There are many ways to find professional motivation. One is to think of a previous job you held as a student that was awful (we’ve all had a few of those), and to say to yourself “I’m never, ever doing anything like that again, because it was the worst.”
Ethan Westbrooks took that several bounding steps further. The St. Louis Rams defensive end who just became one of four undrafted players this year to make a 53-man roster — beating out Michael Sam — decided to find his motivation through tattoo ink.
On his face.
Take it away, Nick Wagoner:
The story goes that Westbrooks was working at a Toys ‘R’ Us in Sacramento while playing football and going to school at Sacramento City Junior College. He didn’t like the job and decided when he quit that he had no intention of working a normal job again. So he went searching for a way to push himself to attain that goal. Somehow, he decided there was no better way to do that than to have a reminder staring him in the face every time he looked in the mirror.
‘I was just like I might as well go ahead and get it on the face because if nothing else, it will help motivate me to either be a guy that has a tattoo on his face looking for another job or hopefully I make it in the NFL and don’t have to work too hard to do something (else),’ Westbrooks said. ‘I don’t feel it’s a bad thing now. I don’t regret it. It speaks for itself.’
Pictured above, the tattoo reads “laugh now, cry later”.
I think we can safely assume Westbrook enjoyed working at Toys ‘R’ Us about as much as the average man looks forward to a kick straight to the groin.
