Alex Smith An NFL quarterback on overcoming setbacks and selfdoubt TED
I wake up in a hospital bed
and I’m surrounded by doctors.
Everything is hazy.
I’ve been in and out
of consciousness for over a week.
The doctors are telling me
that I have a bad infection in my leg.
They say that they’ve operated
eight times already.
They say that at one point my fever spiked
and my immune system
started attacking my body.
I went septic and almost died.
And then one of the doctors says this:
“As we speak, flesh-eating bacteria
is crawling up your leg.
It’s getting closer to your vital
organs every minute.”
Good morning to you, too, doctor.
(Laughter)
Let me back up.
I’m a professional football player.
I played quarterback.
And two weeks earlier, two defenders,
almost 500 pounds of muscle,
crushed me at the same time.
It sounds scary, but honestly,
it’s pretty normal in my line of work.
This time, though,
my leg was bending where it shouldn’t.
I had what they call
a compound spiral fracture,
which means that my leg was twisted
and snapped diagonally,
kind of like a corkscrew.
And yes, it’s as painful as it sounds.
I knew right there on the field
that my season was done.
What took me a little longer to figure out
was that my life
was about to change forever.
Two years after that gruesome injury,
I actually ran back out onto that field
and led my team to the playoffs.
(Applause)
But what I want to talk about today
isn’t some rousing comeback story
where the crowd chants my name.
I want to talk about the stuff
that happens out of you.
The stuff that athletes like me
don’t want to discuss
because we think it makes us look weak.
I want to talk about fear,
anxiety and self-doubt.
Because if I wanted to really fully
recover from my injury,
I didn’t just need to learn
to walk and run again.
I also needed something to run towards,
something to live for.
After that first hazy conversation,
in order to save my leg,
the doctors actually removed
part of my good thigh
and reattached it to my busted-up leg.
Now, they didn’t know
if the muscle would take,
so after the surgery, every hour,
the doctors and nurses would come in,
unwrap the wound,
apply a gel and search
for a heartbeat in the muscle.
Every time I would make them put up
this big white sheet to block my vision,
because from what I could tell,
it wasn’t a pretty sight.
My leg was essentially a giant open wound.
When the doctors and nurses
were back there,
my wife would be back there with them
trying to cheer me up.
“It looks so good.”
(Laughter)
“Babe, it’s so cool.”
(Laughter)
There was no way she was going
to get me to look down there.
The truth is, I couldn’t bear to.
Not because I couldn’t stomach it,
but because I couldn’t accept
what had happened to me.
This went on for months.
At the time I was wheelchair-bound,
at home, my wife had to be there for me
every second of the day,
even helping me to go to the bathroom.
I spent most of my days sitting
propped up on the couch just thinking,
was I ever going to walk again?
Play catch with my kids again?
Wrestle with them
on the living room floor?
All this for a stupid, meaningless game?
To that point, my life had been so big,
so full of possibility,
but now it all seemed
to be spiraling down,
like that fracture in my leg.
And I’ll be honest,
this wasn’t the first time that my mind
had been twisted up like that.
Let me tell you how my career started.
I was this nothing college recruit.
But in my last two years at school,
I played pretty well
and somehow catapulted up
to be the first pick in the NFL draft.
Over the course of a couple of months,
I went from a guy most people
hadn’t even heard of
to the next great quarterback
to the San Francisco 49ers.
Joe Montana, Steve Young,
me.
I was a 20-year-old kid at the time,
and I didn’t handle that pressure well.
I got really, really anxious.
Do I really belong here?
How long until they find out I’m a fraud?
The questions paralyzed me.
I was absolutely terrified
to make mistakes,
and I was desperate
for others' validation.
It followed me around 24/7.
I got to where I couldn’t eat
before games,
I constantly felt nauseous.
I’d be at the dinner table with my wife
or some friends, and I just …
I wasn’t there.
To the outside world,
I was playing this game I loved.
I’d achieved what millions of kids
grow up dreaming about.
But in my mind,
I was sinking like a stone.
It stayed that way
for the better part of five years.
I’d have some success,
but then I’d get injured
or get a new coach.
And the cycle would start over again.
And then I got two key pieces of advice.
The first came in the form of a guy
named Jim Harbaugh.
He was my coach at the time.
Now, what’s best about coach Harbaugh is
he simply does not care
what other people think about him.
He couldn’t be more comfortable
in his pleated khakis
and tucked-in sweatshirt.
(Laughter)
Now, coach Harbaugh
used to tell the team the same thing
right before we would take
the field on game day.
He would say, “Play as hard as you can,
as fast as you can,
for as long as you can.
And don’t worry.”
“Don’t worry.”
It sounds simple, and it is,
but I guess I didn’t really
believe it was possible
until it came from somebody
that I trusted.
Around the same time, I had a teammate
named Blake Costanzo.
Blake was a linebacker
who was a little nuts.
Before games,
he would run around the locker room
and he would get in everybody’s face
and he’d ask,
“Are you going to live today?
I’m going to live today, are you?”
At first, I didn’t get it.
But then he started to win me over.
He was a guy who approached the game
in the exact opposite way that I did.
He was taking the challenge head on.
He was fully present, right in the moment.
Right in my face, just live.
These ideas were a counterweight
to all my doubts.
And wouldn’t you know it?
I started playing better.
Started having fun again,
and we started winning.
For the rest of my career,
I would talk to a small group
of teammates before games
and tell them some form of the same thing.
Just live.
And even as I got traded twice
and replaced by a couple
of great young quarterbacks,
I stuck with that ethic.
But when my leg got infected,
I completely lost that perspective.
You might as well have taken
that white sheet I was hiding behind
and draped it over my face
because I wasn’t really living.
And once again, I needed somebody
to help me snap out of it.
That spring, I started rehabbing
at a military facility
called the Center for the Intrepid.
Because while my injury was unheard of
for a football player,
it was eerily similar to that
of our wounded warriors.
Basically, my leg exploded
like I stepped on an IED.
Before I got down there, I’d watched
hours and hours of videos
of these double and triple amputees
and a lot of guys with injuries like mine
who were going on to the Paralympics
or rejoining the Army Rangers
or the Navy SEALs.
I was in awe of them.
I wanted to be like them.
But one of my PTs, Johnny Owens,
made sure I knew right away
it wasn’t going to be easy
to get back on my feet.
Literally.
The first day I was down there,
I was doing a balance
exercise on my good leg
and he just shoved me right in the chest.
“Come on, Alex.”
Then he shoved me again.
“Come on, you can do better than that.”
Then he did something
that changed my recovery completely.
He handed me a football.
You see,
after spending years and years
of my life with a football in my hands,
I hadn’t touched one
for months since my injury.
It was like reattaching a lost limb.
He told me to throw from one knee.
I zipped one to him.
A better kind of spiral.
From that point on,
if you put a ball in my hands,
I felt stronger.
I did my exercises better.
I can’t explain it, but I felt lighter.
I felt alive.
After that first visit,
I felt like I had permission
to dream again.
I thought about getting back
out onto the field.
If I make it back, great,
if I don’t, who cares,
at least I was living for something.
And that’s the mentality
that carried me through my recovery.
Through numerous setbacks,
both physically and mentally,
I eventually got cleared by the doctors.
I actually made the roster.
And then, 693 days after my injury,
I got the call to put on my helmet
and take my first snap in a game.
Now, I wish I could tell you
that the crowd went wild,
but there was basically nobody
there because of COVID.
(Laughter)
And still, running onto that field,
I had so many mixed emotions.
What a rush.
But to be honest,
I was absolutely terrified.
Practice was one thing, but a real game?
Was my leg going to hold up?
I found out on the third snap
when this huge defender
launched himself onto my back,
I tried to take a few steps,
but I went down.
It’s still the most liberating
feeling in my life,
getting back up, knowing that I’m OK.
I’m proud that I made it back
out onto the field,
but I’m more proud of what got me there.
Not the physical journey,
but the mental one.
I’ve learned that so much of the anxiety
that holds us back in life,
it’s self-inflicted.
We make it worse on ourselves.
And it’s OK if we need somebody
to help us snap out of it.
For me, that was my wife,
a military guy,
a maniac linebacker
or an eccentric coach.
They taught me that I had to see
my fears for what they are.
And that’s why, looking back,
I know that my recovery didn’t actually
start when Johnny shoved me in the chest.
First, I had to pull back
that white sheet.
For weeks and weeks, I’d been hearing
my wife tell me how great it looked.
She helped me get to that point.
I was ready.
And when I finally did it,
it looked way worse than I had expected.
(Laughter)
What I saw was not cool.
It was grotesque.
Mangled and deformed.
All kinds of purple and blue and red.
Fair warning, these pictures
are a little graphic.
But my leg went from this,
the black is the dead tissue,
to this.
And this.
And this.
Before it could get rebuilt.
But I saw my leg for what it was.
And it was mine.
These days,
I’ve come a long way with this guy.
(Applause)
This thing that once represented
everything I feared,
everything I had lost,
it’s probably the thing
I’m most proud of in my life
outside of my wife and kids.
So, yeah, I guess she was right,
it is pretty cool.
(Laughter)
These scars,
they’re not just a reminder
of everything I’ve been through,
but more so, everything
that’s in front of me.
They stare me in my face.
Challenging me to be myself.
To help others out
of their own spirals when I can.
Now, you might not have a leg
that looks like this.
But I’ll bet you’ve got some scars.
And my hope for you is this.
Look at them.
Own them.
They’re the best reminder you’ll ever have
that there’s a whole world out there.
And we’ve got a whole lot
of living left to do.
Thank you.
(Applause)