What do Tom Brady, Michael Jordan, and Tiger Woods have in common? According to Brady, it’s a deep obsession with their own failures. He knows the difference between a championship ring and a long offseason often comes down to a single mistake, a lesson he believes modern NFL players have forgotten.

In a recent excerpt from The Problem with “Just One,” Tom Brady laid out a hard truth about mistakes that most people don’t want to hear. He starts by making one thing clear: nobody escapes them. But the greats learn from them instead of diminishing them.

“Three of the greatest athletes to ever live, who are widely considered the GOATs of their respective sports, had careers that were filled with errors. Michael Jordan missed 15,000 shots and had almost 3500 turnovers. Tiger Woods has carded nearly 1000 bogeys in his career. Serena Williams committed more than 2700 double faults,” Brady wrote.

“My point is: everyone makes mistakes. Even the best of us. We all fail. Often. Mistakes are part of the game. But accepting that mistakes are a fact of life DOES NOT mean you should accept your own individual mistakes, ignore them and do nothing about them.”

The difference, Brady argues while giving these three examples, is that none of them brushed those moments off as “just one.” They didn’t minimize them, shrug them off, and simply move on. They treated it as information, something to study, fix, and learn from. Brady includes himself in that conversation.

“When I threw a bad interception or missed an open receiver, I didn’t chalk it up to tough luck and tell myself it was okay because it was just one throw. As soon as possible, I was on the phone to our offensive coordinator, I was watching replays, I was looking at the all-22 film, and I was figuring out what precipitated the mistake and why it happened,” he said.

Think back to Super Bowl XLII, the one that got away against the New York Giants. Or go further back to that rough night against the Kansas City Chiefs in 2014, when Brady threw for just 159 yards and two interceptions in one of the worst games of his career. He didn’t let it go. And by the end of that season, he was holding another Lombardi Trophy.

That’s the only thing that matters to Brady.

Tom Brady opens up on how to learn from the mistakes

Tom Brady has always believed the fix is pretty simple. If you want to break the habit of brushing off mistakes, you first have to accept one uncomfortable truth: it’s never “just one.” That phrase, Brady says, is where things start to unravel.

“When they start to echo this “just one” mantra, or they shun personal accountability by shifting blame to other people on the team, that’s when mistakes start to compound and the disease of losing takes root,” Tom Brady wrote.

It’s a slow burn. One play gets dismissed, then another. Before long, “just one” turns into one mistake per game, then one every half. Brady called it a virus, something that spreads quietly until it’s everywhere. By the time you notice it, the damage is already done. It is, in Brady’s words, a “losing mindset.”

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Every modern NFL player understands how thin the margin is. The most obvious example from this season is Ravens rookie Tyler Loop’s missed field goal that ended Baltimore’s season. Before that miss, Loop hadn’t failed on a kick from 40-plus yards all year. It would be easy to label it a fluke, but it’s not.

Loop is a rookie, and the worst thing he can do is diminish this mistake and shrug it off. He needs to learn from it, which entails watching the tape, breaking down the mechanics, talking it out with the coaches, and figuring out why it happened in the first place. Brady lived by that approach.

“I never ran from my failures, and I never let them define me. You shouldn’t either. Instead, YOU define the failures–as chances to learn, as opportunities for growth, as the beginning of the next improvement cycle,” he wrote.

That mindset isn’t reserved for quarterbacks or kickers or Hall of Famers. It applies to anyone trying to get better at something that actually matters.