One thing I say all the time is that you can either have success or revenge, but you can’t have both. What you’re really doing is holding on for a better tomorrow. A lot of times it’s the ability to take hard hits without hitting back-something that’s referred to in the ‘hood all the time as “taking an L,” which is taking a loss, but it’s only the appearance of losing. The revelation that came to me much later was that toughness is not the ability to throw a punch. It was about turning off your emotions, turning off what you’re feeling, turning off your pain compass. From growing up among gang members and drug dealers all the way to sports and the NFL, I watched, and I became what I saw. I was involved in a very competitive world. That definition of tough had taken over, especially in the world of masculinity. You have to turn off your moral compass to be a good soldier, so that you can do what needs to be done no matter who gets hurt or what goes on around you or how your world can crumble. I’ve heard a quote-hopefully, I don’t mess it up-but it was about intense morality and how, if you have it, it makes a bad soldier. One thing I discovered in writing this book is that my definition of toughness was “cold.” It was the ability to shut emotion off. The good thing about a book is that the people who decide to read it tend to be invested, and they can take in the whole of what you say, which is something that’s been lost, I think, in a lot of conversations. For me, writing a book is the best way to convey your thoughts and put everything out there as thoroughly and completely as you can without being taken out of context, which is a big thing that happens now on social media-people can take one thing and twist it to mean something else. When you find something out, you have a responsibility to tell your truth to others who may not know it. My whole life, I thought the definition of tough was totally opposite to what being tough actually is. An edited version of the conversation follows. From his journey, he shares lessons that he hopes will inspire others to pay more attention to mental health and to gender and equity issues. In Tough: My Journey to True Power (Portfolio/Penguin Random House, April 2022), Terry Crews offers a structured rumination on his life and what it has meant for him to be “tough”-as a child, as an athlete, as a performer, as an entrepreneur, and as a family man-and how living up to widely accepted standards of toughness can turn into an exhausting performance of toxic masculinity. In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing’s Roberta Fusaro chats with Terry Crews, an actor and former National Football League player, about his latest book.
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