What’s the problem with wanting to win a Super Bowl? For young football players everywhere, that’s been the dream since day one. To hoist up a Lombardi trophy as confetti falls would mean the world.
What it takes to get there has always been in plain sight. The years of bodybuilding. Looking adversity in the eye. All those good plays, and the bad ones, too. Enduring this extreme self-sacrifice and determination is all in the name of one goal: to be a champion.
But what happens after you’ve won it all?
Many NFL players wait their whole careers before they become champions. Many more never get that far. For those who do make it though, a decision must be made: aim for a new goal or sit contently knowing you’ve got a gigantic, diamond-studded Super Bowl ring on your finger.
Maybe you’ve heard of Tom Brady.
In a 2005 interview with 60 Minutes, Brady reflected on his at-the-time three Super Bowl wins with a stark “It’s got to be more than this. This can’t be what it’s all cracked up to be, I mean I’ve done it at 27 — what else is there for me?”
Of course, he went on to win four more times. Unreal.
While Tom’s case may be an outlier, it brings up an interesting question. If we turn a measurement into a goal, do we start to lose track of what we wanted to measure in the first place?
British economist Charles Goodhart believes so. First appearing in a 1975 article, Goodhart’s law asserts that “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
In other words, if you’re playing a game and the score is just for fun, you may play differently than if the score decides who wins a prize. When the score becomes the way to win, you might play just to get points, not to enjoy the game or play well. In real life, if a materials business decides to judge its delivery performance solely based on the number of loads it outputs per day, other important factors like quality control and customer satisfaction may suddenly feel less prioritized. At the same time, how a business achieves such a goal becomes disregarded.
Winning a Super Bowl is an outstanding achievement. So is maintaining a higher load output. But for driven individuals — whether you’re Tom Brady or a plant manager — measuring success based on a single target could create an unnecessary ceiling to our potential.
Meanwhile, purposefully working toward a distant goal as a way to spark motivation could box you in from achieving more. Because assuming such a goal is distant could not only delegitimize the whole point, but it could also flatten the call for continuous improvement once that goal is eventually met.
So maybe we can’t ever truly “win it all” — and maybe that’s exactly the point. When we fixate on a single outcome, we risk narrowing our field of vision and missing the deeper value of the journey itself. Whether you’re chasing rings or reaching daily output goals, success isn’t just about hitting a target — it’s about how you get there, what you learn, and how you keep growing beyond it. The most resilient players — on the field or in the field — understand that progress doesn’t end with a trophy or a benchmark. It’s ongoing, adaptive, and intentional. Keep striving. Keep asking what’s next. Because staying hungry isn’t a weakness — it’s how legacies are built.