My Very Favorite Book in the Whole Wide World by Malcolm Mitchell

I always want to search for more, not monetarily or materialistic, but just trying to reach my full potential. That also helped me to always strive to be a better version of myself, even today. That’s what helped me be a professional athlete. She really instilled this unwavering faith and almost blissfully ignorant belief that you could do anything you set your mind to. She was limited due to her own personal challenges. My mother has this infectious way of encouraging and uplifting and empowering. I grew up in a single-parent household in a small town. MM: If I go back to the root, it would probably be my mother. Instead, you’ve chosen to completely improve yourself in every way by teaching yourself and pushing yourself through all these stages. You could’ve just been partying every night. In the middle of college, you’re playing football and you’re soon to be drafted to the Patriots. Eventually, I was writing down vocabulary words and next thing I knew, I was reading The 48 Laws of Power. Then I moved into YA novels like Harry Potter and The Hunger Games. Then I moved to graphic novels because they had simple sentence structure.

I think I moved on to self-help because they’re easy to read. I gradually got better and better and better.

Eventually, my theory played out like I thought it would. I did that with books like The Giving Tree, Exclamation Mark, Cat in the Hat, Oh, The Places You’ll Go. MM: I’m in my dorm room reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar, writing down notes about sentence structure.

I went back and started reading picture books. I thought to myself, maybe if I do this same thing with reading, it’ll work out. You become your own version of the athlete you want to be. I started reading picture books and took my athletic approach of starting with fundamentals, and then building on that. I had a revelation that I needed to read. Through a series of fortunate events, I discovered that if I wanted to be more emotionally intelligent, more cognitive, a better decision maker, I needed to be literate. I wanted to feel empowered not just physically, but mentally. My exposure was not broad, and I wanted to change that. Once I got to the University of Georgia, I realized how limited my thinking was. Only relying on that natural skill set placed me in a box. I had that otherworldly experience, but it was really restricting. I was able to go to the NFL and played in a Super Bowl.

I had this intense draw to sport and football, which worked out. It’s just the way the community was structured. I think my community promoted sports and entertainment over education. MM: Let me start by saying I was not diagnosed with any learning disabilities. What happened then? Also, were you ever diagnosed with any sort of learning disability, or was it just a lack of education in the reading arena that caused that? ZO: I read that you were reading at a middle-school level when you got to college.

My Very Favorite Book in the Whole Wide World by Malcolm Mitchell