When he was born, he was legally considered less than fully human. 

Born in segregated Washington in 1937, George Raveling and his family were second-class citizens, denied basic rights and dignities. 

And then it got worse from there. When he was nine, his father died at the age of forty-nine. His mother was committed to an asylum when he was thirteen. Effectively orphaned, this could have been another sad story from a long time ago. Instead, the life of George Raveling became something beautiful, inspiring, and almost unbelievably modern—a classic American story, equal parts Alexander Hamilton and Forrest Gump. 

It started with a man named Father Jerome Nadine, a Catholic priest in Brooklyn, who loved basketball (one of his other parishioners was the Wilkens family, whose son Lenny would go on to be an NBA Champion and one of the winningest coaches of all time). He got George a spot at St. Michael’s, a boarding school in Pennsylvania for boys from broken homes, and asked the basketball coach if he could make a spot for the tall young man. Soon enough, the head coach from Saint Joseph’s College, Jack Ramsay, came to his games and told George he would be offering him a college scholarship. 

George loved to tell the story of what happened when he went to his grandmother, Dear, to tell her the good news. “I thought I raised you better than that,” Dear said when George told her a college was going to pay for his education to play on their basketball team. “What do you mean?” George said. “I think you’ve done a great job.” “Well, I’m disappointed in myself,” Dear replied, “because I can’t believe that you’re naive enough to think that some white people are gonna pay for you to go to college just so you can play basketball. It makes no sense. They’re tricking you.”  

At Villanova, where he did end up with a scholarship (and later a degree in Economics), George led the country in rebounds, only the second black player in the school’s history. In the days before televised basketball, it was often a shock when this integrated team showed up to play southern schools. In 1959, they drove down to Morgantown to play West Virginia. Assigned to guard Jerry West—the future NBA logo—George chased West on a fast break late in the game. When West went up for a layup, George jumped in an attempt to block the shot, colliding with West in the air and sending both of them crashing into the stands. “As we lay there tangled together,” George wrote, “the field house fell silent. I could feel the eyes of the crowd on us, could sense the anger and hostility crackling in the air. In that moment, I feared for my life. But then, something extraordinary happened.” West—“the golden boy of West Virginia, the pride of Morgantown”—got up and then reached out his hand to George. As West pulled George to his feet, the all-white silent crowd erupted into applause. After the game, West ran over as George walked off the court and grabbed him by the arm. “Good game,” West said as he shook George’s hand and looked him in the eyes. “It was a pleasure playing against you.”

After college, he spent time as a traveling assistant and bagman for Wilt Chamberlain, who was getting tons of requests to make appearances at summer camps around the east coast. “I’ll hire you to be my chauffeur,” Wilt told George one day. For a hundred dollars a day, George jumped at the chance to drive Wilt’s purple Bentley convertible from camp to camp, talking basketball and life.

Just these few anecdotes alone would have made George Raveling a living legend. But his rendezvous with history didn’t happen until August 28, 1963. Sent by the father of a friend, 6-foot-four George was recruited to work security for the March on Washington. Standing on the podium a few feet from Dr. King on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, George was one of the first people to greet him as he finished the “I Have a Dream” speech that would change the course of American politics. Accepting the congratulations, King handed George the only existing notes/text (which he had largely ignored in favor of improvisation) of one of the most famous speeches of all time. George tucked it into a book at home—a personalized copy of Truman’s autobiography, which the former president had given him his senior year at Villanova when George played in the East-West All-Star game in Kansas City. There it would sit, safely preserved, for the next few decades until journalists got around to figuring out what had happened to it. 

It is a shame that George Raveling’s coaching career is not more well known. He was a great and pioneering one. While an assistant at Villanova, he started recruiting players from the South who, up to that point, were only looked at by historically Black colleges and universities. Players like Johnny Jones and Howard Porter became part of what one sportswriter dubbed “the Underground Railroad,” George’s trailblazing pipeline bringing Southern talent to a predominantly white Northern school. He would later become the first African American basketball coach in what’s now the Pac-12 and went on to go 335-293 over his career, leading programs at Washington State, the University of Iowa, and USC. He won 2 Olympic medals, a gold in 1984 and a bronze in 1988. He coached against John Wooden, Dean Smith, and Bob Knight. He earned his Hall of Fame induction as an X and O’s guy, a recruiter and as a leader of young men to victory. 

Of course, we remember him most for his contributions to the game slightly off the court. It was George Raveling who, as an assistant coach for the 1984 Olympic Team, steered Michael Jordan to Nike and changed the economics of sports and entertainment and fashion. You might not know this from the movie Air, which is largely about Sonny Vaccaro, but Michael Jordan knows the truth and has always and repeatedly credited Raveling. Ben Affleck tells the story of meeting with Jordan to get his blessing to make Air. Jordan gave the go-ahead, but with two conditions: Viola Davis had to play his mom, and George Raveling had to be in the story. He released a statement this morning after the news of George’s death, thanking him for his decades of friendship and mentorship. “I signed with Nike because of George,” he said of his most famous and consequential business decision, “and without him, there would be no Air Jordan.”

And then there is what George did while he was at Nike. After a twenty-two-year career, he retired from coaching in 1994, and at the age of sixty-two joined Nike as their director of international basketball. He traveled around the world to countries where basketball was a little-known sport, where resources were limited, good coaching was scarce, and talented players had no exposure to college or professional scouts. In an attempt to fix that, in 1995, George developed the Nike Hoop Summit, an annual all-star game featuring the top young players from around the world. Since the inaugural event, to this day, the Hoop Summit has launched the careers of countless international stars: Dirk Nowitzki (Germany), Tony Parker (France), Enes Kanter (Turkey), Luol Deng (South Sudan), Serge Ibaka (Republic of the Congo), Nikola Jokić (Serbia), and most recently, Victor Wembanyama (France). 

I, myself, met George in 2015 at a University of Texas Basketball practice. I thought I was just shaking hands with a friendly older gentleman. I did not know that day that I was shaking hands with history–a hand that had in turn shaken hands with Presidents Truman and Ford and Carter and Reagan and Clinton and had held the “Dream” speech. 

I liked to say that George was my oldest friend, but that was literally not true, since he and I once went and sat on the porch with Richard Overton, then literally the oldest man in the world at 111. Most of the time, George felt like one of the youngest. Not only was he an avid texter, but he loved to email articles that he read from his iPad on topics as diverse as mastermind groups and AI, leadership principles and personal habits, philosophy, politics, time management, parenting, public speaking, storytelling, and on and on. For someone who taught so many people—regularly taking calls from John Calipari, Shaka Smart, and Buzz Williams—he was always quick to call me his mentor. I didn’t know quite what to make of the compliment, finding it both extremely complimentary but obviously absurd. In time,  I have come to see it as just another lesson: We’re never too old to learn and the wisest people remain students all their lives, learning from everyone they can find, including, apparently, people a fraction of our age.

I’m not sure there was a bigger supporter of bookstores than Coach Raveling, who rarely arrived at a meal without books as gifts. He would send me pictures from his weekly trips to Barnes and Noble, whenever he saw any of my books. It was one of the honors of my life to help him fulfill a lifelong dream of writing his own book, What You’re Made For, which he lived long enough to see in stores.

What You’re Made For by George Raveling

My only sadness about my time with George is that he had to cancel a book signing he was going to do at my bookstore, The Painted Porch, for health reasons back in May. I was sad not to see him obviously, but mostly sad that he seemed to take needing to cancel something so hard. He was not used to accepting limitations–he had been defying them all his life. 

There was not a major figure you could name in the 20th century and not get a story from George about them. I asked him, after Jimmy Carter died, if he ever met him, and he told me about a trip in 1981 to the People’s Republic of China. George was there leading a coaching clinic for 200 Chinese coaches. The clinic was held in Shanghai, and one night he was asked to move out of his hotel room because, he was told, President Carter had unexpectedly arrived at the same hotel and the Secret Service asked that the rooms above, below, and adjacent to Carter’s suite be empty. Despite the inconvenience, George said it turned out to be the highlight of the trip—Carter invited George to have dinner with him to make up for the disruption.

I asked him if he knew John Wooden and he told me not just of coaching against him and their breakfasts together, but that in his coaching column for The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, George had broken the story of Wooden’s retirement after 27 years at UCLA. He told me stories about Kareem and Chamberlain and Sammy Davis Jr. and Kobe Bryant and Bill Russell and Charles Barkley and Bill Walton and of course Truman and Jordan and Phil Knight and his beloved grandmother, Dear. Who would have guessed that that lonely little boy living on the corner of New Jersey and Florida Avenues in Depression-era Washington would have intersected with so many fascinating people? 

A life like George’s could have hardened a person, necessitating a narcissism and self-absorption in order to survive in a cut-throat, fast-paced world. I’m sure he was a hard-ass as a coach (one of Michael Jordan’s children told me with a twinkle that although everyone saw George as a kindly old man, he had seen him yell at people). I remember being cc’d on an email about a negotiation George was in and when he didn’t like the terms was blunt and forceful about shutting the whole project down. He was not going to be taken advantage of. It gave me a sense of the strong and savvy coach and executive who had broken down so many barriers and carved out a space for himself—as well as for others as a founding member of the Black Coaches Association. 

But for the most part, he was one of the kindest and calmest and supportive people I have ever known. 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 told me that when he had heard that Jerry West, his friend of 65 years, had died, he found himself shouting, “Oh no, oh no!” When I got a text on Monday night that George had passed, I had a similar reaction. George told me the last text he had sent Jerry was, “I think of you every single day with love in my heart and best wishes for good health and stability. I miss your presence, wisdom, and leadership. Hope to see you soon, my friend. God bless you and your family.” I went back through mine and found a few—a meme he’d sent me about the new pope, an article he thought I should read, a message I had passed along from RC Buford, the CEO of the San Antonio Spurs who had just purchased signed copies of George’s book for a bunch of people in their organization, including all their players. 

Of course, no one is totally surprised when someone dies at the age of 88. And I know George wouldn’t have been either. In one of my favorite passages in his book, George writes about thinking of his life as a basketball game in its final quarter, with just a few minutes left on the clock. “For me,” George writes, “I know what time it is…which is to say, near the end. There’s no way around that. In fact, at my age I’m closer to something like double overtime or extra innings.” He lived accordingly–which is to say gratefully–and tried never to leave anything undone or unsaid. 

In July, I had checked in on how he was feeling. He replied: 

It’s been a marvelous 88 years(6/27/37) on planet Earth!! You changed my life forever!! Each day I’m in search of strategies that will allow me to Grow personally and professionally!! thanks for believing in me!!!! thanks for investing in me!! God bless you and your family!

I told him I loved him and I missed him. 

It’s true. 

We all did and do. 

I remember exactly where I was. 

Twenty years ago, I was working in Hollywood. On my lunch break, I was at Philly’s Pizza on La Cienega and Olympic, reading The 33 Strategies of War by Robert Greene. In a chapter about the “divide-and-conquer” strategy, Robert writes about the Athenians’ legendary stand against a massive Persian invasion on the plains of Marathon in 490 B.C. After the battle in Marathon, the soldiers had to immediately race back to Athens where a second Persian fleet was on its way to take the city from the sea. 

“There was simply no time to rest,” Robert writes. “They ran, as fast as their feet could take them, loaded down in their heavy armor, impelled by the thought of the imminent dangers facing their families and fellow citizens…Within a matter of minutes after their arrival, the Persian fleet sailed into the bay to see a most unwelcome sight: thousands of Athenian soldiers, caked in dust and blood, standing shoulder to shoulder to fight the landing. The Persians rode at anchor for a few hours, then headed out to sea, returning home. Athens was saved.”

Had the tired, dusty soldiers not run from Marathon to Athens, Robert writes, “history would have been altered irrevocably,” as the Persians, in conquering Greece, would have crushed the Athenians’ nascent democratic experiment that went on to shape the western world. Perhaps there would be no such thing as Western civilization. 

I had previously read about the Battle of Marathon in Herodotus’ Histories but this was so much more vivid, I actually understood what was happening and why it mattered. There in the pizza shop, I was struck by the way the same historical event could be transformed in the hands of a different storyteller. I remember being struck in particular by Robert’s line, “caked in dust and blood.” 

In any case, I emailed Robert and asked what he read when he was researching this famous event. He told me his sources, which included a book called The Greco-Persian Wars by Peter Green. I immediately ordered it on Amazon, and a few days later (Amazon was a little slower then), I began to read it on my lunch break.

The screenwriter and director Brian Koppelman (Billions, Rounders, Ocean’s Thirteen) talks about “The Moment”—the critical moment in every aspiring artist’s life, when the craft they have long elevated as magic or beyond their grasp suddenly becomes a bit more comprehensible. 

My moment happened about forty pages into The Greco-Persian Wars, where Peter Green writes, “The reappearance of the Marathon warriors — grim, indomitable, caked with dust and sweat and dried blood — not only gave Datis pause for thought; it also, obviously, came as an unexpected shock to the Alcmaeonidae and the pro-Persian party.” It was here that I realized: Oh,  this is how it works. This is what a researcher, a writer, a storyteller does: they read a collection of books on the same event, filtering the many details through their own lens based on their own tastes, which they then shape into their own style to make something new. 

The passage from ​The Greco-Persian Wars​ (top) that Robert Greene used in ​The 33 Strategies of War​ (bottom).

 It was a breakthrough moment for me. A little peek behind the curtain of the previously intimidating craft that I was drawn towards. A realization that on the other side of the books I admire and love is just another human being doing a job. And I’m a human being too, so maybe if I work hard enough, I can write books too.

Now, there was nothing in either of the Green(e) books about the fact that one could still go to Greece and run the course the Athenian soldiers, caked in dust and blood, ran from Marathon to Athens. But not long after, I read what became another all-time favorite book, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, in which Haruki Murakami writes about running “the original marathon course” all alone, not as part of “an official race.”

Re-reading “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running”

I had been a runner for a long time, and the one thing you get asked all the time as a runner is, “Are you training for a marathon?” My answer was always, “No, this is the marathon.” That is, the day-to-dayness, the doing it for no reason other than because, is the real challenge I’m tackling.

That’s how I thought about running basically from the moment I left organized sports as a kid. It’s, as Murakami talks about in one of my favorite passages in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, both exercise and a metaphor. “Running day after day,” he writes, “bit by bit I raise the bar, and by clearing each level I elevate myself. At least that’s why I’ve put in the effort day after day: to raise my own level. I’m no great runner, by any means. I’m at an ordinary—or perhaps more like mediocre—level. But that’s not the point. The point is whether or not I improved over yesterday. In long-distance running the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be.”

Combined with my longtime fascination with the way that ancient, original Marathon tipped the balance of history, Murakami’s quiet account of running it alone—not for a medal or a crowd, but simply to raise his own level—planted the idea of one day running it myself. It had been sitting in my mind for some fifteen years when my wife and I started planning a trip to Greece with our two boys this past summer.

Along with bringing to life the places I’ve been reading about for years and years—Olympia, Ithaca, Delphi, Thermopylae, Mt. Olympus and more—finally, I was going to try to run from Marathon to Athens.

After looking at a lot of the marathon training regimens out there, I didn’t have to change much. (Which was my point all along: ​If you stay ready, you don’t have to get ready​). The only real shift was being more deliberate than usual about running in as many different environments and conditions as possible. 

I went for long runs up switchbacks in Palm Springs, along the Santa Ana River in California, on mountain trails in Utah (where I was warned to look out for a very protective mother moose and her two calves) and as I often do, around Lady Bird Lake in Austin, and through the eerie elephant graveyard of the burned-out forest of Bastrop State Park.

Training in Sundance, UT

I ran in 105-degree heat. I ran on steep inclines. I ran before dawn, at altitude, on cement, gravel, sand. And once we got to Greece, I trained at the Acropolis. I trained in Ithaca. I trained running up Mount Olympus. I went on hikes with my family. I swam in the Aegean Sea. As Epictetus says, the goal when we come up against adversity—as I knew I often would during the long, hot, solitary run from Marathon to Athens—is to be able to say, “This is what I’ve trained for, for this is my discipline.”

Training in Greece

Swimming in Greece

At 6:51 a.m. on July 13, I stood at the starting point of the original Marathon route. I wasn’t nervous. And I was nervous about not being nervous. But the stillness came from training. I had done the work.

It was not the prettiest of courses, and I was the only one out there. I ran on sidewalks. I ran on the shoulder of busy roads. I ran along shopping centers and autobody shops. I ran on the side of a freeway and through underpasses. There was a brief period where you had a peek at the ocean, but most of it was industrial and gritty. It was entirely asphalt excepting a few brief moments of rocks by the side of the road. 

Three and a half miles in, I came to the ruins Murakami writes about in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running,

“As those who watched the TV broadcast of the marathon at the Athens Olympics are aware, after the runners leave Marathon, at one point they go off on a side road to the left, run past some less-than-distinguished ruins, and then return to the main road.”

It is perhaps the only part of the book I disagree with. I wouldn’t say they are “less-than-distinguished” ruins. I would say they are some of the most impressive and meaningful ruins in the entire world. I was incredibly struck by them. In particular, I was struck by a giant mound surrounded by trees—the burial mound of the 192 Athenians who died at Marathon, to whom we owe basically all of Western civilization. Theirs was not to reason why, Tennyson famously wrote about another group of soldiers on an impossible mission. Theirs was but to do and die. Or as the Spartan monument says, tell a stranger passing by that here, obedient to their laws, we lie. 

In part, Stoicism itself, the philosophy that I am lucky enough to write about, is rooted in the epic heroism of those Athenian soldiers. Not just because they saved Greek civilization, but because they were held up by the early Stoics as models of the four virtues—courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom—that they themselves strived to live up to. The Stoa Poikile—literally the “Painted Porch”—where Stoicism was founded, earned its name not because the porch itself was painted, but because a series of famous paintings lined its walls. 

We’re told by ancient historians that of all the “great deeds” depicted in the Stoa Poikile, none was more prominently displayed than the Battle of Marathon. One 1st-century B.C. writer writes that the Athenian general Miltiades “was given a special honor…When the battle of Marathon was painted, his picture was placed first among the ten generals, and he was shown urging on his men and joining battle.” Again, this wasn’t just a 26-odd-mile run for those soldiers sweltering under armor, caked in dust and blood. It was an existential fight. The fate of Greece—and with it, the future of the world—was on the line. The sheer bravery and strength of those Athenians, covering the very distance I was now running, powered me through the next seven or eight miles. 

A little over halfway in, I was still feeling good. And I found myself thinking about what the Stoics say about undergoing a hard winter’s training: we train, we do hard things, we challenge ourselves—physically, mentally, spiritually—so that when life throws its own challenges at us, we have something to draw on. We have proof. Evidence that we are someone who can do hard things. Someone who can keep going. Someone who has done the training.

25 km into the run

But then I entered what Courtney Dauwalter, one of the great ultramarathoners of all time, calls the “pain cave”—where you hit the edge of your mental and physical limits. When I interviewed Courtney on the Daily Stoic podcast, she talked about how she gets excited when she reaches her pain cave during a long run. Instead of thinking about the pain and discomfort, she thinks about exploring how far back the cave goes, what’s inside it, how she might chip away at the back wall to push it just a little farther away for next time. 

With about 3 miles left, I was as deep in that cave as I think I’ve ever been as a runner. It was 90 degrees now and it didn’t matter how much water I drank, I could not get hydrated. I had trouble reading the map on my phone, my brain basically wasn’t working. It’s clear afterwards that I had sunstroke or was in the early stages of it. Whatever time I was hoping for fell away, and it was really just whether I was going to continue or not. Epictetus talked about only entering competitions where winning is up to you. I tried to remind myself that I was not doing this for an outcome. There was no time or goal I was chasing. Doing this thing I had never done before, elevating myself, raising my own level—that was the real competition. And winning it was up to me. As long as I don’t quit, I thought, I’ll probably make it to the other side. 

I would have loved to have finished stronger, but I ran into a complete wall. There wasn’t much I could do—physically or mentally. Both my mind and body were begging to quit. I thought of the Kipling lines in If—

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on”

I held on. I didn’t quit. I gutted it out. I finished.

After finishing, I was wrecked. The story about Pheidippides is that when he finished the journey back to Athens, he delivered his message and then immediately died. I didn’t exactly do that, but I did throw up in one of the oldest and most beautiful stadiums in the world. I threw up before the long drive back to my hotel. And when I got to the hotel, I threw up several more times. I couldn’t keep down even water. 

In the days after the run, once I was somewhat back in command of my faculties, I thought about what I could have done better. I could have managed the nutrition side of things better. I could have started a little bit earlier so that I could have finished before it got as hot as it did on the final miles. 

In a word, I could have been wiser. Obviously, discipline is incredibly important, but without the virtue of wisdom—understanding the right place to apply that discipline and how to support that discipline—you can get yourself in some very rough spots. And so discipline is something we have to moderate with wisdom. The wisdom of, What is the best plan? What is the best nutrition? How do you not get wrecked by the heat? How do you take care of your body?

Seneca talked about how the only people he pitied were those who hadn’t been through adversity or experienced difficulty. Because they will never know what they’re capable of.

What I took most of all from running the Marathon is that I am a person who is capable of doing hard things. I know that because I did a hard fucking thing. 

And I take that with me.

I think it’s safe to say that no one is great at anything by accident.

So in one sense, greatness is a choice.

We choose to be great.

You get to decide, ‘I’m going to take this craft, sport, talent, profession, discipline, genre, or subject as far as I am capable of taking it.’

That’s up to you.

But on the other hand, I don’t know if you get to choose what you’re great at. I don’t want to be too mystical about it, but I think what we get called to do is a confluence of circumstances that are not up to us. When we’re born—not up to us. Where we’re born—not up to us. If we’re male or female, short or tall, from a rich family or a poor one—not up to us. Why does this light me up and that lights you up? Why does math come easy to some but not to others? Why does this genre of music grab you instead of that one? Why is it writing for me and picking stocks for you? Teaching yoga for one person, teaching chemistry for another?

I don’t know, but I don’t think it is up to us.

There is something a little bit unfair about this. I think about this with my friend Paul Rabil, who I got to work with on his book ​The Way of the Champion​. Paul is considered the greatest lacrosse player of all time. He chose to be great. In the book, he talks about a coach who told him the key to being a great lacrosse player was simple: ​take one hundred shots a day​. If you get one hundred reps a day, every day, eventually, you’ll get an offer to play D1 lacrosse. He promised them.

And you know what, that’s exactly what Paul did, getting a full scholarship to play at Johns Hopkins and winning two national championships and All-America honors all four years. But it wasn’t all sunshine and roses. His calling for the game was actually a kind of curse. Because even though it’s one of the oldest sports in history, lacrosse is a fringe sport to say the least, so when Rabil got drafted to the pros first overall, it didn’t mean making millions of dollars, signing big endorsement deals, or playing before huge crowds and national TV audiences the way it does in some professional sports. No, his rookie wage was $6,000 a year. Games were played in small high school and college stadiums, often with just a few dozen fans in the stands. And there were no national TV broadcasts, just the occasional grainy webstream on some little-known site tucked in the corners of the internet.

He was the LeBron James of a sport for which transcendent greatness meant relative obscurity, as it continues to mean for the best lacrosse players in the world.

More recently, ​I had a great conversation with Candace Parker on the Daily Stoic podcast​. She is also one of the greatest to ever play her sport. She played for the University of Tennessee under Pat Summit, where they won two NCAA championships in 2007. In 2008, she was drafted number one overall in the WNBA. She was the Rookie of the Year and the MVP in her first season. She’s won two gold medals and her jersey is being retired this year by two separate teams. Yet, there are far fewer accomplished NBA players—maybe even basketball players who play overseas—that you’ve never heard of that make more money in a season than she did throughout her entire career.

Is that fair? I don’t know if fair is the right word. It’s just what it is. And what it’s always been. Jim Thorpe, one of the greatest athletes of all time, got to choose to be great, but he didn’t get to choose that he was born in 1887. He didn’t get to choose that he lived decades before sports became big business. He didn’t get to choose that professional football players of his time made less than the average college football player makes today.

It isn’t only athletes in less popular sports or from bygone times, of course, who can be world-class yet poorly paid or recognized. The best middle school teachers. The world’s leading experts on this niche topic. The once-in-a-generation talent at that obscure skill. The woman at the daycare I used to send my son to who could put thirty toddlers down for a nap at once, when I struggled to do it with just one. The list could go on and on. There are so many people out there who are utterly extraordinary at what they do, but whose greatness—for one reason or another—doesn’t translate into mass appeal, doesn’t command high compensation, doesn’t receive the recognition it deserves.

I think about this with myself. ​I write books about Stoicism​. If I wrote about something with more mass appeal or if I wrote romance novels or if I ghostwrote celebrity memoirs, maybe I would sell more books, make more money, or be known by more people.

Now, you might say, oh, why don’t you just switch to one of those things? Well, that’s the whole dilemma, right? Paul Rabil and Jim Thorpe could have switched to other professions, maybe. But Candace Parker can’t switch to the NBA. I have written books about other things, but I can tell you, it’s just not what lights me up. It’s not what gets me excited. It’s not what I feel called to try to be great at. Maybe if I had been involved in the design process, I would have chosen to be lit up by something else. But they didn’t consult me. It wasn’t up to me that writing about an obscure school of philosophy is what I find endlessly fascinating.

What is up to me is whether I choose to take it as far as I am capable of taking it.

And this is no small thing. I would actually argue there is a moral imperative to take your talents as far as they can go—irrespective of what the market says about them. After Rabil took his talents as far as they could go—multiple championships and MVP awards, two gold medals with Team USA, 10 All-Star teams, and the all-time record for career points in professional lacrosse—in 2018, he founded the Premier Lacrosse League, a pro league that rivaled and then overtook the 20-year incumbent. The PLL today has a major media rights deal with ESPN, pays its athletes full-time salaries with equity, and includes investors like The Chernin Group, the Raine Group, billionaire Joseph Tsai, NBA star Kevin Durant, and many others.

Because he chose to be great at the thing that had chosen him, Paul has raised the sport’s ceiling so that today’s lacrosse players can take their talents further than was possible when he was playing.

What makes his decision remarkable is that he had been presented with a highly tempting alternative. When Paul was 24, a couple of years into his professional lacrosse career—living with his parents and working a day job—he got a call from New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick.

“I told Paul he could be a strong safety in the NFL,” Belichick writes in the foreword to ​The Way of the Champion​. “I thought he had the size, the speed, and the toughness to play in our league. I had a good sense of his transferable skills because, like him, I grew up playing lacrosse.” Belichick had also had success converting athletes from other sports into great NFL players.

After several conversations, Belichick laid out the options: Paul had the tools to be a pretty good NFL player, and he had the opportunity “to define the pinnacle of a sport.” “Everything worth anything in life comes at a sacrifice,” Belichick said. What did he want to sacrifice? Millions of dollars, perhaps a Super Bowl or two, and the prestige of being an NFL player? Or the call to be one of the greatest lacrosse players of all time? “I would go all in on lacrosse,” Paul writes. “This was my path.”

That’s the choice in front of all of us.

Eventually, we all come to this crossroads—between being pretty good and being great, between what looks impressive from the outside and what lights us up on the inside, between what’s lucrative and what’s calling us.

Where this calling comes from doesn’t matter.

What matters is where we take it.