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So there you are right now, Wake Forest football players, getting ready to play Stanford in a football game today. For some of you this may be your first time in California, or initial trek up there in what you have come to learn is Silicon Valley – extending from Palo Alto to San Jose and over to San Francisco.
You may think this could be the only time you’ll ever go to California except maybe for a vacation or two later in life. But what you may not realize now – that I came to understand throughout my 35 years in the tech industry – is that the area you are in is the absolute center of the tech universe. I’ve been there on business trips more than a dozen times, and much of my daily tech industry work on the East Coast has been, and continues to be, in one way or another related to what’s happening there in Northern California, the Land of Tech Titans.
The most influential, largest, and most financially rich companies are all there within 25 miles or so from where you will be tomorrow on the Stanford field.
Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, Google, Cisco (the list is huge) – all the giants have mammoth offices in that area. The semiconductor companies that make the chips that power your iPhone have big offices there.
As you finish up your football careers and embark on professional journeys, you’re going to find out how powerful and important that area is to the American and global economy. And this isn’t going to change much during your working life. Tech business and innovation, especially in Silicon Valley, are of paramount importance to us all for decades to come.
Why am I telling you this?
Because I think it’s an important realization for you now, while still in college, that your future is probably going to bring you back to Silicon Valley, or San Jose, or Stanford, or Google, or Facebook, or San Francisco plenty more times in your lives. At least a dozen is my estimate.
And you will find out that the competitiveness in this tech market is every bit as ferocious as it will be on the football field tomorrow – probably more so. Companies out there and the ones that compete with them around the world have to pour their lives and hearts into succeeding, or they go out of business, which is worse than losing a football game.
When you lose in business there’s only one thing to do and that is survive – literally. Your only real choice is to wake up in the morning scrambling to figure out where your next paycheck will be coming from; no one will have much time to tell you how. They’ll be straining to survive themselves.
You will be in the professional working world where non-stop learning, which Wake Forest coursework has taught you, will be only enough to stay current but will be no guarantee your business will succeed. I can’t even begin to tell you how intellectually rigorous it will be for you to grasp the constantly changing concepts interwoven with the avalanche of new technologies and products that keep coming out day after day.
You think you had to prepare a lot for the Stanford football game and you certainly did. And it’s been mentally arduous to prepare to pass the far-from-easy Wake mid-term and final exams. I lived that entire experience and never found it simple or anything close to that.
But the game of business in Silicon Valley and throughout the tech world is for feeding yourself with tests like exam curve balls throwing your mind into confusion daily. You either get up early, throw yourself at your work with all your energy, and keep moving, catching planes, taking meetings, reading books, tracking the news, writing and re-writing, strategizing how to offer value to your customer that no one else can, or you’re going to have a lower number on the scoreboard than you opponent. High-tech business competition is endless, mentally draining, and never boring.
The good news, for all of you, is you are athletes who experienced the advantage while growing up learning how to lose, pick yourselves back up, figure out a new approach, and get back on the field. You know what losing feels like – you don’t like it – so you know how to exert more energy and battle with more force to win the next game.
Business for you will follow the same losing and winning pattern. Unlike non-athletes who haven’t lost much in their lives as routinely as you have, they may not be able to handle the down feelings emotionally. But you will. You’ll do whatever it takes to feel the euphoria of winning again.
I share all this with you because I hope it makes you a little wiser about what life is like after an athletic career ends (I ended after high school).
Post-sports career no one will care much if you were an athlete. They will care a whole lot about how smart you are, how fast you can process information, how valuable your insights are, how fast you can write, how versatile you are using software applications, whether you’re a dexterous whiz using ChatGPT, how much money you can make for them, and how well your product or service makes customers feel.
You will be competing as business people and I believe, especially with the growing prevalence of artificial intelligence, you will need to be insatiably and tirelessly curious to keep learning. You will need to know how to use AI in so many different ways that haven’t even been thought of yet. Get ready now. The inevitable is your career will be heavily about technology.
And the companies that will be leading in AI will be in Silicon Valley, right near where you are right now, playing a football game, preparing in a sense for the biggest game of all, the game of life.
Feel empowered you are who you are, disciplined and tough athletes who get knocked down and stand back up again and again. Part of your secret sauce will be you were an athlete who doesn’t like to lose.
You’ll run into this pattern for the rest of your life. A lot of those experiences will be in technology, using AI, and either collaborating with or competing against Silicon Valley companies.
As athletes, you’ll be ready for all that’s coming your way.
And so compete tomorrow. Take a look around the Stanford stadium and surrounding area.
Silicon Valley.
You’ll be competing there for the rest of your lives.
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Sammy Sportface, a sports blogger, galvanizes, inspires, and amuses The Baby Boomer Brotherhood. And you can learn about his vision and join this group's Facebook page here:
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