Time & Perspective Quote by Greg Akcelrod

Akcelrod’s line is the classic locker-room equation - effort plus obsession, with a nod to the cosmic wildcard - but its real work is psychological, not mathematical. “Give all the time one hundred percent” isn’t just advice; it’s a demand for total identity buy-in. In pro football, where careers are short and bodies are rented out at high interest, the cleanest story you can tell yourself is that success is earned. That story keeps you showing up on the days when you’re sore, cut from the depth chart, or quietly aware that someone younger is running the same drills faster.

The small aside - “to be lucky is a good thing” - is doing heavy lifting. Athletes know the truth: opportunity often arrives dressed as health, timing, coaching favor, or a roster spot that opens because someone else’s knee doesn’t. Mentioning luck acknowledges the randomness without surrendering to it. It’s a culturally acceptable confession of uncertainty, quickly re-contained by the harder creed: “work hard…give everything.”

The promise at the end - “you will have great success” - reads less like a guarantee than a coping mechanism for a brutally non-meritocratic system. It sells control in a profession built on variables you can’t control: injuries, schemes, contracts, politics. The intent is motivational, but the subtext is survival: if you can’t command outcomes, command your effort, and let that become your proof - to coaches, to teammates, and to yourself - that you deserved whatever comes next.