From huddles to boardrooms, the NFL Hall of Fame member and well-respected investor reveals to Seth Cohen, Chief Impact Officer of Forbes, why trusting in higher ideals and your team is key to personal and business success.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00My name is Seth Cohen, and I'm the Chief Impact Officer of Forbes and the founder of the Forbes Impact Lab.
00:06I'm here today in the Nasdaq Market Site in New York City, and I'm joined by Hall of Fame quarterback,
00:13Super Bowl winner, and investor, Steve Young.
00:19Steve, thanks for joining me today.
00:20Seth, my pleasure to be here.
00:22So, Steve, there's so many different kinds of conversations we can have with each other.
00:27We can talk about sports.
00:28We can talk about investing.
00:30We can talk about faith.
00:31I'd like to do all three.
00:33I think you can't help but do all three at once.
00:35Exactly, because they all go together in a lot of ways.
00:39But let's start, you know, with your why.
00:42I really just, people have so many different views of you, again, from being a star on the field,
00:47to being a successful businessman, to being a best-selling author.
00:52What motivates you?
00:53Just what, who is Steve Young, and what keeps him going?
00:57Well, I, kind of the root, I guess you're asking a rooted question, right?
01:06What's the root?
01:08If you go to the root for me, and I guess you go to the root of my theology, is that there's God, Mother, Father.
01:17We all lived with them before.
01:19Our durable spirits that's inside of us, in each human being, were with God before.
01:24And we're actually of God.
01:26We're divine.
01:27Every human being is divine in its nature, in its root.
01:31And then we all made this raw, fundamental, full of agency and rigor choice to take a body.
01:44So in that way, okay, so if I just lay that out as a, that we're all root, then that kind of, in my mind, that's my roots.
01:52That's my roots of how you and I are here, and how I see you.
01:56I see you as divine.
01:57I see you as a part of the family that we're in it together.
02:00And I think that my why and faith is, because I think that's my truth.
02:06And because that's my truth, then I got to go, you know, like anything,
02:11if it's not your truth, it's not your truth if you don't live it, right?
02:14So you live this truth in lots of different ways.
02:18But let's now go backwards to that.
02:19You had to live, in many ways, through a life of resilience, through effort, through faith, in front of millions and millions of eyeballs on the football field.
02:29What was that like?
02:30And maybe explain to me, how does one navigate kind of that inner self, while also being incredibly public, like you have had to be over a lot of your career?
02:43I've always enjoyed, my dad used to say to me, you love third and ten.
02:50And if you love football, you'll know third and ten is not a fun place to be.
02:54That's the long, right?
02:56He goes, and I go, Dad, no, I don't love third and ten.
03:01I just find it a lot.
03:02And I think that I enjoy, you know, going to law school while I play football.
03:07I love the conversations being different and changing.
03:10I love learning about, and so to me, doing something very public and then still having such, you know, I'm more of an introvert generally.
03:22If you leave me alone, I'll be on the outskirts of the party and listening, rather than be in the middle of it all.
03:29And so I think I love what I'll call the emotional athleticism of life.
03:34I love, you know, two different things that are very, you know, and then finding that, you know, synergy, the abundance in it.
03:45And so for me, playing in front of millions of people and then having, you know, I don't know exactly what the question that you're asking,
03:54but I just, I find that the challenges and the rigors of life, like, I guess, fundamentally, again, we go back to the roots.
04:01I believe we're all here as human beings to learn and grow.
04:03That's what we're here to do.
04:05And so I'm up for that.
04:07So we have conversations a lot these days about how faith, about how beliefs are not necessarily a place you can bring into the workplace.
04:20That's not the case in a locker room.
04:23It's all there.
04:25It's all there.
04:27Talk to me a little bit about the unifying space of a footballer.
04:29And you were sharing with me an anecdote before of your coach, Bill Walsh, and how he handled this.
04:36So he was the, you know, obviously he was the Hall of Fame coach, won Super Bowls.
04:40And he'd start every season, bring the team together and say, look, I don't care what play we run.
04:45I don't care what defense we run.
04:47We're going to win because we have shared common experiences and an element of love for each other.
04:53And that was mind bending for a football coach to say that.
04:57Like, what?
04:59I don't know what you're talking about.
05:01And then he went out and enacted it.
05:03He knew that if we played together in a locker room setting for 10 years, we would know each other's name because it's on the back of their jersey.
05:11But we wouldn't really.
05:13Quarterbacks would know each other.
05:15Offensive players might know each other.
05:17But the defensive players, I might know your name, but I don't really know you.
05:19And he said, that's where we lose.
05:21And if we're going to play great winning football, we were the 49ers for 20 years were in the playoffs.
05:25Five Super Bowls.
05:27I want to guess 12 championship games.
05:29People like, wow, how did they do it?
05:31He did it off of relationships.
05:33And so that taught me fundamentally.
05:35It was always intuitively true to me.
05:37But then if it's true on the football field, then it must be true in business.
05:42It must be true.
05:44And it must be super true at home.
05:47How I navigated the locker room with my faith was being very vulnerable, self-deprecating, and have a sense of humor.
05:59Some of my best friends on the team, Harris Barton and John Frank, were Jewish.
06:03They were my roommates.
06:05And you can imagine the conversations and the fun we had.
06:07And we just laughed about the unique, crazy things about our faith.
06:14If somebody wanted to have a conversation with me on the plane, great.
06:18And I tried never to be offended.
06:20I tried to always find the space where we were in it together.
06:24Being accessible.
06:26Yes.
06:28And laugh at some of the oddities.
06:32But that's teamwork, it sounds like.
06:34And that's also a way that an individual leader shows up and brings himself or herself into that space and creates that accessibility.
06:42But to go backwards just even a little bit more, when people look at you, they see championships.
06:50They see MVPs.
06:52But you've also had to be resilient.
06:54They don't remember necessarily the early Steve Young that had to fight through everything just to get to that stage through college and to pros.
07:04How has resilience shaped Steve Young?
07:09All the things you said that are positive have been built off of losses and failure.
07:19How many times have I wanted to quit?
07:23Luckily my dad, again back to my dad, he's like, you can't quit.
07:29You can play it out, you can figure out something else to do in your life, but you can't quit.
07:33And so luckily I had people around me that didn't let me quit.
07:35Because I would have quit.
07:38When you talk about resilience, I don't know that I'm that resilient.
07:41Luckily I had some people around me at very vulnerable times that gave me some resilience.
07:47So I'm not going to claim like, oh, I'm the toughest bastard you've ever seen in your life.
07:53I kind of grew into that over time, kind of learned as I fake it until you make it.
07:59But I think I started to realize, again, back to my roots, if I'm here to learn and grow, if that's what I'm here for,
08:07the challenges are the life force.
08:09It's the hard things are actually the food for learning and growing.
08:17That's the mission we're on.
08:19Right. So then why would I run away from it?
08:21And so I got this theme in my mind, maybe about college time, when I run into about 40 things that were really hard,
08:27that I noticed that I started to go around them.
08:30You know what I mean?
08:31And I built calluses of going around them.
08:34And if you do that over time, you never actually...
08:36Yeah, you got to go through it.
08:38You got to go through it.
08:39But you have to affirmatively go through it.
08:41You have to, you know, if you're pushed in there, you know, you'll find another way around.
08:45You have to actually make the statement to yourself, this is hard and I'm going through it.
08:50So translate what you just described to now we're in a generation very much that is in the moment
08:59where like what they do on the field successfully, what maybe they do in business successfully,
09:03is immediately tweeted, immediately Instagram.
09:06They can't suffer in silence because they have to be on all the time.
09:11What advice do you have for maybe this generation of both athletes and just leaders of how to respond in that moment?
09:19So my friend Ronnie Lott, who is a Hall of Fame defensive back for the 49ers for many years,
09:26and he got into a beef with a quarterback, famous quarterback that I won't name because it's local,
09:30and got on to it in the field and they got into each other.
09:34And Ronnie doesn't, he wasn't a, like he was an incredible competitor,
09:39but he wasn't on the field.
09:42The field was sacred ground to him.
09:44And so to have him get into a beef is like, what happened?
09:46I remember asking him, he goes, he doesn't understand that this is, that competition is sacred.
09:52And if you don't respect it, if you disrespect it, if you say something that disrespects,
09:56or you make some fun of someone who's lost, or you make some fun, then you've taken away,
10:01I don't, how do you say it?
10:03If I'm playing just to win and lose, I don't want to do it.
10:08I want to grow, I want to learn.
10:10If I'm going to lose, I want to learn.
10:12Don't you shame me from learning.
10:15The purpose, I love what you just said, competition is sacred.
10:20And so in other words, think about it, competition at its core is just winners and losers.
10:25And if we all live at the bottom of the hill as a winner and loser,
10:28I'm a winner, I'm a loser, if that's all it is, according to Ronnie Lott,
10:32that's not worth it.
10:33I don't want to do it.
10:34So you've had another chapter in your career since you've retired from football,
10:39where you've been phenomenally successful as an investor,
10:42but also as someone who assesses the landscape of investment and opportunities.
10:49What have you learned both about resilience and maybe even, again,
10:52bring back in faith to being a successful investor and entrepreneur?
10:57Well, business is hard for me coming from a place where there was a line field,
11:03there's a scoreboard, there's a clock, you know,
11:06and like everything was immediate, you had 80,000 witnesses.
11:10You couldn't come after the game and say, oh, it didn't happen the way you saw it.
11:14Well, no, I watched it.
11:16You can't mitigate your way out of that one.
11:18And so my life previously was, I loved that, that the end of it was a score,
11:23the end of it was the truth, and the field was the place of truth.
11:26And you come to business, it's harder to find.
11:29Like the score is like, I'm not really sure, yeah.
11:33Winners and losers.
11:34And then who saw it?
11:36What's the truth?
11:37Oh, there's all this obfuscation and all this mitigation and all this,
11:41no one is actually responsible, you know?
11:44And so I've loved kind of jumping in with entrepreneurs, founders,
11:51management teams, even other financial sponsors,
11:54people that see the world kind of how I saw it before
11:59and can recognize that in the end, if we're really going to win,
12:03which means I'm going to win in every direction, not just me,
12:07they're businesses that are built off of these same principles.
12:11And they're willing to go the extra mile, the longer way,
12:15rather than just transaction, rather than just whatever is the thing of the day,
12:21but actually to build something that is kind of player equity, right?
12:27It's like employee equity.
12:28How do we all, what kind of a culture are we building?
12:31Who owns the business?
12:33Can we spread that out?
12:35The same values and that same locker room mindset
12:40that your old coach taught you as well?
12:41100%.
12:42If you think about in a football team,
12:45there's 50 independent contractors, essentially.
12:48I negotiated my own contract.
12:50I'm getting paid my salary.
12:52It's different than everybody else.
12:53Quarterbacks usually way more.
12:55You go into a locker room now being one of the highest paid oddities
12:59in the locker room.
13:00Now you've got to come together, shed all of that,
13:03and come together in a way that gets tested viscerally.
13:07Like you can't speak it.
13:09It sounds like a startup.
13:10You have to live it.
13:11But yet, how can I draw those linemen who have to give their body to
13:17to protect me who are being paid a tenth of what I'm being paid
13:21to actually want to do it?
13:24That dynamic is super cool to think about in business
13:28because those are the lessons.
13:30If you can pull that off and create that kind of environment of,
13:34I tell you, the way you do it is accountability.
13:38The ball's in my hands.
13:39What's the truest truth?
13:41The ball's in my hands and now it's in,
13:43like if I throw an interception, it's in their hands.
13:45There's a lot of mitigation that happens on the field.
13:47There's so much that happens that you can find excuse in,
13:50but the truest truth is it's on me.
13:52And if you do that, you spread that out into the team
13:55and everybody kind of like, you know what?
13:56I'll keep following you.
13:57Well, Steve, I feel like there's so many topics we could cover,
14:00including investment, faith.
14:02We already talked a bit about football.
14:05We haven't yet talked about BYU's playoff chances yet,
14:08but I have one last question for you.
14:10Well, think about this.
14:11BYU's playoff chances being led by the only Jewish quarterback
14:15in the NCAA today.
14:16Who'd have thought?
14:17Seth, come on.
14:18Who'd have thought?
14:19You've got to love that.
14:20Who'd have thought?
14:21Well, with that, I have one last question.
14:23You have a book that I've read about love called Love.
14:27And I think in this moment that we're in as a country,
14:31we talk a lot about division.
14:33We talk about do we know our neighbors?
14:35Yet you've written thoughtfully about how your faith,
14:39about how your beliefs create a roadmap for us to love each other
14:43despite our differences.
14:45What is maybe one piece of advice that you have
14:48from that perspective that we can share in this moment
14:52for maybe people who are wondering where is the love?
14:54Yeah.
14:55Well, we're in a very transactional space right now.
14:59And transaction like the language..
15:01Think of entropy, the scientific environment we live in.
15:05The language of entropy is transaction.
15:07That's what we live in.
15:08It's rational.
15:09What's irrational is to think about could we find more abundance
15:13if we're able to see each other in a way that was selfless?
15:17That there's truly selfless love out there.
15:20And in that, it's not necessarily something that weakens your position.
15:27Ironically, it gives you the full measure of who you can be.
15:29And so the irony of selfless love in business
15:33and people are like, Steve, what are you talking about?
15:36I go back to my 49er experience.
15:38I go back to what I learned on the field,
15:40what I've seen in business, what I see in my marriage.
15:42When I see like anything comes up and he's like,
15:45if I was going to lay on top of or I was going to states of being,
15:50a situation or trouble,
15:52what language would I bring to an argument?
15:56If that language is long-suffering, gentle persuasion, meekness and love unfeigned,
16:00if I'm going to actually speak those words in this tough environment,
16:04tough situation, it's amazing what happens.
16:07So love is, I wrote the law, it's a law of love.
16:11It means that if there's a place of perpetuity in the universe,
16:15this is not it.
16:16But if there is, it's being governed by selfless love.