Adversity Comes for Everyone

The following is adapted from Silver Spoon: The Imperfect Guide to Success.

Some people are born into more privileged circumstances than others. That much is undeniable. I grew up in relative affluence, with parents who wanted the best for me. But that doesn’t mean my life has been free of adversity. Is anyone’s?

Adversity for you may look very different from adversity for me. Nonetheless, you will encounter serious challenge sooner or later. What matters is how you respond in the moments when you want to crawl into a deep hole and stay there forever.

We all encounter adversity. What defines us is how we respond.

Dropping the Hopes of an Entire School

In 2012, in my junior year at Michigan State, our team was ranked thirteenth in the country. Many of our best players were returning, including Le’Veon Bell, our great running back.

We started the year strong, edging past twenty-fourth-ranked Boise State and then clobbering Central Michigan 41–7. When twentieth-ranked Notre Dame came to town on the evening of September 15, we were tenth in the country and feeling confident.

That confidence did not last. Notre Dame’s defense smothered us, and we struggled to get first downs, let alone touchdowns. The Fighting Irish scored first, and at halftime, they led 14–3. The eighty thousand fans at Spartan Stadium and the ABC broadcasters in the booth wondered whether we were going to show up in the second half.

We didn’t. We were shut out in the second half in an ugly performance, and one of the ugliest performances came from me. Late in the game, I dropped an easy nineteen-yard toss that should have been a touchdown.

The massive groan that rose in the stadium as that pass slipped through my fingers was just the beginning. After the game, every reporter within a hundred square miles of the stadium wanted to know why I dropped the pass, what caused the drop, and how I felt about it. Social media blew up with accusations and recriminations as that dropped pass came to represent everything that had gone wrong for us that night.

Adversity had come to pay me a visit. I had to decide what to do next.

What to Do When Adversity Hits

Dropping an easy pass in front of eighty thousand people was the heaviest dose of adversity I’d ever encountered. For the next week on campus, everyone I passed seemed to be glaring at me—or worse yet, dropping their eyes. I experienced overwhelming hurt, coupled with embarrassment. How was I going to pull myself out of the deep pit in which I found myself?

More than my abilities as an athlete, that dropped pass was a test of my mental strength. Would it define me as a player (He’s had some issues with drops, the announcers would say)? Would it undercut my confidence? How could I push it from my mind?

That moment could have been the start of a slide in confidence. I could have become fearful or tentative. I could have started playing like I was more concerned about dropping the ball than catching it. Had I thought that way, it could have become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I could have started looking for the threat of failure because I wanted to avoid it and began to see that threat of failure around every corner. In the Book of Job (3:25–26), the prophet recounts, “For the thing which I have greatly feared, has come upon me.”

Instead, that dropped pass became a turning point. I chose to use it as motivation to work harder. I reminded myself that I was the starting wide receiver on one of the best teams in the country. To get there, I’d worked my ass off. There had been countless early mornings and late nights, routes run over and over. None of that work had vanished. I was still the product of all that hard work. And I couldn’t let one dropped pass erase that fact.

I kept it in perspective. It was one dropped pass. There would likely be others in my career. Instead of worrying about more drops, I focused on the good. I wanted the promise of future success surrounding me, not the dread of failure.

The lesson I took from that heartbreaking moment of adversity was simple: Live your life with fear and apprehension, and you will only find things to fear. Live your life with joy and positivity, and you will find what you really want out of life.

Love the Journey

The undisputed highlight of my career is playing for the Denver Broncos when we won Super Bowl 50. I caught Peyton Manning’s final NFL pass to secure the victory.

The next day, I was overcome with emotion. I cried thinking about the game. I was ecstatic for the win. But that wasn’t what brought me to tears.

I was brought to tears thinking of the journey.

That journey had as much adversity as joy, as much failure as success, as many setbacks as steps forward. And a dropped pass in 2012 that turned into an incredible lesson.

Everyone faces adversity at some point. Life is about ebbs and flows. It’s not a steady state of bliss. It’s filled with trial and error (and trial again). When that adversity arrives, here are some things to keep in mind:

Keep working. Football taught me this, of course, because a whole lot of difficulty can come your way in football, even when you win. Losses (and dropped passes) are the worst, but not if you use those setbacks to redouble your efforts.

Have patience. When I got cut by Chicago in 2018, I realized my football career wasn’t going to progress according to my preferred timeline. There are too many things you can’t control, so I learned to focus on the things I had power over and have patience with the things I didn’t.

Practice what you’re weak at. This may sound obvious to some people. Still, I’ve watched many athletes become more complete players by focusing on their shortcomings.

 Think positively. The power of positive thinking is not a new idea, but it bears repeating. When you think about success and the things you’re grateful for, little victories emerge, like mushrooms in a damp forest.

The adversity isn’t the failure. The failure is letting trouble get the upper hand. One of my biggest disappointments was not getting drafted by the pros. But I never considered quitting. The failure wasn’t in not getting selected. The failure would have been not trying to make the pros.

In the words of my friend and NBA legend, Draymond Green, after I was cut by the Chicago Bears: “All made men been through some adversity. Now go make yourself.”

Now I’m saying the same to you: Go make yourself.

For more advice on adversity, you can find Silver Spoon: The Imperfect Guide to Success on Amazon.

Bennie Fowler is a six-year veteran of the NFL. He began his career as an undrafted free agent signed by the Broncos in 2014. He spent four years with the Broncos and was a member of the Super Bowl 50 championship team in 2016. Bennie played college football at Michigan State University, where he was a member of the 2014 Rose Bowl championship team. Bennie holds the annual Bennie Fowler youth football camp in Detroit, Michigan, is an in-demand speaker trained through the NFL Speakers Bureau, and lives in Denver during the offseason.