Following up on last Sunday's post, Happiness And Fulfillment, Part One: Scottie Scheffler, Law Professors, And Faith: 

Tom Brady, Your Actions Reflect Your Priorities:

It’s been more than a week since Scottie Scheffler won The Open at Royal Portrush. Yet he is still doing interviews about an answer he gave during Media Day, in response to this question: "What would be the longest you've ever celebrated something?"

His answer was basically ‘not very long.’ For Scottie, celebrations have been fleeting, in part because golf doesn’t fulfill the “deepest desires of his heart.” The golf course, he said, is not where he goes to find satisfaction. So “what’s the point?” (That was the line that went most viral.)

When I heard this, some of it resonated with me, because I had a similar experience around his age. But I also understood that what I was hearing was a young athlete trying to make sense of success without the benefit of the perspective that comes with years of experience.

In this week’s newsletter, I want to give you some personal insight from my own experiences that I think will help explain where true personal satisfaction comes from—it comes from many places, not just one—and how you create it every day, win or lose, by the way you show up in each part of your life.

In 2005, I gave an interview to “60 Minutes” where I sounded a little bit like Scottie Scheffler. I’d won three Super Bowls in my first four years as a starter, and I was explaining to the interviewer how, when I looked at my trophies and Super Bowl rings, I found myself thinking, “there’s gotta be more than this…this can’t be all …”

I would figure it out, but it took time. The lessons came in stages. First, that there is more to life than playing football and winning championships. Then I learned exactly what those other things were. Then, I learned how they all fit together so that what I did on the field supported the things I did off the field, and vice versa. And finally, most importantly, I learned that it was the pursuit of excellence in each of these areas where I found the most joy, not in the achievements themselves. It was the process, not the outcome. …

We all have different parts of our lives. You can think of them like a pyramid. At the top is yourself, and your physical, mental, and emotional health. Then there’s the relationship with your significant other or partner. Then you have your children, then your work, then your extended family, your friends, your hobbies, and finally your greater community.

Every layer of that pyramid is a priority. At any given moment, one of these priorities is taking precedence over the others. And the question is always whether it’s the right priority for the moment. That is the question it seems Scottie Scheffler is wrestling with: do I have my priorities straight? But I think figuring out that answer is fairly straightforward. When the priority is to take care of your mental and physical health, which is #1 always, that’s what you do. First you take care of yourself, then your partner, then your kids, and so on. When the priority is to take care of your career, whether it’s a three-week training camp or four rounds of major championship golf, that's what you do. When it’s time to get to work, work becomes the priority.

The trick is recognizing which aspect of your life is most pressing, from moment to moment, and then learning how to prioritize what it takes to be great in that aspect when it matters, so that your actions and achievements in that area help improve all the other areas of your life instead of take away from them.

As part of his answer at Media Day, for example, Scottie said he’d rather be a better father and husband than a good golfer. And my question is: why are those mutually exclusive? Sure, they’re different blocks on the pyramid, but they’re part of the same pyramid. They’re connected!

• Barstool Sports, Tom Brady's Advice to Scottie Scheffler is to Knock Off This Crap About Prioritizing Family Above Your Awesome Career
• Chicago Sun-Times, Tom Brady Lecturing Scottie Scheffler About Perspective on Work/Life Balance Is Just Mind-Boggling
• People, Tom Brady Questions Scottie Scheffler Prioritizing Family Over His Golf Career: 'Why Are Those Mutually Exclusive?'
• Washington Post, Tom Brady Has a Lesson on Priorities for Family-Minded Scottie Scheffler

Christianity Today Book Review: We Want What the World Can’t Give, by Ronni Kurtz (Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary) (reviewing Bobby Jamieson, Everything Is Never Enough: Ecclesiastes' Surprising Path to Resilient Happiness (2025)):

Bobby Jamieson’s new book, Everything Is Never Enough: Ecclesiastes’ Surprising Path to Resilient Happiness, … called to mind one of my favorite [David Foster] Wallace essays, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never do Again.”

The “fun” thing that Wallace had found disappointing was spending time aboard a cruise ship, an experience he chronicled in 1996 for Harper’s Magazine. The essay is both hysterical and moving in its anthropological insights. After cataloging the ship’s dizzying list of delights—the food, fashion, festivities, and the like—he asks a passing but vital question: “Is this enough? At the time it didn’t seem like enough.”

Summarizing his time aboard a floating paradise, Wallace writes:

There is something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that’s unbearably sad. Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex in its causes yet simple in its effect: on board the Nadir (especially at night, when all the ship’s structured fun and reassurances and gaiety ceased) I felt despair.

Something of that same paradox—existential despair amid bountiful sources of delight—comes through in the question Jamieson, a pastor and author, poses at the outset of Everything Is Never Enough: “Shouldn’t you be happier?” Given all the blessings life has to offer—especially in advanced Western societies—the answer might seem obvious. Yet Ecclesiastes is relentless in proclaiming that none of it brings lasting satisfaction.

Jamieson will not leave his readers to wallow in despair, however. His book, built upon the wisdom of Ecclesiastes, delivers on the promise of its subtitle by offering a path toward resilient happiness in an unhappy world. …

Jamieson’s goal across his exploration of Ecclesiastes is to help us discover a depth of happiness this world cannot shake. To do that goal justice, Jamieson needs to make Ecclesiastes’ concerns his concerns.

Throughout the book, Jamieson proves an invaluable guide to navigating a confusing and often dispiriting ancient text. In particular, he distinguishes himself in three ways: by clarifying the structure of Ecclesiastes, by articulating a deep understanding of human happiness, and by keeping Christ’s redemptive work firmly in view.

First, consider Jamieson’s exegetical blueprint for Ecclesiastes. Biblical scholars often disagree on how to interpret this book, even on basic matters like establishing the author, determining when it was written, and mapping its basic contours—to say nothing of the enigmatic pronouncements that fill its pages.

To understand Ecclesiastes, Jamieson argues, we should envision a three-story building. On each floor, we confront different questions, emphases, and views of the world. Everything Is Never Enough follows this three-story model, with the first 11 chapters examining the first floor, the next eight heading upstairs, and two climactic chapters giving the view from the top.

In Jamieson’s telling, Qohelet—the mysterious figure commonly credited with writing Ecclesiastes—remains on the first floor for most of the book. Here, his “far-seeing eyes take in the whole of human life,” as he “weighs the merits of work, sex, food and drink, wealth, power, and many other possible sources of meaning and satisfaction. He finds them all wanting and pronounces them all ‘absurd.’

Qohelet only ascends to the second floor on a handful of occasions—“seven, to be precise,” as Jamieson argues. Here, he “surveys the same territory, considering many of the same subjects.” Yet “he sees something astonishingly different.” Certain things that had struck him as absurd on the ground floor are now revealed to be gifts worth savoring.

The third floor is visited even more rarely. As Jamieson writes, Qohelet “comes here only a few times, gives no warning before he does, and never stays long.” After venturing upstairs, he returns with “two crucial reference points: one, fear God because, two, he is going to judge all that you do and all that everyone ever does.”

Just as a three-story building remains intact even as the individual stories have different layouts and afford different views, the perspectives of Ecclesiastes cohere despite the outward tension between them. We learn something about the inherent limits of earthly life. We learn something about the gifts of contentment—and even the joy—we can experience within those limits. What holds it all together is the importance of fearing God, who reveals himself as the sole source of durable satisfaction through the limits and gifts alike. …

Ecclesiastes is not an isolated piece of literature. It is a vital book within a larger canon. We can’t grasp its full significance without following its echoes across the entire redemptive arc of Scripture. That arc, of course, bends toward fulfillment in Jesus Christ, who alone can offer the abundant blessings for which we yearn (John 10:10).

Up to this point in the book, Jamieson has convincingly argued that our hearts never wash up on the shore of satisfaction because they were built for infinity. Yet that insight could easily lead to hopelessness if not for an astonishing fact: Infinitude has taken on flesh and dwelt among us. Because of Christ, there is real hope that our hearts may find the rest that feels so out of reach.

In resolving the aching frustration that pervades so much of Ecclesiastes with the ultimate fulfillment found in Christ, Jamieson guides his readers to something far greater than temporal happiness. I feel confident that Qohelet himself would have been pleased with the outcome.

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