Thought For The Week: 

Jalen Hurts Just Delivered an Emotional Intelligence Masterclass. It All Starts With Just Six Words

Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts may have lost the Super Bowl, but his postgame press conference teaches multiple lessons in emotional intelligence, the ability to make emotions work for you instead of against you.

Jalen Hurts holds himself to a very high standard.

The Philadelphia Eagles quarterback was obviously disappointed as he sat for his postgame Super Bowl interview. Hurts had just put on a historic performance, setting three NFL records in a game that came down to the final seconds, as the Chiefs took home the crown as this year’s top team.

But if you watch Hurts’s ten-minute interview, you’ll learn some important lessons for anyone striving for success. It all starts with a succinct, six-word summary from Hurts himself:

“You either win or you learn.”

The importance of reflection

Hurts’s “you either win or you learn” reminds me of similar axioms, like: “There are no failures, only learning opportunities.”

This advice is valuable because it forces a perspective shift and allows you to turn negative events into positive outcomes. But a key part of the learning recipe is to reflect, to think deeply about what you did well and want to repeat, and what you did not do well, so you can improve.

Finding joy in challenges

Hurts’s press conference was mostly sombre, but there was an especially bright moment at the end when he decided to take one final question from 15-year-old Eagles superfan and podcast host Giovanni Algarin. Hurts immediately cheers up and smiles when he notices Algarin, who has suffered from a rare genetic disease since he was a little boy.

“How you doing, man?” Hurts asks. 

“I’m doing good. I’ve never met you in person.”

Algarin goes on to ask a pretty good question: “What is one lesson that you learned from this game that you’ll take on to the next?”

And Hurts completely nails the answer.

“I think you want to cherish these moments with the people you’ve come so far with,” says Hurts.

“You know, your family, your loved ones, your teammates, your peers, everyone you do it with and [who] do it for you. And...you know, I will say I’m so proud of this team for everything that we’ve been able to overcome. Obviously, we had a big-time goal in the end that we wanted to accomplish, and we came up short.

“You know, I think the beautiful part about it is, everyone experiences different pains, everyone’s experience is different...but you decide if you want to learn from it. You decide if you want to use that to be a teachable moment.

“And I know what I’ll do.”