In my role as Titans beat reporter, I write roughly 40 times as many articles per year as the number of games the Titans actually play. And that's just me. We at The Tennessean post maybe 1,000 articles about the Titans every year, plus several hundred more photos and videos. If you'd read, watched or looked at every piece of media we produced about the Titans in the last year, I'm not sure you'd have time in your life to do much else.
And as a by-product of this pace, there's so much that I write about this team that even I don't end up remembering. Sometimes a story needs to be written and it gets written and that's that. The point of the story isn't to win a Nobel Prize for Literature. It's to inform the fanbase and move on forward to the next
story. I write it and move on. You read it and move on.
I'm letting you behind the curtain here because I've been thinking a lot about the way I do my job since speaking with Titans star defensive tackle Jeffery Simmons for this week's front page story as part of our Titans season preview edition. At his core, Simmons is someone who believes that every moment of every day is the most important one. Nothing's disposable. Nothing's mundane. Nothing's single-use. If Simmons is doing it, he's treating it like it's life-changing.
If Simmons had my job, I have no doubt he'd be the kind of reporter who exhausts himself trying to turn every transactional news item into something worthy of that Nobel Prize for Literature. Because he can't conceive of behaving any other way. There are no layups, no cheat codes, no built-in rest periods in a Simmons work day. His greatness, or at least his greatness the way he portrays it, comes from an unrelenting drive to treat every single task like it's the task that's going to define his legacy.
For us everyday blokes, schlubs and laypeople, that feels like an impossibly exhausting standard. Living every moment like it's the difference between validating and invalidating everything you stand for is a wholly unnecessary way to behave if you're content to be content. But for me, Simmons is a reminder that reaching the pinnacle of your craft ― whatever that craft may be ― requires a functional weirdness, a strange disconnect between the way you see the world and the way everyone else does. You can't just happen upon generation-defining success. You have to choose it, and keep choosing it and keep choosing to keep choosing it.
To emulate Jeffery Simmons is to accept the value of purpose, to forsake the easy path of only trying when it's necessary in favor of discarding the concept of "necessary" altogether. Trying your hardest at all times isn't what leads to success. It is, in a way, the success itself.
So even if I know you're only going to be reading this one time, I'm giving it my all. That'll be my promise for everything you read about this upcoming Titans season. And I hope you make similar promises about the ordeals in your life too. Like Simmons, all we can give is everything we have.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: What I learned from Jeffery Simmons' dedication to being his best
