Following Your Heart (with NBA Hall of Fame Basketball Player, David Robinson)

Audio Transcription

Welcome back to the thrive time, show on your business coachradio during today’s podcast I’m sitting down with my good business coach friend, nba hall of fame basketball player, david robinson and I’m, asking him about what it’s like to start a school. When you are an nba hall of famer in nba in nba hall of fame basketball player with a huge net worth. Why in the world, would you want to start a non-profit school that even went successful? Has the potential of not producing for you a prophet I mean? Why would you want to build a charter school that would serve the most underprivileged students in your community who don’t even have the financial capacity to pay you back? Why would you want to do it and reason? Why is because david robinson was following his heart when he decided to start the carver academy any further ado david robinson on the importance of following your heart as an entrepreneur, you would never started the school before and then you started a school. That now is opening your own. You guys are opening 20 schools in the next 5 years. What made you mean to go back to the ddt thought process and george washington carver, and you said basically i don’t maybe have all the business coach tools but I’m just going to start right now with where I am and what I have is that kind of your idea like i, don’t have it all figured out, but I’m just going to start right? Where did you get that sort of belief that you can do this well number one was just my passion. I felt like it was my calling and I think that’s an important deal at me. If you’re starting to venture you have to know what your passion I remember. My very first meeting I sat with a gentleman who I respected in the city very very much and we sat down and had a chat, not I told him about this idea of starting school, and it is the business coach gentleman that had donated a lot of money towards education in it and he try to discourage me as strongly as he could and he said, I’ve seen a lot of money wasted in education and-and he said this is this is not something you want to do. Trust me. It’s going to become a noose around your neck and it’s going to drag you down and, and so I left that meeting quite discouraged. Oh my gosh I didn’t miss. It means it’s, it sounds awful, but it was my calling.

It was something I knew I was supposed to do it. So I went back later on and talk to this gentleman and said:look I appreciate your input, but it’s in my heart. It’s what I have to do on the teacher at heart. I have to do this and he was a very first person to write me a check until you know it’s. You have to know your passion and know that that’s what I bring to the table, I i, know what I what what it should look like. I know what I want to see and and I’m I represent many of these kids that are out there. You know we grew up with in some of these neighborhoods. You know, I was right, there I was watching these kids kill themselves, and so I know what I’m. Looking for in a guy that passion was a starting place. I was able to use what I had I had a little bit of money and I had some resources and I had I had some business coach connections so I tried to tie all those things, I started where I was I used, what I had and and try to make something of it, and unfortunately, I had some other people come alongside of me and then, like you said now, we go from one school to building 20 here over the next five years. Just bump your starting a business. You say it has to be your area, passion. It just has to be absolutely i, love that you’re not passionate i, don’t exaggerate how hard it is as a business coach. But those are you own, a business or watching this or doesn’t you were thinking about starting on? It is tough you’re going to wake up at 5 a.M. With it with a text message from someone you’re going to have a busy weekend and you’re going to come home and you’re going to discover?

Oh, my gosh I have so many voicemails i, don’t even know where to start you’re going to so it better be worth the passion, but you better be some of your passion about, because you only live once time. It’s going to text you or marriage. It’s going to text your your help. It’s going to text everything in you and it is going to text your belief in yourself a lot of times of failure where you feel like you’re, not adequate for the situation. So you need to have a business coach passion. Do you need to have a aaa calling for what you’re doing videos online and in of the carver academy in hindi kind of doing it to her and I’m? Looking at the videos and the good good production and I’m going, maybe I’m missing it, so I watch it again and I don’t see anywhere where it says you know like david, robinson’s, carver, academy bust of you spin. It seems like you’re getting all of it all of it. It’s a really a place to celebrate the life of achievement of george, washington, carver had and education. Where did you get the idea to name it after him and why didn’t you name it after yourself, but he’s far more important than me is understanding this man has. His life was dedicated towards education and towards really changing the lives of the people in the south.

If you look at the lines of those people who were farming, it was a you know that the cotton there was a cash crop. There was no way they were going to improve the quality of their lives, mining, picking, cotton, farming, cotton, george, washing, carver. The cotton was sucking all the nitrogen out of the landing and the land over a period of time was going to become useless and they were going to have to move on. So there was no way that you could really make the type of money that would improve the quality of your life. Being a cotton farmer, so carver said, there’s a problem here. We need to address this problem and was committed, spend his whole life really was committed to making these people’s lives better, and you know he knew that the only way to really revive the land was to put in nitrogen rich products like peanuts in like sweet potatoes, but at the time there was not a big use for the sweet potatoes, so he had to create a whole market for the sweet potato whole market for the peanuts. So this man’s life is a is a beacon for what america is about. You know, mine is a work-in-progress. I didn’t want to place all of this in fences on on one that was still developing as good as opposed to having this icon of of of america I thought. That was a great place to it to plant our hopes