Jen: This is the PKF Texas Entrepreneur’s Playbook. I’m Jen Lemanski, this week’s guest host and I’m here with Carl Lewis, Olympic Gold Medalist, University of Houston alum and entrepreneur. Welcome back to the Playbook Carl.

Carl: Great, thank you, thank you.

Jen: So last time we talked about your success and success in business; now, for those kind of middle school/high school students, what can they do to find success over the long term, whether they’re an athlete or not an athlete?

Carl: Well one of the things we talk about with our company Winning Dimensions, we talk about excellence, the perfect method, trying to be the best possible athlete you can be; so that’s really a start, it’s really about your personal excellence. The second thing is work hard in school. And it starts in 9th grade because me, as a coach, I go our recruiting all the time and I see these amazing young athletes and 9th grade was terrible, we can’t get them in a school. So education is very important, actually because it shows that you’re disciplined enough to have a full life. And think of your entire life; I always say we will merge your career athletically and academically from the day you get here because you have to think about what you’re going to later on in life. Because you know what, every person aspires to live a lot longer old than they are young.

Jen: Now how do you kind of balance that because I know a lot of athletes these days have a lot of demand on their time because of practices and all that kind of stuff and sometimes the school work slips; how do you balance that in making sure that the coaches are on board with balancing that.

Carl: Well I think a lot of it is first of all you have to make choices and I say this all the time, I missed a lot of priorities when I was growing up and now I give them.

Jen: there’s time for that; there’s time for that down the road.

Carl: There’s time for that. You have a lot of time and I think that you can have fun but if you stay in front of the things that are important – you know, get up and study first, get it out of the way so that you don’t have to worry about that later and then study – then you have more time. But the people that procrastinate, the people that put it off, they’re the ones that struggle.

Jen: Perfect. Well thank you so much for sharing that with us, I really appreciate you being here again.

Carl: Great, thank you.

Jen: This has been another Thought Leader Production brought to you by PKF Texas, The Entrepreneur’s Playbook. Tune in next week for another chapter.