What Matters More Than Talent and Hard Work? | 10@9 | 2026.10.18

Good morning. Today is Sunday, October 18th, 2026. I want to share an incredible story with you. There's a video on TikTok that has received millions of views. When I describe it, maybe you've seen it. I learned about it from an article in the athletic written by Jason Banks. And I'm going to tell this story in four parts. But generally, as an introduction, it concerns a moment, about 20 seconds, at the end of a recent Little League baseball game in Tennessee. So part one is how did this video come to be made? There's a woman named Heather Wilson. Heather Wilson has an 11-year-old son named Landon. And Landon plays on a Little League baseball team. Now, on the team, there's another boy, and their parent owns a pair of glasses, eye glasses, that can record. You know that there are eye glasses that can record, make a video of whatever the person is looking at. And this other person has these glasses. Landon thought that these glasses were very cool. And Heather said it was okay for Landon to borrow, the owner agreed, for Landon to borrow the glasses to wear while he's playing the game. Okay. So what happened, which I'm going to get to in a few minutes, was a private conversation that lasted about 20 seconds. And there was no way anyone else would have ever known anything about it unless one of the two participants in the conversation said something which they did not, except for the fact of the glasses. So since there were these glasses, Heather had a video. Again, it's about a 20-second video, and she posted this video on TikTok, and it went viral. So that's how this video came to be made. And everybody involved was surprised because nobody else besides Heather and Landon knew anything about these glasses. All right. Part two. Let's talk about the other participant. Michael Lolley. Michael Lolley was the coach of the other team. Again, literally baseball. Landon is an 11-year-old boy on one team. Lolley is the coach of the other team. Michael Lolley is a police administrator. He runs a youth baseball and softball travel organization out of Hendersonville, North Carolina. Okay. So Lolley is a coach, and he arranges travel for little league teams, and he's in North Carolina. Lolley himself, Michael Lolley, his parents were divorced when he was very young. His mom raised him by herself, and she instilled in him an ethos. Talent and hard work are great, but being a good person is most important. So Lolley grew up hearing that talent and hard work are great, but being a good person is the most important thing. Now, as Lolley was growing up, he was talented in baseball. He was so talented that he had a chance to play baseball at college. But at the first game, it was quickly evident that he was not talented enough to make a team. And he took that very hard. He failed. He had this dream that he'd be a baseball player, and then it was just very clear he was not going to be a baseball player. And he took it hard. Looking back, he says he did not have the mental tools to handle it, and he hit some rough times. He had some difficult times in his life. He struggled with addiction. He struggled with depression. He had some hard times. But years went over, Michael Lolley grew up, and he got married. He had kids of his own. When he had kids of his own, he had no interest in coaching any sports teams because he didn't have a good experience, his own experience with baseball. So he was not interested in that. But one year, he got roped in as a volunteer to be a coach for a Little League baseball team. They had no one else. They appealed to him. He gave in. And when he did that, he felt a certain pull. He felt a certain pull back to baseball, back to sports. And so he started getting involved in Little League baseball coaching. And arranging games of Little League baseball. Okay. So now, with that background, what happened? So Lolley is the coach of one team. Landon is a boy on the other team. They played a game together at the end of the game when the game is over. So this is normal in Little League and other places. Also, the two teams line up and everyone shakes everyone's hand. Okay. That's a very good sportsman-like thing to do. Everyone shakes everyone's hand. Doesn't matter what happened in the game. The fact is that Michael, that Landon's team lost 10 to 2. It was a blowout. Okay. But they shake everyone's hand. As they're both going through this line, Michael Lolley, the coach of one team, pulls over this kid who does not know who is Landon, who is 11 years old from the other team, and he speaks to him. And again, no one knows what they say, except for the fact that Landon is wearing these glasses and it's made into a video. And this is what Lolley said to this boy, Landon. He said to him, were you the kid playing third base? And he says, yes. And Lolley says, listen, I want to tell you something. All the talent in the world. The thing that will make you go furthest is what you were doing over there on third base. So playing third base, just to explain, you're playing third base. You're playing defense, right? You're trying to prevent the other team from getting any runs. And the other team is hitting and they're trying to get runs. What you're doing over there on third base, when these kids are hitting good, right? The best part of you today was how good of a teammate you were, telling these guys, great hit, and doing all the things that you were doing. In other words, what this boy Landon was doing, he's playing third base. His team is losing. But when the other team gets a hit, he would yell out, great job, great job. I mean, normally, of course, on a team, when someone on your side does something, everybody yells out, great job. Yeah, good hit, run, run, whatever it is. But Landon was doing the same thing to the kids on the other team. And Michael Lolley, the coach of the other team, was very impressed with that. So he said to Landon, you keep that up. You keep up that attitude where you're urging on and complimenting the guys on the other team. That will take you way further than any talent in the game will take you. And Lolley said to this boy who he did not know, Landon, thank you. I appreciate that you played the game the right way today. And that's all that Landon was doing. Landon was speaking to the players on the other team. That was a good run. You had a good hit. And Lolley said those words to him. It was 20 seconds. And that's the whole story. That's it. And he said a video of those 20 seconds was posted on TikTok and a viral and millions of people have seen it. Now, later Landon, this boy, remember he's 11 years old. He was asked why, why does he do that during a ball game? And he said, for me, it's simple. Really, I'm just clearing my mind. I'm making them feel better. And if I could make them feel better, I feel better because it made me feel like I made someone else's day. If I tell someone else you had a great hit, you ran really fast. You did a good job. It makes me feel better that I can make somebody else's day. That's what Landon said, 11 years old. Now, Heather Landon's mom said that she didn't think anything was unusual about Landon's behavior during the game. She said, every day, she tells Landon and his two sisters, you are smart, you are kind, you are important. That's how Heather is raising these kids. Every day she says this to them, you are smart, you are kind, you are important. And then she said about her son Landon. And again, she didn't see anything unusual about what Landon was doing in this baseball game because it's what he always does. And she said about her son Landon, he doesn't want someone to feel less of themselves. He wants to bring them up to where he visualizes them to be. 11 year old boy. So Heather Landon's mother posted this video because she felt proud of her son. I just wanted to show my kid off because it was very touching to me, she said. And then after all the publicity and this becomes a viral thing, Heather said, and this is a really important lesson for us. You never know who's watching. You never know what impact you can make on somebody else. Nobody expected that anyone would know about this short conversation or that it would have such an impact. You never know who is watching. And finally, let's go back to Michael Lolli. I told you before, when he finally had kids of his own, he did not have any interest in coaching for their teams because of his own negative experience in his disappointment with his own attempt to be part of a team. But one year he got roped in as a volunteer and then he felt a pull. He realized he could help kids prepare for the inevitable failure coming their way. Little League is great. But very few people who excelled in Little League are actually going to make it to the major leagues. At some point you're going to confront failure. And if it's not in baseball, it's in some other area of life. And he realized he could help them develop the tools he wished he'd had because when he faced failure, I said before, he did not have what he said were the mental tools to handle it. And it spiraled downward for him. It caused him a lot of problems. So he felt maybe one of the things I could do in coaching these kids is to give them the tools to be able to handle it if they don't win. To be able to see themselves in a positive light even if they don't win. And then he said, one of the biggest fears I've had since I've had kids is I don't want to get to heaven and God shows me a highlight reel of everything I didn't do and all the opportunities God gave me that I was too focused on myself to take. The interactions and opportunity I have to be around these kids, I don't want to mess those up. I want to pass on something. He has this opportunity to spend time with young kids and he has a message that he can share with him from his own hard-learned experience. He does not want to miss that opportunity. So when he saw Landon encourage the other players during the game, he had something to say. And he said to him what his own mother had said to him. Talent and hard work are great, but being a good person is the most important thing you will ever accomplish in your life. It took 20 seconds to deliver that message, but it's a lesson that Landon will never forget. Landon will never forget how this coach from the other team made him feel, and neither will I. My friends, I wish you a great day and I look forward to seeing you soon in person.