For the next week’s Humphrey seminar we are supposed to find a leadership quote from the area of sport.
When we were given this task the first thing that immediately came to my mind was a famous speech of basketball couch Jim Valvano. Everytime I watch it, it brings me to tears. My Dad and my brother were basketball players and I remember my brother wearing the T-shirt with this quote when he was a teenager. That time I didn’t know where did it come from.
Jim Valvano gave this speech in 1993 at ESPY awards. He could hardly speak because of the cancer and they had to help him to get on the stage.
His speech included the following: (source: wikipedia)
“To me, there are three things we all should do every day. We should do this every day of our lives. Number one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think. You should spend some time in thought. And number three is, you should have your emotions moved to tears, could be happiness or joy. But think about it. If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that’s a full day. That’s a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you’re going to have something special.”
He died 8 weeks after the speech but his quote will be there to motivate many generations of athletes (and regular people) to come.
