Welcome to It's a Good Life with Brian Bafini, founder of America's largest business coaching company.

Here's a short, classic cut from one of our all-time favorite episodes.

Our guest today is Mr. Walter Bond.

Walter came on the scene as a basketball player in college, played in the NBA for the Dallas

Mavericks, Utah Jazz, and the Detroit Pistons.

And that was cool.

But then when he retired, he's gone on to become a presenter, a speaker, TV host, you

name it, but he has presented at a number of our events and literally

blown our audience away. I call him my brother from a different mother. Walter, we are delighted

to have you on the show today. Thanks for joining me. Awesome. Thanks, Brian. You often tell the

story of your experience, you know, in college and going through it and getting to your breaking points and pushing through that. I'd love you to share some of that stuff with our audience today just because I think there's so much to be learned from it. Right. Well, you know, if anyone's seen the movie Rudy, I'm Rudy, you know, I didn't start on my college basketball team. You know, after being a high school basketball star, that was it, you know, because

that's a minimum requirement to play Division I one basketball. And once I got to campus,

you know, everybody's a stood where they came from. And then you got to kind of recalibrate.

Right. And my freshman year, I got recalibrated. I'm sitting on the bench, Brian, you know,

with just no minutes, no playing time. It almost gave up on my dream, but I had this

dialogue with my dad, and he would always ask questions. And the first question he asked my

freshman year was, you know what, you're not playing, son, why not? And I gave him an 18-year-old

answer. I said, politics, dad, it's political. Right. That's the corporate answer, right? And my father asked me another question. He was like, how did your coach get paid? And I was like, Dad, he gets paid to win. He says, okay, son, well, if he gets paid to win, won't he pay the players to give him the best chance to win? And I was kind of like a long pause, kind of like, hey, his mom home?

You know, I don't want this tough love crap. I want a different answer.

Yeah, but you know, that was a great moment, though, where I learned accountability.

And when I think about a person reaching their potential, you can't reach your potential without being accountable.

In fact, my bestselling book is titled All But Think.

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