Like most people, I am a product of my mentors.
But when I talk about one of the most influential people in my life, everyone usually assumes I am referring to Robert Greene. Robert, of course, taught me so much and I continue to learn from him.
Actually…there’s someone else. Someone whose wisdom, generosity, and curiosity have shaped my life, work, and thinking more than almost anyone I’ve met. Someone who has influenced how I approach relationships, how I treat others, and how I try to give back.
That someone is George Raveling.
Who is George Raveling? I think he’s one of the most remarkable people of the 20th century. His story is extraordinary. His father died when he was young. His mother was placed in a mental institution, and he was raised by his grandmother. He went to a series of Catholic schools, thrived as a basketball player at Villanova, and after serving briefly in the Air Force, found his calling in coaching. He became the first African American basketball coach in what’s now the Pac-12 and went on to have a Hall of Fame career, leading programs at Washington State, the University of Iowa, and USC. He was instrumental in bringing Michael Jordan to Nike and has mentored some of the most influential coaches in college basketball. I’ve watched John Calipari, Shaka Smart, and Buzz Williams all call him to get his advice on something when I’ve spent time with George. In college basketball, he’s known as the Godfather.
And if that weren’t enough, George owned the original typewritten draft of the “I Have a Dream” speech, which Martin Luther King Jr. handed him while he was working security at the March on Washington. In an extraordinary gesture, in 2021, George donated the historic document to his alma mater, Villanova University, on the condition that they collaborate with the Smithsonian and the National Museum of African American History to loan it out, ensuring that more people can see and be inspired by it.
He’s been a mentor and friend to me, someone whose message I’ve tried to help share with the world. Most recently, I played a small role in bringing to life his memoir, What You’re Made For: Powerful Life Lessons from My Career in Sports, which I pitched to my publisher. It just came out yesterday.
In this article, I wanted to share some of the many lessons I’ve learned from George over the years and in the process of working on the book with him. His wisdom and example have influenced my life in ways I never could have imagined—I hope these 21 lessons impact you as much as they have impacted me…
– You have two choices today. George told me that when he wakes up in the morning, as he puts his feet on the floor but before he stands up, he says to himself, “George, you’ve got two choices today. You can be happy or very happy. Which will it be?” (Voltaire put it another way I love: The most important decision you make is to be in a good mood.)
– Always be reading. He told me a story from when he was a kid—“George,” his grandmother asked him, “do you know why slave owners hid their money in their books?” “No, Grandma, why?” he said. “Because they knew the slaves would never open them,” she told him. To me, the moral of that story is not just that there is power in the written word (that’s why they made it illegal to teach slaves to read), but also that what’s inside them is very valuable. And the truth is that books still have money between the pages. My entire career has been made possible by what I read.
– Go learn things and meet people. It’s not enough to read—you have to go down rabbit holes, look up words you don’t know, share interesting ideas with others, earmark pages, and make notes in the margins. A few years ago, George was reading a book when the word “mastermind” caught his eye. He’d never heard it before. As was his habit, he circled it and made a note to look it up later. That sent him down a rabbit hole—researching the concept, reading articles, and learning about an event called Mastermind Dinners. He shared what he found with a few friends, including me. As it happened, I knew the guy who ran the Mastermind Dinners and offered to connect them. “Go for it!” George replied. Not long after, I got a photo of him at the conference in Ojai, California. He was the oldest person there. The only one not an entrepreneur. The only one from sports. The only one retired. But by the end, he was everyone’s favorite. People told me afterward that George was the highlight of the event. He asked great questions, he listened, he shared, he made people think. He could have told himself he didn’t belong. Instead, he showed up, stepped outside his comfort zone, and kept learning—at eighty-three!
– Keep a commonplace book. At his house, George has these big red binders filled with notes. He calls them his “learning journals.” They’re his version of a commonplace book—a collection of ideas, quotes, observations, and information gathered over time. The purpose is to record and organize these gems for later use in your life and work. It’s a habit he’s kept since 1972. To this day, he told me, “I go back and just read through them. I’ll just get one of the binders and I’ll sit down at the kitchen table and start reading through it. Sometimes I come across stuff that is more applicable today than it was when I wrote it in there.”
– Live like it’s the 4th quarter. George nearly died in a brutal car crash at 57. When he woke up in the hospital, a police officer told him, “Coach, you don’t know how lucky you are.” He took that to heart—treating every day after as a second chance, an opportunity to do more, learn more, and give more. He went on to have a whole second act, joining Nike, shaping the future of basketball, and achieving things he never imagined. We shouldn’t need a near-death experience to wake us up to what we have. Seneca put it well: Go to bed each night saying, I have lived. If you wake up, treat it as a gift.
– Learn from everyone. George once said in an interview that I was his mentor, which, of course, is preposterous. But I’ll take the point: you can learn from anyone. It doesn’t matter if they’re younger than you, if they live a completely different life, or even if you disagree with them on 99% of things. Everyone can teach you something. Anyone can be your mentor.
– Do the most important thing. When George became Nike’s Director of International Basketball at 63, he had no prior corporate experience and was overwhelmed by self-doubt. Until a mentor gave him a simple system: “When you leave the office every day, leave a yellow pad in the middle of the desk, and when you come in the morning, write down the three most important things you gotta get done that day in that order. That day, do not do anything else but the first thing on the pad. And if you get the first one, then you go to the second one.” That structure put order to his day and gave him a sense of purpose. Instead of spinning his wheels or getting lost in distractions, he focused on what mattered most. One thing at a time.
– Choose opportunity over money. George once told me, “Never take a job for money. Always take a job for opportunity.” That’s how he’s lived his life, and that’s why he’s had such an incredible life. It’s why he took the job at Nike, not despite the fact that he had no experience as a global corporate executive—but precisely because he had no experience as a global corporate executive. It was a chance to step into something completely new, to learn, to grow, to challenge himself. He didn’t take the job because it was safe. He took it because it was filled with opportunities—to meet fascinating people, travel the world, immerse himself in different cultures, and bring the game he loves to new places and new people. Most people would have stuck to what was comfortable and familiar, but George went where the opportunity was.
– Always be prepared. When we were working on What You’re Made For, George and I had weekly calls that ran for one to two hours. It was my job to pull stories and lessons out of him. George is obviously the boss and the questions were largely about his life, so it could have been pretty relaxed, but that’s not his style. He clearly spent hours preparing for each hour we were on the phone, always coming intensely prepared with notes, questions, and ideas ready to go. He treated every call the way I imagine he prepared for a big game back in his coaching days or a high-stakes meeting at Nike. In one of our calls, he told me, “Right to this day, I think it’s disrespectful to go into a meeting and not be prepared.”
– Trust is earned. George and Michael Jordan have known each other for decades. Their relationship is built on trust—so much so that George told me, “Other than my mom and my grandma, never in my life have I had anybody who trusts me as much as Michael Jordan.” And he’s never done anything to jeopardize it. In all their years of friendship, even when he ran Michael’s basketball camps for 22 years George said, “I’ve never asked Michael for anything in my life—no money, no tickets to games, nothing.”It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that when George told Jordan he should seriously consider signing with Nike, Jordan listened. That billion-dollar decision was the result of the trust Coach built when he coached Jordan on the ‘84 Olympic Team. As Jordan writes in the foreword (not something he does often!) to What You’re Made For, “There are all kinds of stories out there, but George is truly the reason I signed with Nike. As I’ve said before, I was all in for Adidas. George preached for Nike, and I listened.”
– Practice the art of self-leadership. George once told me, “One of the most underrated aspects of leadership is our ability to lead ourselves.” Before you can lead a team, a company, or a family, you have to be able to lead yourself. And isn’t that what the Stoics say? That no one is fit to rule who is not first ruler of themselves?
– Be a positive difference maker. George has a powerful question he often asks: “Are you going to be a positive Difference Maker today?” It’s a question that challenges you to think about the impact you want to have each day. I think about it all the time.
– Find the good in everything. George once texted me out of the blue, “I am absolutely unequivocally the luckiest human being on planet Earth.” He sees everything that’s happened to him, even the terrible things, even the adversity, even the unfair things. He sees them as all leading up to who he is now. He walks through the world with a sense of gratitude and appreciation and a belief in his ability to turn everything into something positive.
– Tell them what they mean to you. When we would do our calls for the book, it caught me off guard at first. George, before hanging up, would say, “I love you.” I’m not used to that—at least not from people outside my family. But George never hesitated. “I’ve learned that it’s hard for people, especially men, to say ‘I love you,’” he told me. Even with his own son, he noticed that for years it felt uncomfortable for him to say it back. “It’s strange,” George said, “because every one of us has a thirst to be loved, appreciated, acknowledged, respected. And yet, for some reason, we struggle to express it.” So George has made a habit of saying things like, “I appreciate you.” “I respect you.” “I’m glad you’re my friend.” “I’m here for you.” Simple words that so many people rarely hear. George didn’t assume people knew how he felt—he told them.
– It’s up to you. George used to give a talk at basketball camps titled, “If it’s to be, it’s up to me.” He said, “At the end of the day, either our hands are gonna be on the steering wheel of our lives or someone else’s hands are gonna be on the steering wheel of our lives.”
– Do less, better. Once in a meeting at Nike, the president asked the team, “Would we be better off doing 25 things good or 5 things great?” George said he still applies that day-to-day. “My day really revolves around just three or four things…I try to declutter the day and say, ‘Okay, if I can get these four things done today, it will be a good day.’ Every day, on a notecard, I write down 5-6 things I want to get done that day. Every day, I cross these off and tear up the card. That’s it. That’s the system.”
– Cultivate relationships. While we were working on the book, George told me, “Often people say, how do you account for what’s happened to you in your life? And the one word I use to capture it all is: relationships. My whole life has been built on relationships. People seeing something in me that I didn’t see in myself.” When I look at my own life, the most pivotal moments, the biggest opportunities—they all came from relationships. From people who believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself. Relationships aren’t just about networking; they’re about surrounding yourself with people who see your potential, sometimes before you do.
– Build your team. George sometimes refers to his family as Team Raveling, and his wife, Delores, as the CEO of their family. He talks about how too many people put more thought, effort, and strategy into their careers than they do into their families. They chase professional success with careful planning, clear goals, and relentless discipline—but expect their relationships to work out on their own. You wouldn’t expect a company to succeed by just winging it. A family is no different—it can’t thrive without leadership, communication, clearly defined roles, and a shared vision. Whether it’s your spouse, close friends, or a chosen family, you have to build your team with the same intention and commitment you bring to your work.
– Listen. George is one of the best listeners I’ve ever met. He says, “The quality of your conversations is greatly dependent on the quality of your listening.” I used to think I was a good listener, but watching George taught me how much better I could be. He doesn’t just wait for his turn to talk—he listens to understand.
– Become the go-to. When George was a player at Villanova, initially, he wasn’t getting much playing time. So he looked around and noticed something: no one on the team was a great rebounder. And he figured if he became the best rebounder on the team, his coaches would have no choice but to play him. So he made it his role. He invented his own rebounding drills and practiced them every day. By the time he graduated, he had set multiple rebounding records and was one of the best rebounders in the game. I love the idea of inventing a role for yourself—finding something that’s being overlooked or not addressed and deciding to become the go-to person for it. It’s not just a good strategy for athletes—it’s a way to make yourself indispensable in any field.
– Know your boundaries…and enforce them. I once connected George with someone interested in working on a project with him. Everything was going well—until they sent over the proposed terms. George didn’t argue or negotiate. He sent back a clear, firm email terminating the discussion. The other party was surprised and followed up to ask why. “The offer was insulting and ridiculous,” George explained. He didn’t waste time debating or trying to make it work. He knew his worth, and he wasn’t going to entertain anything less. Too many people accept bad deals out of fear or politeness, but George believed in setting clear boundaries—and enforcing them.
…
I will leave you with this…
Although he’s famous for being a coach, that’s not what it said on the door of his office. Instead, it said,
George Raveling
Educator
He, to this day, sees himself as a teacher. And he teaches by example, by how he lives his life. That’s why, even though I never played for George Raveling, I’ve learned so much from him. By watching how he carries himself, how he lives, and how he treats others, I’ve learned more than I ever could have from words alone.
And you can, too.
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