Drew Bledsoe, the top draft pick in the NFL, knew football doesn't last forever. How he transitioned to an entirely new occupation.

Career change is a key to life today and must be planned ahead. Today, we have a very special guest and an exemplary position in life to give you a perspective that’s very different and something that we’ve talked about in other episodes, but here we have a real life example. Today we have Drew Bledsoe. If there’s anybody on the planet who doesn’t know or remember, he was drafted number one in the NFL, and then became a starting quarterback, etc. Extremely successful. We know that.

I want to talk a little bit both about how he got there, what he went through, what he did, and then the new business he’s in, which is wine; how he did that, how he made the transition, because that’s what so many people have to do so many times in life. Almost nobody ends up in the same place, or the same job, or the same career that they started with.

Welcome, Drew.

Drew Bledsoe: Thanks for having me on. I’m really excited to visit with you, Thomas, and I welcome the opportunity.

Thomas: Thank you. Thank you for coming on. You’re such a good example . Could you tell us a little bit about what it takes to attain the level in sports that you did?

Drew:  There are a lot of things at work, there. First, you’ve got to program your mind. If somebody saw me in the seventh or eighth grade, I was not the guy that anybody was going to pick out as the guy who was going to go on to be a professional athlete. I was tall and skinny, and not very fast. I had really big feet; I just didn’t move very well.

That didn’t change how I viewed myself in my mind. I really felt like I could be a great football player, and really programmed my mind so that I could never accept anything less than my very best effort, whether it came to training, practice, school – you name it. Because I had those high expectations and that view of myself as somebody that was going to be excellent, I wouldn’t accept less than my very best in anything that I did. That was really where it started.

Thomas: It’s interesting, because so often so many people think that somebody has just got this natural ability, natural talent, and that’s why they are where they are. I know in college, etc., when I went to graduate school at Berkeley, my impression was: “Oh, gosh. I’m going to meet these professors, and they’re just these superhuman people.” Then, low and behold, I get in there and I find out they’re there early, they’re there late, they’re working on weekends. These are Nobel Prize winners. It wasn’t just a gift. It was also a dedication, effort, and fortitude. I am hearing you saying something of the same thing. Is that true?

Drew: You’re 100% right. One of the advantages that I had, as I was growing up, my father and his good friend ran a football camp and I got a chance to be around very successful professional football players when I was growing up. I got a chance to see these guys and meet these guys, and I discovered that they’re not superheroes. They are regular guys that have athletic ability that obviously is outside the norm, but that’s not really what allowed them to be successful. What allowed them to be successful was the work they put in, and the continued work that they put in.

Fred Biletnikoff, who was one of the great wide receivers ever to play professional football, and still, the best receiver in college football every year receives the Biletnikoff Award. I got to meet and be around Fred Biletnikoff when I was growing up, and the guy, I think he was probably 5’10-5’11, probably 180 pounds, and by the time I met him, slightly balding. He was not the guy that you looked at and said: “Man, that guy is an NFL wide receiver.”

When I was around him, every time he was on the practice field just coaching kids up, he was always practicing running routes, and he was always practicing proper catching technique,