In the video, Seth Cohen, Chief Impact Officer of Forbes, engages in an insightful conversation with Hall of Fame quarterback Steve Young. They delve into Steve's motivations and discuss the interplay between his impressive sports career and business achievements. Steve reveals the roots of his motivations, which emanate from his faith, resilience, and the values instilled by his family, particularly his father. He explains how these influences have shaped his personal and professional journey while he navigates roles in the public eye.

The conversation covers how Steve balanced his personal convictions with his public life in sports and business. He shares anecdotes from his time in the NFL under coach Bill Walsh, emphasizing the power of shared experiences and the significance of building relationships. Steve also discusses how these principles translate into business, advocating for a culture of accountability and teamwork, reminiscent of a cohesive locker room dynamic, which he has brought into his investment endeavors.

Main takeaways from the video:

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. resilience [rɪˈzɪliəns] - (n.) - The capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness. - Synonyms: (toughness, adaptability, endurance)

How has resilience shaped Steve Young?

2. synergy [ˈsɪnərdʒi] - (n.) - The interaction or cooperation of two or more organizations, substances, or other agents to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects. - Synonyms: (collaboration, cooperation, interaction)

And then finding that, you know, synergy or the abundance in it.

3. navigate [ˈnævɪˌɡeɪt] - (v.) - To plan and direct the course of a journey. - Synonyms: (steer, pilot, guide)

How does one navigate kind of that inner self while also being incredibly public?

4. transaction [trænˈzækʃən] - (n.) - An instance of buying or selling something; a business deal. - Synonyms: (deal, exchange, arrangement)

Yeah, well, we're in a very transactional space right now.

5. abundance [əˈbʌndəns] - (n.) - A very large quantity of something. - Synonyms: (plenty, profusion, wealth)

And then finding that, you know, synergy or the abundance in it

6. obfuscation [ˌɑːbfʌsˈkeɪʃən] - (n.) - The action of making something obscure, unclear, or unintelligible. - Synonyms: (confusion, ambiguity, obscurity)

Oh, there's all this obfuscation and all this mitigation.

7. perpetuity [ˌpɜːrpəˈtjuːɪti] - (n.) - A bond or other security with no fixed maturity date. - Synonyms: (eternity, infinity, endlessness)

I wrote the law. It's the law of love. Means that if there's a place of perpetuity in the universe, this is not it.

8. meekness [ˈmiːknəs] - (n.) - The quality of being quiet, gentle, and easily imposed on; submissiveness. - Synonyms: (humbleness, modesty, docility)

And if that language is long suffering, gentle persuasion, meekness and love unfeigned.

9. integral [ˈɪntɪɡrəl] - (adj.) - Necessary to make a whole complete; essential or fundamental. - Synonyms: (essential, fundamental, innate)

It's integral to creating a culture of mutual respect.

10. selfless [ˈsɛlfləs] - (adj.) - Concerned more with the needs and wishes of others than with one's own; unselfish. - Synonyms: (altruistic, unselfish, generous)

What's irrational is to think about could we find more abundance if we were able to see each other in a way that was selfless, that there's truly selfless love out there

NFL Legend Steve Young On How Faith is the Ultimate Game-Changer

My name is Seth Cohen and I'm the Chief Impact Officer of Forbes and the founder of the Forbes Impact Lab. I'm here today in the NASDAQ market site in New York City and I'm joined by Hall of Fame quarterback, Super Bowl winner and investor Steve Young. Steve, thanks for joining me today, Seth. My pleasure to be here.

So, Steve, there's so many different kinds of conversations we can have with each other. We can talk about sports, we can talk about investing, we can talk about faith. I'd like to do all three. I think you can't help but do all three at once.

Because they all go together in a lot of ways. Of course they do. But let's start with your why. I really just people have so many different views of you again, from being a star on the field to being a successful businessman, to being a best selling author. What motivates you? Just who is Steve Young and what keeps him going?

Well, kind of the root, I guess you're asking a rooted question, right? What's the root? If you go to the root for me, and I guess you go to the root of my theology is that there's God, Mother, Father, we all lived with them before. Our durable spirits that's inside of us in each human being were with God before.

And we're actually of God, we're divine. Every human being is divine in its nature, in its root. And then we all made this raw, fundamental, full of agency and rigor, choice to take a body. So in that way, okay, so if I just lay that out as a, that we're all root, then that kind of in my mind, that's my roots. That's my roots. You and I are here.

And how I see you, I see you as divine. I see you as a part of the family, that we're in it together. And I think that my why in faith is because I think that's my truth. Because that's my truth, then I got to go. You know, like anything, if you don't, if it's not, if it's not your truth, it's not your truth if you don't live it.

So you live this truth in lots of different ways. But let's now go backwards to the you had to live in many ways through a life of resilience, through effort, through faith in front of millions and millions of eyeballs on the football field. What was that like? And maybe explain to me how does one navigate kind of that inner self while also being incredibly public? Like you have had to be over a lot of your career I've always enjoyed.

My dad used to say to me, you love 3rd and 10, and if you love football, you'll know 3rd and 10 is not a fun place to be. That's 3rd and long, right? He goes. And I go, dad, no, I don't love 3rd and 10. I just find it a lot. And I think that I enjoy going to law school while I play football. I love the conversations being different and changing. I love learning about.

And so to me, doing something very public and then still having such. I'm more of an introvert, generally. If you leave me alone, I'll be on the outskirts of the party and listening rather than be in the middle of it all. And so I think I love what I'll call the emotional athleticism of life.

I love two different things that are very. And then finding that, you know, synergy or the abundance in it. And so for me, playing in front of millions of people and then having, you know, I don't know exactly what the question that you were asking, but I just.

I find that the challenges and the rigors of life, like, I guess fundamentally go back to the roots. I believe we're all here as human beings to learn and grow. That's what we're here to do. And so I'm up for that.

So we have conversations a lot these days about how faith, about how beliefs are not necessarily a place you can bring into the workplace. That's not the case in a locker room. In a locker room. It's all there. It's all there.

Talk to me a little bit about the unifying space of a football. And you were sharing with me an anecdote before of your coach, Bill Walsh, and how he handled this. So he was the, you know, obviously he was the Hall of Fame coach, won Super Bowl bowls, and he'd start every season, bring the team together and say, look, I don't care what play we run, I don't care what defense we run.

We're going to win because we have shared common experiences and element of love for each other. And that was mind bending for a football coach to say that. Like what? I don't know. And then he went out and enacted it like he knew that if we played together in a locker room setting for 10 years, we would know each other's name because it's on the back of their jersey, but we wouldn't really.

Quarterbacks would know each other. Offensive players might know each other, but the defensive players. I might know your name, but I don't really know you. And he said, that's where we lose. And if we're going to play great winning football. We were the 49ers for 20 years, were in the playoffs, five Super Bowls, I don't, I want to guess, 12 championship games. People like, wow, how did they do it? You did it off of relationships.

And so that taught me fundamentally, it was always intuitively true to me. But then if it's true on the football field, then it must be true in business, it must be true and it must be super true at home. Right. And so that's. So for how I navigated the locker room with my faith was being very vulnerable, self deprecating, and have a sense of humor.

Some of my best friends on the team, Harris Barton and John Frank, were Jewish. They were my roommates. And it's like you can imagine the conversations and the fun we had. And we just laughed about the unique, crazy things about our faith. If somebody wanted to have a conversation with me on the plane, great. If they wanted. And I tried never to be offended.

I tried to always find the space where we were in it together. Being accessible. Yes. And so, and laugh at some of the oddities. But that's teamwork, it sounds like. And that's also a way that an individual leader shows up and brings himself or herself into that space and creates that accessibility.

But to go backwards just even a little bit more, when people look at you, they see championships, they see MVPs. But, but you've also had to be resilient. They don't remember necessarily the Steve, the early Steve Young, that had to fight through, like, everything just to get to that stage through college and to pros.

How has resilience shaped Steve Young? I mean, all the things you said that are positive have been built off of losses and failure. You know, how many, you know, how many times have I wanted to quit? Luckily, my dad, again, back to my dad, he's like, you know, you never can't quit. Like, don't just, you can play it out, you can figure out something else to do in your life, but you can't quit.

And so luckily I had people around me that didn't let me quit because I would have quit. So you talk about resilience. I don't know that I'm that resilient. Luckily I had some people around me at very vulnerable times that would build, you know, gave me some resilience. So I'm not going to claim, like, oh, I, you know, I'm the toughest bastards you ever seen in Your life you never seen, Like, I kind of grew into that over time.

Kind of learned as I kind of fake it till you make it. But I think I started to realize again, back to my roots. If I'm here to learn and grow, if that's what I'm here for, then the challenges are the life force. It's the, like, the things that are, like, hard things are actually the food for learning and growing.

That's the mission we're on, right? So then why would I run away from it? And so I got this theme in my mind, maybe about college time when I run in about 40 things that were really hard that I noticed that I started to go around them. You know what I mean? And I built calluses of going around them.

And if you do that over time, you never actually. Yeah, you got to go through it. You got to go through it, but you have to affirmatively go through it. You have to. You know, if you're pushed in there, you know, you'll find another way around. You have to actually make the statement to yourself, this is hard, and I'm going through it.

So translate what you just described to now. We're in a generation very much that is in the moment where, like, what they do on the field successfully, what maybe they do in business successfully is immediately tweeted.

Immediately Instagram. They can't suffer in silence because they have to be on all the time. What advice do you have for maybe this generation of both athletes and just leaders of how to respond in that moment?

So my friend Ronnie Lott, who is a Hall of Fame defensive back for the 49ers for many years, and he got into a beef with a quarterback, famous quarterback that I won't name because it's local, and got onto it in the field, and they got into each other, and Ronnie doesn't. He wasn't like. He was an incredible competitor, but he wasn't on the field.

There was a. The field was sacred ground to him. And so to have him get into a beef is like, what happened? I remember asking him. He goes. He doesn't understand that this is.

That competition is sacred. And if you don't respect it, if you disrespect it, if you say something that disrespects, or you make some fun of someone who's lost or you make some fun, then you've taken away. I don't. How do you say it?

If I'm playing just to win and lose, I don't want to do it. I want to grow. I want to learn. If I'm going to lose, I want to learn.

Don't you shame me from learning the purpose. I love what you just said. Competition is sacred. Sacred. And so, in other words, think about it. Competition at its core is just winners and losers. And if we all live at the bottom of the hill as a winner or loser, I'm a winner.

I'm a loser. If that's all it is, according to Ronnie Lott, that's not worth it. I don't want to do it.

So you've had another chapter in your career since you've retired from football, where you've been phenomenally successful as an investor, but also as someone who assesses the landscape of investment and opportunities.

What have you learned both about resilience and maybe even, again, bringing back in faith to being a successful investor and entrepreneur?

Well, business is hard for me coming from a place where there was a line field, there's a scoreboard, there's a clock, you know, and like, everything was immediate. Yet 80,000 witnesses. You couldn't come after the game and say, oh, it didn't happen the way you saw it. Well, no, I watched it. You can't mitigate your way out on that one.

And so my life previously was, I loved that, that the end of it was a score. The end of it was the truth was like. And the field was the place of truth. You come to business, it's harder to find. Like, the score is like, yeah, a lot more ambiguous. Winners and losers. And then who saw it? What's the truth? Oh, there's all this obfuscation and all this mitigation and all this. No one is actually responsible, you know, and so I've loved kind of jumping in with entrepreneurs, founders, management teams, even other financial sponsors.

People that see the world kind of how I saw it before and can recognize that in the end, if we're really going to win, which means I'm going to win in every direction, not just me. They're businesses that are built off of these same principles, and they're willing to go the extra mile, the longer way, rather than just transaction, rather than just whatever is the thing of the day, but actually to build something that is, you know, kind of player equity. Right?

It's like employee equity. How do we all. What kind of a culture are we building? What kind of a. Who owns the business can we get? Can we spread that out? Can we claim the same values and that same locker room mindset that your old coach taught you as well? 100%, if you think about in a football team, there's 50 independent contractors.

Essentially, I negotiated my own contract. I'm getting paid my salary. It's different than everybody else. Quarterbacks usually way more.

You go into a locker room now being one of the highest paid oddities in the locker room now, you've got to come together, shed all of that and come together in a way that gets tested viscerally, like you can't speak. It sounds like a startup. You have to live it.

But yet how can I draw those linemen who have to give my, their body to, to protect me, who are being paid a tenth of what I'm being paid to actually want to do it? And there's that. That dynamic is super cool to think about in business because those are the lessons.

And if you can pull that off and create that kind of environment of like I tell you, the way you do it is accountability. The quarterback owns, the ball's in my hands.

What's the truest truth? The ball's in my hands. And now it's in like if I throw an interception, it's in their hands. There's a lot of mitigation that happens on the field. There's so much that happens that you can find excuse in. But the truest truth is it's on me.

And if you do that, you spread that out into the team and everybody kind of like, you know what? I'll keep following you. Well, Steve, I feel like there's so many topics we could cover, including investment, faith. We already talked a bit about football.

We haven't yet talked about BYU's playoff chances yet. But I have one last question. Well, think about this. BYU's playoff chances being led by the only Jewish quarterback in the NCAA team. Who'd have thunk, Seth? Who'd have thunk? You gotta love that. Who'd have thunk? Well, with that, I have one last question.

You have a book that I've read about love called Love. And I think in this moment that we're in as a country, we talk a lot about division. We talk about, do we know our neighbors yet. You've written thoughtfully about how your faith, about how your beliefs create a roadmap for us to love each other despite our differences.

What is maybe one piece of advice that you have from that perspective we can share in this moment for maybe people who are wondering, where is the love? Yeah, well, we're in a very transactional space right now. And transactions like the language you think of entropy, the scientific environment we live in, the language of entropy is transaction.

That's what we live in. It's rational. What's irrational is to think about could we find more abundance if we were able to see each other in a way that was selfless, that there's truly selfless love out there. And in that it's not necessarily something that weakens your position.

Ironically, it gives you the full measure of who you can be. And so the irony of selfless love in business and people are like, what, Steve, what are you talking about? I go back to my 49er experience. I go back to what I learned on the field, what I've seen in business, what I see in my marriage.

When I see like anything comes up and you say, how do I. If I was going to lay on top of, or I was going to states of being a situation or trouble, what language would I bring to a, to an argument? And if that language is long suffering, gentle persuasion, meekness and love unfeigned, if I'm going to actually speak those words in this tough environment, tough situation, it's amazing what happens.

So love is. I wrote the law. It's the law of love. Means that if there's a place of perpetuity in the universe, this is not it. But if there is, it's being governed by selfless love.

INSPIRATION, MOTIVATION, LEADERSHIP, EDUCATION, ENTREPRENEURSHIP, STEVE YOUNG, FORBES