As he drove a school bus carrying his junior high school basketball team back to school after a loss, Dale Brown turned on the windshield wipers. The rain was heavy. With each swipe of the wipers against glass, the dejected Brown heard failure…failure…failure…
It's literally been decades since I read a Sports Illustrated (SI) feature on then-LSU basketball coach Dale Brown. By then he was a Final Four, SEC Champion, college basketball coaching legend, but in the SI story Brown recalled the old days when he wasn't much of anything. Failure...failure...failure…
Brown's story came to mind while reading Rich Karlgaard's inspiring new book, Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed with Early Achievement. Not only is Karlgaard a big fan of the world's greatest magazine (after Forbes, of course), not only did Sports Illustrated's layout inform his creation of the first magazine meant to chronicle the rise of a nascent Silicon Valley, but Brown's ascent from the depths of school-bus failure would very much fit what he's talking about in Late Bloomers.
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