Your story is one of your greatest assets. 

 

Jed Collins, author of Fourth & Goal: An NFL Memoir, Grit, Survival, & Stories From Inside My Helmet joined me on the Get Ready Before Life Happens podcast to explore the power of journaling, why reflection helps shape personal growth, and how authenticity becomes even more valuable in the age of AI. Jed shares lessons from football, failure, entrepreneurship, and financial education, along with why capturing your story can help you better understand yourself, your goals, and the value you bring to the world.

 

Key Takeaways

• Journaling helps capture experiences, reflect on growth, and develop original thinking
• Reflection creates greater self-awareness around decisions, goals, and personal identity
• Authenticity and perspective are becoming more valuable as AI expands access to information
• Growth often comes through challenges, setbacks, and learning from failure
• Financial education becomes more powerful when people can apply ideas in real life
• Capturing your story over time helps clarify your voice, values, and direction
• Small, consistent habits like journaling can create long-term personal and professional growth
• Become the person you needed when you were young

 

 Tony’s Take: Your story is an asset. This conversation is a reminder that reflection helps us better understand who we are, what we value, and how we grow through both successes and setbacks. In a world where information is everywhere, authenticity, perspective, and lived experience become even more meaningful. Taking time to capture your journey helps turn experiences into insight and insight into growth.

 

 🎥 Watch this episode below: 

 

🎧 Listen to the podcast below or on your favorite podcast app. 

 

Connect with Jedidiah Collins, CFP®:  

 

• Website: https://jedidiahcollins.com
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jedidiah-collins/
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@jedidiahcollins8198

 

Book:

 

• Fourth & Goal: An NFL Memoir, Grit, Survival, & Stories From Inside My Helmet (Amazon)
• Your Money Vehicle: How to Begin Driving to Financial Freedom! (Amazon). 

 

Mentioned this episode:

 

• Ball Four: The Final Pitch by Jim Bouton (Amazon) 

 

Bio: 

 

Jedidiah Collins, known as the Fullback of Finance, spent seven seasons in the NFL where he was cut 13 times before earning his place and eventually becoming one of the top fullbacks in the world. His journey taught him a lesson that now defines his work: talent may get you noticed, but resilience is what keeps you in the game.

 

While others measured success by contracts and statistics, Jed was quietly building a different edge—through journaling, reflection, and learning from the greatness around him. Those habits helped shape both his football career and the life that followed.

 

After the NFL, Jed became a Certified Financial Planner® and founded the financial literacy company Money Vehicle. Today, he teaches athletes, students, entrepreneurs, and leaders how to Speak Money & Act Wealthy, turning financial literacy into practical action and confidence.

 

As a keynote speaker and author, Jed now shares his Rookie to Veteran framework to help others grow in business and life. His message is simple: success leaves clues, failure is a First Attempt In Learning, and the most important victories are the ones you choose to write down first.

 

👉 Start Your Financial Readiness Plan: A free, practical plan that helps you create your in-case-of-emergency Financial First Aid Kit, organize what matters, and prepare before life happens. Start Your Free Financial Readiness Plan  https://www.tonysteuer.com

 

👉 Support Get Ready. Become a Get Ready Insider and help keep the Financial Readiness Plan free, support the podcast, trusted resources, and consumer-first financial education. You’ll receive access to the Get Ready Library. Support Get Ready here. www.tonysteuer.com/support

 

Transcript

Tony Steuer:
Success begins when we take the time to reflect on what life is teaching us.

Welcome to Get Ready: Before Life Happens. I’m Tony Steuer, and today I’m joined by Jed Collins.

Jed, welcome back to Get Ready.

Jed Collins:
Tony, I have truly enjoyed the community you are building, the message you are putting out, and the opportunity you are giving me to share my message.

I appreciate being back and I am excited for the conversation.

Tony:
Me too, Jed.

You are doing some really cool work, and you have a very innovative way of looking at things in the money world because of your background.

Let’s jump into that.

What is your origin story, and how did it inspire you to write your new book, Fourth and Goal?

Jed:
I love it.

I am getting to live out a dream I wrote down about 18 years ago, and that ages me a little bit.

My origin story is that I got a great accounting degree at Washington State, then got to play in the National Football League.

I played in the NFL for seven years.

I am not the hero.

I am not the big-name, first-round money guy.

I am the no-name.

I got cut 13 times.

So my story is much more about grit and survival than fame or fortune.

While I was in the league, I came to a humble realization.

Despite having a business degree and being an accounting major, I knew very little about personal finance.

It was an overwhelming topic.

Money was not discussed in my household.

So I set out on a mission to empower myself as Jed, the rookie NFL player.

How do I capture the financial side of the dream?

How do I avoid becoming one of those statistics that so many people point to?

I started reading the gurus: Dave Ramsey, Robert Kiyosaki, Suze Orman.

Then a mentor of mine challenged me to get the CFP designation.

Once he introduced me to it, I spent each offseason of my seven-year career studying for the CFP and educating myself.

The dream I wrote down 18 years ago was that I wished a former player would come in, not selling anything, just talking to me about the language of money.

Today, this offseason in 2026, I will visit about 13 or 14 NFL teams, talking to rookies and second-, third-, and fourth-year players.

I have one-on-ones with them, not as an advisor, not as an agent, and not as a member of their team.

I am there as a pure educator.

My goal is to teach you one thing about money today.

The next time you see me, hopefully we get to move on to the next step.

So that is the full-circle moment.

Jed had to go play his career.

I had to go into wealth management for a time.

I had to launch my own business.

I had to earn the trust of the teams.

Now I am earning the trust of the players.

It all comes back to a quote I love: become the person you needed when you were young.

When I was young, I needed what Jed Collins, the Fullback of Finance, is doing today.

And now, as you mentioned, with this new area of experience through journaling, I am publishing Fourth and Goal, a memoir of sorts built from a daily journal I kept during my seventh and last season in the NFL.

Tony:
That is cool.

One of the things that hits home for me is what you said about your business degree.

I was also a business major with a finance degree, and it did not feel like it prepared me for real life.

I got into problems with my credit card when I was in college.

We had something called the Harvard banking model that we did, where we learned how to run a bank, which was really practical because, at 22, you get a lot of offers to run banks.

There is that challenge with college and practical skills, which is a whole other topic.

You said something that I think is almost a drop-the-mic moment, although we should record the rest of the episode anyway: become the person you needed when you were young.

That is one of the questions I end up with, the time machine question.

I think it brings out a lot because you know what you needed.

When we talk about athletes, the first athlete I read about who struggled financially was a pitcher named J.R. Richard.

He might be before your time.

Jed:
A little bit, but I know the story.

Tony:
At his peak, he was probably the best pitcher in Major League Baseball.

Within a couple of years of retiring, he was living under an underpass in Houston.

It was amazing because he had the resources you are talking about.

He made a lot of money, but it did not help him.

So it is cool that you are going back and helping athletes.

As you and I have talked about, athletes can come from situations where there was not money in the house.

They may be the first generation to go to college or make a significant income.

It is a whole different thing.

Let’s get into the journaling, and then maybe we can talk more about that.

Jed:
Go for it.

I definitely want to go there.

I also want to highlight something you said about being finance and business majors, and learning how to run a bank.

I always told people, if you give me 100,000 widgets, I can fill out accounting statements and financial statements.

Where we are looking at this is that it is not an education problem.

It is an implementation problem.

You have to go beyond understanding to action.

I talk to a lot of advisors today.

I actually just hosted a conference for the NFLPA.

It is not the information.

The information is out there.

It is how that player understands it and makes it work for them.

The J.R. Richard story and the Broke documentary that came out through ESPN are truly what lit my fire of fear.

Fear makes you do a lot of bad things.

It also makes you do some good things.

It was that commonality of the pro athlete who goes broke.

How?

How does somebody who has been handed the world not capture it and not seize it?

I come back to education, and then implementation.

As we transition to Fourth and Goal, I have been a lifelong journaler.

I am now 40 years old.

I probably have 14 or 15 journals of my life.

I have never journaled as much as I did during the 2014 season.

It came at two pivotal moments for me.

One, I was in my seventh year and really seeing the end of my career.

This was probably going to be my last go-around.

I was also becoming a father.

My firstborn daughter was born that year.

So I challenged myself.

Every day going in and out of the Detroit Lions building, I wanted to capture as much as I possibly could.

People have asked me every day since I made it to the NFL, “What is it like being an NFL player?”

That is a large part of why I am putting this out: to answer that question.

To my knowledge, there has never been an NFL player who journaled every day and published a book about it.

I truly think this is going to be a first-of-its-kind moment.

Another time capsule is a book called Ball Four by Jim Bouton.

You remember Ball Four.

Tony:
That is an awesome book.

Jed:
It is an awesome book.

While I was in Detroit, a reporter told me about the book and gave me a copy.

By December of that season, I thought, “I am writing my own version of Ball Four.”

That is exactly what he did.

That is what I was doing.

That is where the Fourth and Goal tie-in comes from: Ball Four, Fourth and Goal.

I wanted to keep some recognition of him.

Somebody did it in Major League Baseball, but that was almost 40 or 50 years ago.

I look at the football journey and the internal turmoil.

It comes back to that time machine question you mentioned.

We are going to talk about a lot of the benefits of journaling.

I think it is unquestionably the greatest skill a leader, a young person, an athlete, any creator, influencer, or brand builder can develop over the next decade of life.

Especially with artificial intelligence on the horizon, journaling is going to be where original thought takes place.

If I type something into a computer, it immediately improves it.

Where does the original idea come from?

It has to come from my pen and paper, however you document it.

The shift and change are here.

For a few reasons, the timing of Fourth and Goal is going to be really neat.

Tony:
That is awesome.

Ball Four was a great book.

It has been years since I read it, so I do not remember it too much, but I remember it was amazing.

As you talk about journaling and original thought, that is something people talk about a lot with AI.

You can get lazy with AI doing almost everything for you.

It will keep prompting you to do more.

Do you want to write a social media post about that?

Do you want to turn that into a video?

It is easy to let it do the thinking.

Let’s talk about what journaling actually is, because I think a lot of us do not know.

We have not done a journal.

So what actually is journaling?

Jed:
I love that.

And just to respond to what you said, you said you can get very lazy.

I agree with you because you and I are a similar age.

The 18-year-old or 20-year-old does not consider themselves lazy.

They think they are being efficient.

There is some transparency issue there, but I am forcing myself to live by a quote this year in 2026:

Everything you have ever thought before has changed.

Everything you have ever thought before has changed.

So if I look at a 22-year-old and say, “They did not really do this. They just clicked a button,” are they being lazy, or are they more efficient than me in scaling what they wanted to do?

Six months ago, I would have said lazy young kid.

Now I challenge that notion.

You really can build a website in two minutes.

That is not lazy.

That is amazing.

I am fighting that.

But as you are saying, it does need direction.

It will prompt you which way to go.

It is begging for a ball of clay.

That is where original thought comes back.

I have Money Vehicle.

It is a ball of clay I can build many things with.

I have Fourth and Goal.

That ball of clay continues.

Journaling, in and of itself, is something I am trying to introduce to people.

I almost do not even want to use the word journal because people write it off and go, “No, thank you.”

It is kind of like meditation.

Call it something else, and then you might get somebody to listen.

Journaling is simply the capturing of the internal voice.

I hear a dialogue.

Everyone does.

Now, whether they hear it or listen to it is a different story.

But everyone in the world has a voice going on in their head.

What are my emotions?

What are my human emotions?

What are my experiences?

What is my first-person perspective of this situation?

I can click a button, and AI can tell me about a Yankees and Dodgers baseball game.

AI cannot tell me how I sat in the stands, watched the game, and what my thoughts were as the game progressed.

The emotional and crazy part of it.

That is what we need to capture.

That is the human experience.

That is the human element.

If I were to describe journaling in a short phrase, it would be: capturing your voice.

That is as simple as it can be said.

Getting it on paper, getting it on camera, getting it typed, however you want to document it.

It is not creating.

So many people are intimidated by a blank page.

They say, “I do not know what to create.”

You are not creating anything.

You are trying to hear the voice going on and capture it as it goes.

It is a train of thought.

It is not something you have to edit and correct.

My journals are one direction.

I am going as fast as the pen can go.

The beautiful thing about pen and paper is that your brain works at the speed you can write.

That is a weird connection to how this amazing thing in our minds works.

So journaling is no more than this:

I have a voice in my head.

The person who is talking when no one else is around.

Can I start to document what that voice is saying?

Tony:
That is really deep.

As I think about it, the show is about money, but money and life are very tied together.

A lot of us do not realize we have internal voices and scripts when it comes to money.

It seems like journaling is a good way of slowing yourself down when you are making a financial decision.

You can journal how you feel about it, the pros and cons, and the context.

Some people do the Ben Franklin thing and write out pros and cons.

But journaling gives you the context to do that.

I am curious: what is the reaction of a 22-year-old when you mention journaling?

Jed:
Amazingly, they are much more receptive than a decade or a generation before them.

This under-25 era, the COVID-influenced era, is much more introverted.

Everything is on screen.

Everything is locked in here.

I always have headphones in.

I am not huge on conversing and going into big groups.

This generation wants to analyze.

They also want to remain human.

Everything is going to be virtually or artificially influenced and improved.

This is a format where they get to at least say, “This was my perspective. This was my experience.”

Coincidentally, I am having younger people say, “Jed, this is something I want to do. How do I get started?”

Then we get to begin the practices.

If I asked a 30- to 45-year-old, they might say, “I do not know. That is the woo-woo stuff. Get out of here.”

You ask a 25- to 15-year-old, and they get it.

Their world is on camera.

Why are they not going to bars?

Why are they not going out?

Because everything they do is filmed.

I read something yesterday that it is kind of like Footloose.

Nobody dances anymore.

Tony, I am sure you are a great dancer.

Tony:
That is my wife.

Jed:
They are being viewed, and they are afraid to do or say anything that will get them canceled.

Your journal is the internal dialogue.

It is the place you are supposed to be the most raw and the most authentic.

And as you were saying, how does it connect with money?

Everything in your journal connects with your financial and overall wellness.

How do I make this decision?

Let’s say I want to buy a car.

I journaled about it in April when I first thought about it.

Here are the cars.

Now I go back and look at that in May.

What has changed?

Maybe I got hit with a $4,000 bill I was not expecting.

Okay, the car budget just went down $10,000.

Or maybe this is what I thought I needed it for, and now I am realizing I do not need that.

You have documentation of the internal dialogue and conversation.

The car example is just one.

You can expand it to all financial decisions.

The greatest one is: why are you going to work?

What do I want out of this?

Everybody says, “I want to be an entrepreneur.”

If you can journal and capture the theoretical things you believe are around the corner today, you are going to see what is real and what comes to fruition.

Tony:
I like that.

You said a couple of things.

One is about professional athletes and how the spotlight is very different now.

Young people are under more of a spotlight anyway.

When we were in college, nobody was capturing everything.

Maybe somebody took one photo.

That was it.

There was no internet and none of these things.

I remember when I was in high school, I was at a local gym and there was a guy who played for the Spurs just shooting around.

It was not a big deal.

People were not mobbing him.

He was a nice guy.

We played horse.

Of course, he beat me because he played for the Spurs, but it was fun.

There was no entourage.

He was just a regular guy at the time.

Jed:
I get to meet these young men and now young women.

I am working with WNBA and National Women’s Soccer players who are skyrocketing in value and income.

The shift and evolution happened when we stopped calling them student athletes and they became business athletes.

When you go into college making hundreds of thousands of dollars, that changes things.

I have talked to rookies for a decade.

They are not coming in and asking me about budgeting anymore.

They are starting to talk about, “I already have an LLC. Should I be an S Corp? Tell me about the tax advantages of the S Corp.”

You sit back and go, “You are speaking this language.”

That is who I want to meet.

Part of being an entrepreneur is that you have to look five or 10 years into the future.

If that path does not end up in an area you think or want, you need to change course.

I look at the music industry.

I look at the movie industry.

They have been unforgettably disrupted.

They are not the same industries they were five years ago.

The creation phase is totally different.

Athletics is the one industry right now where I say it is not going to be disrupted.

It is going to become exponentially more valuable, at least today.

Nobody wants to watch two robots play golf or two robots shoot a basketball.

They want the human element.

The athlete is irreplaceable.

I think in the next 10 to 20 years, we are going to see a new frontier of wealth.

The last 20 years were technology.

This is going to be the athlete’s time.

There will be billion-dollar quarterbacks, with an S on the end.

There will be players making $100 million a year for throwing or catching a ball.

And women as well.

There are more millionaire female athletes this year than there have ever been, and that number is going to skyrocket.

So I start to see the shift and change in what the athlete’s horizon looks like and what their responsibilities look like.

Tony, now if they are in college, they have to manage their classwork, kind of.

They have to manage their sport.

They have to manage their business.

They have to manage their social circle.

All of this is being done in a fishbowl where everybody is watching.

I go and talk to 500 rookies in the NFL.

I would say maybe 100 of them even drink alcohol.

Why?

Because they come from Ole Miss, Texas, or other big programs, and everything they do is recorded, observed, and talked about afterward.

You cannot have that second beer, let alone the 12th.

It is the dawning of a new era.

Fourth and Goal is meant as a template.

I documented my story throughout the book.

We have two versions.

There is going to be the complete version and the game-day version.

In the complete version, there are 100 journal entries for Tony the athlete, Tony the leader, Tony the individual, to start their own journal.

My goal is not just, “Jed had a cool story.”

I am the no-name, nobody story.

That is part of why it is going to be unique.

I am not Drew Brees or Tom Brady or the big famous guy.

I captured the behind the scenes, the fly-on-the-wall version of what I observed and absorbed while going through this survival process.

My goal is to get the reader to start their journal and start capturing their story.

For athletes, that story becomes a brand, and that brand can become a business.

I have been asked a thousand times over the last year or two by NIL athletes, CEO leaders, and entrepreneurs, “Jed, you are the Fullback of Finance. How do I go about building a brand? How do I become a speaker? How do I stand on a stage and give a message?”

It starts in your journal.

It starts when nobody is around.

What is that voice telling you?

Then we can format it, market it, package it, and plate it.

But it starts with you capturing the original thought.

Tony:
I love that.

It is important for us to think about ourselves as a brand.

Of course, athletes are a brand.

You think about certain athletes like Michael.

You only have to say Michael.

You do not even have to say anything else, and everybody knows who you are talking about.

We picture that image of Air Jordan.

That is a brand.

All of us are personal brands if we are out there on LinkedIn or writing a book, like you are.

The Fullback of Finance is a brand.

We are all creating our brand.

Even if we work at a company, we still have to create our brand, especially in the age of AI, because we have to make ourselves distinct and memorable.

That does not mean doing crazy stuff in a bad way.

It means standing out.

You have to be authentic.

That has been a subject on this podcast a couple of times: authenticity as a superpower.

Even with pro athletes, I am sure there were guys on your team who excelled beyond their talent because they were authentic.

Like you.

You said you were not Drew Brees, but you were authentic.

You worked hard.

You came back.

You have a super inspiring story, but it is about authenticity.

I imagine as a player, you were authentic.

You worked hard and probably showed up to practice early, right?

Jed:
Oh, yeah.

I am a Breakfast Clubber.

I would always say I am the first guy in the building, the one who is going to wake the weights up.

On authenticity, again, Tony, everything you have ever thought before has changed, at least professionally.

This is the first time in human history where knowledge and brain capacity are no longer your strategic advantage.

Think about that.

Throughout time, if I could calculate in my head, analyze, think, or become a thought leader, I had a strategic advantage.

There is no more panel of experts.

I have the greatest tool and resource in my pocket, readily available, that endlessly works.

Authenticity is going to be more important than knowledge in the future.

It is no longer, “I know how to build a website. I know how to run Google ads. I know how to write something.”

I can have a tool do all of that endlessly.

I do not know how we are going to send emails in five years.

All of these things are going to change.

So I look at authenticity.

I look at what, in the next decade, is going to identify me as something of value.

It is going to come back to that human, authentic experience.

How does Tony connect with me?

Eye contact.

If you give me $1,000 for one skill every college or high school graduate needs, I would say: look somebody in the face.

That is it.

Game changer.

Differentiator.

Why?

Because we had 10 young people in, and only two of them looked me in the face.

That authenticity is going to come from confidence in who you are.

Journaling is the greatest self-reflection and self-discovery tool in mankind.

In any history book ever, this skill is where the greatest leaders and minds came to find what they stand for and what they do not.

There is a great quote: if you do not stand for anything, you will fall for everything.

It is that identification of who I am trying to be in the marketplace today.

No longer is my knowledge or internal computing power my gift.

It is how I analyze, how I put my perspective on what is happening, and how I control the output of messaging that is going to be authentically from Jed Collins.

Tony:
That brings us up to the wrap of the show.

It is about putting our perspective in.

Authenticity and how we show up for people are going to be our unique factor, our superpower, however you want to phrase it going forward.

Jed, to wrap up, I have what is called the Get Ready Hot Take Trio, three quick questions I ask all my guests.

The first one is: what is one myth you are trying to break about journaling?

Jed:
One myth is that it takes a lot of time.

I have some journal entries that are two sentences long.

I also have journal entries where I am at my wit’s end, completely broken and about to cry.

“December 2nd.”

That is enough.

That is capturing it.

With stories, everyone says, “I have to write out every detail in my journal.”

No, no, no.

Get the main moment of transformation.

Get the main moment, and come back and write the story later.

Just get the practice started, and you will start to see it move forward.

With journaling, you do not need to fill up a full page.

You do not need to fill up 10 pages.

It could be a paragraph.

Just get into the practice of hearing the voice.

If you hear the voice, you are journaling.

Whether you write it down is different.

Tony:
Reflection is such a valuable skill.

Jed, let’s get out the time machine for a minute.

Knowing what you know now about journaling, what advice would you give your younger self, the rookie trying to make it in the NFL?

Jed:
This has been my greatest secret gift.

I created a series of principles while getting cut 13 times called Rookie to Veteran.

I was trying to understand the challenge of a rookie getting cut and why those veterans were sticking around.

They are all stories from my journals.

I have 10 principles and 10 concepts.

So the message to younger me is: keep documenting.

I wish I could have been more confident in it when I was younger.

As I got later into my career, I captured much more.

The message to my younger self is that this is an asset.

Twelve years later, I am publishing a journal from 2014 that I think is going to change a lot of young athletes’ lives.

It is also going to change the idea of what a book is.

A book does not have to be a story.

It can be your story.

I would tell my younger self: look at it as an asset.

And yes, that is going to be cool.

But also see the blessing of self-discovery, self-evaluation, and perspective.

What was important to me 10 years ago?

What is important to me today?

Maybe I do not need to stress and worry as much about whatever it is.

That ability to capture my experience and my journey through life, not only to give to my daughters one day, but also to sit back and reflect on the moments, the good and the bad, is powerful.

People think, “I do not want to journal when I am sad.”

I love my sad journal entries because, sitting here today in a good place, those are why.

I fought through that.

I went forward despite the dark, the gray, the burning.

Those are the ones you really do want to capture.

Capturing the fun and the stories is awesome, but it is really about being appreciative of what made you who you are today.

Tony:
That is awesome.

For people watching and listening, we have talked about you being cut 13 times, but you also had a lot of success.

You made the Pro Bowl at least one year, right?

Jed:
Yeah.

And I attribute all of my success to the journals and those Rookie to Veteran principles.

I consider myself lucky today because I see fail as a very different word.

Everybody is scared of it.

Everybody fears it.

Nobody wants to do it.

There is no way to succeed without failure.

I see fail as your first attempt in learning: F-A-I-L.

I attribute all of my success as an athlete, professional, father, and husband to the fact that I learned from failure.

Every great person we strive to be like is somebody who acknowledged failure.

They were not free from failure.

They acknowledged it was going to help them build and grow.

If we can reframe that word, I think it would be a tremendous gift.

Journaling is going to help you do it.

Looking back two years ago, that thing I thought was going to destroy me just altered my path a little bit and led me in a different direction.

I am here today because of that thing I was so embarrassed or upset about.

Reframe it and go: failure is feedback.

Feedback is knowledge.

Knowledge is power.

Failing is powerful.

Tony:
I love that.

That is why I want to make sure people know that your story includes becoming a Pro Bowler.

Think about how many high school athletes play football, then how many go on to college, then how many go on to pro football, and then the tiny percentage of pro football players who go to the Pro Bowl.

Jed:
As an undrafted player.

Tony:
I cannot even imagine.

What is that percentage as an undrafted player?

Jed:
It is statistically irrelevant.

It is zero.

But that is the beauty.

You look at your journey, and it grows by the day.

Failing has to be part of it.

If you are not failing, you are not growing.

If you are not uncomfortable, you are not growing.

The reality is that greatness is lonely.

To become a Pro Bowler, to become the best in the world at moving people against their will, as I did as a lead-blocking fullback, I had to be comfortable being alone at times.

I had to be comfortable being on an island and feeling like I was out over my skis.

That is the beauty of the journal.

I captured all of those moments.

I was 30 years old, in my seventh year in the NFL and my 15th year of competitive football, and I was still dealing with and struggling with things.

That is why they call journaling a practice.

You do not master it.

You get better at it, but it is continual.

LeBron James, at 40, as one of the greatest basketball players of all time, is still mastering his mental game 20 seasons in.

That is his journal.

That is his documentation of the internal voice.

It is a practice.

Once you begin, you start to see the endless benefits.

And again, if you are trying to be a leader in any asset, in any form of what you think that word means, journaling is going to be your greatest skill.

Tony:
That is awesome.

Thinking of great athletes, I am from the Bay Area, so Jerry Rice and Steph Curry come to mind.

That was Jerry Rice’s reputation: nobody worked harder.

Pro football players would come out to train with him and could not keep up.

Steph is the same way.

He is first in the gym and last in the gym.

He takes hundreds, maybe thousands, of shots a day.

That is why he is who he is.

If people are interested in seeing a great story, watch the Steph Curry movie about his life, from being a skinny guy at Davidson to becoming arguably one of the top five players in NBA history and definitely the best shooter.

That is a story for another day.

Jed:
I look at his father.

I look at my father.

His father was crazy until he was a genius.

That is the story of the entrepreneur.

He became a crazy genius.

His dad did things with him that went against traditional sense.

Anyone who wants to be an entrepreneur has to accept that you are crazy.

You see something nobody else sees.

One day, maybe somebody will call you a crazy genius.

Until that day, you are simply crazy, chasing a dream no one else believes in.

Tony, I will leave you with this as we wrap up.

As you look at the future and what is going to be irreplaceable, the two things I have come to that AI will not replace, as of yet, are in-person experiences and first-person experiences.

Go to a basketball game.

Go to a concert.

Go to a bar.

Shake people’s hands.

The other is first-person experiences.

That is the journal.

Those are the only two things I can strongly look at and say, “These are going to be relevant in five to 10 years.”

Everything else has changed.

Tony:
That is a great place to end.

Jed, where can people learn more about you, Money Vehicle, and pick up a copy of Fourth and Goal?

Jed:
JedediahCollins.com, YourMoneyVehicle.com, and Amazon.

Go get Fourth and Goal.

We are recording on the 7th.

It will be out on the 12th, so it should be out by the time people are listening to this.

There is the paperback and the e-book.

I recorded the Audible.

It is 10 hours of listening to me tell my story.

They asked, “Should we get a professional?”

I said, “It is literally my internal thoughts. I think I have to read this one.”

That is what I am most proud of.

I think most people will listen to it in the end.

At least young people may not read. They listen.

Go grab it on Amazon.

The goal is truly to start capturing your story.

Take those journal prompts and start scribbling.

Pull out your phone and talk to it.

The goal is to help people learn this skill I have loved for 20 years.

People say, “Jed, you are one of the most authentic and unique humans I have met.”

Why?

Because I not only hear the voice in my head, I have a conversation with it.

That is because my father taught me journaling is a gift.

It allows me to travel through time, and it allows me to keep building my brand.

Tony:
That is awesome.

Jed, thanks for joining us on Get Ready: Before Life Happens.

Jed:
Love it, Tony.

Keep being you.

Keep doing what you are doing.

The other thing in the future is your community.

You are ahead of the curve there.

Keep building your community and keep making an impact.

Tony:
Thank you.

You as well.

It is always a pleasure.

And thank you, everyone, as always, for tuning in to this episode of Get Ready: Before Life Happens.

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