![]() That’s never been repeated since in over four decades. Five years later at 36 they went undefeated, both in the regular season and the post season, and won the national championship. At age 31 Bobby Knight became head coach at Indiana University. Now, I’m using the name Robert to obscure things a little bit. Then Doc Counsilman was the long-time swimming coach at Indiana, and also someone that Robert became friends with. He met Bill Parcells around the same time, way before Bill became a star in the National League. This was the coach of the Cincinnati Bengals, Bo Schembechler, who would go on to coach at Michigan, was his assistant on the basketball team at Army. He didn’t limit his peer network to basketball coaches. Years later Pete would induct Robert into the Basketball Hall of Fame. Pete was the greatest basketball mind on the West Coast at the time. Then he kept following up and hanging out.Ī year later he met Pete Newell. Two of them Lapchick and Iba, he just went to a coaches’ luncheon where he knew they were going to be, and he begged, he said,”Can I sit next to you?” That’s how he met both of them. That’s Evert Dean from Indiana, and he met all of them and became friends. He coached 36 years at Oklahoma State and was, at the time, probably one of the most successful basketball coaches of all time. When he was 27, Robert drove Clair to Clair’s induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame and sat next to him. Clair Bee coached at Long Island University and has the best record of any coach in the Basketball Hall of Fame. He was able to build a relationship through that. This is Red Auerbach, so Havlicek went to Boston, and Red was the coach at the time. In the first five years of his coaching career he befriended five of the top basketball minds on the East Coast. Now, what ended up making Robert successful, from my point of view, isn’t what happened inside the four walls of the gym where they practiced every day. At 24, he became head coach of a D-1 school. When he was 24 the head coach retired, and he begged for the job. At 22, he was an assistant at Army, the Black Knights. He spent his first year as a JV coach at a high school, and then finagled his way onto the staff at Army. Those two players that I mentioned went onto the NBA, and Robert went into coaching. They played in the national championship his junior and senior year. His sophomore year they won the national championship. He came off the bench, and he didn’t get a ton of minutes, but this team had John Havlicek and John Cuzzie. That’s Fred Taylor, the coach of Ohio State at the time. He was lucky enough one of his neighbors knew the coach, Fred Taylor at Ohio State, and he was able to get a spot on a really good basketball team. He attended Orville High School where he was a three-sport letter man, baseball, football, basketball. This is in 1940, and this is what the town looked like when he did. The first gentleman I’m talking about is a guy named Robert Montgomery that grew up in Orville. That has nothing to do with this presentation. Anyone know what company was founded in Orville in 1897? I’ll give you 20 bucks if anybody knows, Smucker’s. Then there’s some special stories at the end as well. What I’m going to do first is I’m going to start by telling three stories of these luminaries, and then after that I’m going to walk through five guidelines that I’ve inferred from what they did. For me, you’re the opportune audience for this, and, obviously, I wanted to come back to Texas to do it. You’ve worked a little bit, and now you have this chance to go do whatever you want. If you’ve only got one shot, and then it’s all over why not do what makes you most happy?īy the way, one of the reasons this is the audience, and I want to thank you for being here, this is the audience I wanted to do this presentation to first because I think coming to an MBA program is this amazingly unique opportunity you have. My partner Kevin Harvey has a phrase that I love, and he says, “Life is a use or lose it proposition.” For most humans, they take one career path. It means chasing a career where you just have immense passion. All right, everybody has heard the phrase, so you know what it means. Now, how many people in the room have heard of the phrase Dream Job? Raise your hand. They were probably heroes of mine when I read about them, and I noticed an overlap of pattern amongst them. I was inspired after studying the stories of three people that you might call luminaries. Believe it or not, I’ve been thinking about giving this particular presentation for about a decade. This speech was originally delivered at the McCombs School at the University of Texas by Bill Gurley, a venture capitalist at Benchmark Capital.
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