of what these guys have said. I remember my rookie year, again, walking in as a big-time hotshot first-round draft pick. We had a guy, Chris Gray, who was a 14-year vet sitting next to me, and he said to me, “Hey, you need to get to know everybody in this building, from the groundskeepers to the janitors, because those are gonna be the people that when you’re done, when you’re sitting here 10, 14 years down the road, those are the people you’ll need to rely on.” Relationships were always important to me, but to hear someone actually tell me that, as I’m still sitting in the middle of this high of being a first-round draft pick, really stuck with me. I think that now that I’m doing what I’m doing, being able to rely on the resources around me, from psychologists to I/O psychologists, to GMs, to vet out my product, to being in the sport and having boots on the ground, it’s been tremendous for me.

That’s awesome. What’s the most costly financial mistake you’ve made, or are you seeing other pro athletes make?
Early on, investing in family projects without the knowledge of what the return would be. Is the person on the other side of the table someone you can trust? I didn’t have a vetting process early on, and I made a lot of mistakes. I didn’t have that vetting process, but I quickly surrounded myself with the right people and figured out how to vet these different types of deals.

Last question. If somebody wants to be a top 0.1%er in the field, how can they out-compete everybody around them?
I would say self-awareness. I think self-awareness is really huge. When you understand your strengths, and you’re willing to put people around you to build you up and make you stronger, you’re not afraid that someone is going to take what you have or set you down a wrong path. When you become very self-aware of your strengths, you can focus on the leadership aspect of things. You can really set yourself up for success when you become aware of how you navigate different areas of life and know that you don’t have all the answers and be okay with knowing that you don’t have all the answers.

Awesome. You guys give Chris a round of applause. Thank you.