Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…The other thing—this is pretty crazy—that young Sam as a teenager exhibits is he becomes the quarterback of the football team in his high school. Sam, if you've ever seen any photos or videos, is such an incredible folksy dude. Listening to his talks is just amazing. He's 5'9" and very slight so you wouldn't think that he's going to be a great football athlete. Of course, we're talking about American football here. This is incredible, though. I think they win the state championship every year because he never loses a game. It was crazy. He writes about this in the book. He says, "I think that record had an important effect on me. It taught me to expect to win, to go into tough challenges always planning to come out victorious. Later on in life, I think Kmart or whatever competition we were facing just became Jeff City High School, the team we played for the state championship in 1935. It never occurred to me that I might lose; to me, it was almost as if I had a right to win. Thinking like that often seems to turn into sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy." Man, was that Sam Walton. There are two contrasting ideas that I've heard different VCs and different founders espouse on both sides. One is you learn from your mistakes and you learn from failure. The other is if all you've ever done in your entire career is being really high-performing in very successful environments, then that is all you know how to do and that's the bar that you hold yourself to. I think there's total merit to both. Both of these forces shape Sam, the Depression, the Dust Bowl, foreclosing on farms, his dad's struggles, and he never loses a game. All of that goes right into Walmart.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.