Coach Carter - Yes Maam, No Sir: The 12 Essential Steps for Success in Life

Copyright 2012 by Ken Carter

All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the authors intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the authors rights.

Business Plus

Hachette Book Group

237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

www.hachettebookgroup.com

www.twitter.com/grandcentralpub

First e-book edition: February 2012

Business Plus is an imprint of Grand Central Publishing.

The Business Plus name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

The Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out more, go to www.hachettespeakersbureau.com or call (866) 376-6591.

ISBN 978-1-455-50233-2

This book is dedicated to my parents,
the late A. J. Carter, Sr., and
my mother, Hettie Lee Carter.

I love to learn. It doesnt matter what subject were talking about; if its something I dont know, then I want to learn about it, and if its something I already know about, then I want to learn more.

I have an insatiable curiosity about all forms of human behavior and about life in general. Everything in this world fills me with wonder. Thats exactly what happened when I picked up a pen to write this book. I couldnt put it down because when I went to work on this book, this book went to work on me. I learned something from every sentence!

If you are in possession of this book, I consider you a part of my team, and as part of my team, it is crucial that you win.

So read this book. Pick it apart and take notes, because this is the playbook to success in your life.

L ong before I became Coach Carter of Hollywood recognition, portrayed in the blockbuster film by Samuel L. Jackson, I was Kennie Ray Carter, a boy who watched his parents tirelessly raise nine children on a farm in rural Mississippi.

As it turned out, it was the perfect backdrop to an inspired life that has become a touchstone of limitless possibilities and success.

I was too young to see that then. Instead, I wondered: Why do we seem to have less than others?

We werent poor; we were broke. Being broke is just an economic condition. But being poor is a disabling frame of mind and a depressed condition of the human spirit. So we were never, ever depressed. We were just broke.

I tell people that my family was so broke that when we rode by the bank, we set off the alarm.

The reality, I came to understand, was that even though we were broke, we had more than most: more love and support and togetherness, and those elements sustained us and helped shape me into a man of honor, commitment, and achievement.

It was a long journey that started when I was a kid. Seeing my parents work hard to provide for us instilled a dogged work ethic in me that showed when I was just seven years oldand it still resides in me today.

At that young age I started my first business. I placed small, undeveloped cucumbers inside long-neck bottles and waited until they grew to where they could not come out. It made people wonder how I got the big cucumber through the narrow bottleneck.

I loaded up my unique novelties into my little red wagon, and with no shoes or shirt, I headed into town to set up shop.

I sold them for five dollars. If someone had a ten-dollar bill, I never gave him change. Instead, I sold him two. I just had no fear. And I ended up making more in a day than my mom and dad.

That was where my road to being a leader began. Years later, when our family moved across the country to Richmond, California, I carried that spirit of ownership and leadership with me.

The day we arrived in Richmond was March 19, 1972. I remember that day so well all these years later because so much happened. We were excited to move into a home with running water; in Mississippi, I had to pump water from a well.

Also, that was the day I met Mr. James Dunkley. He owned a Laundromat in Richmond, and that first day I saw him dump hundreds of quarters from the washers and dryers into a big bucket. Back in Mississippi, if you had a quarter, you had wealth. And here was this man with hundreds of them.

I was only twelve, but I could not resist asking Mr. Dunkley, Are all those quarters yours? He told me they were and that he emptied the machines twice a week.

Well, I was mesmerized. That made a real impression on me, but not as much as what Mr. Dunkley said to me that day:

You can make a life for yourself working for others. You can create a lifestyle if you work for yourself.

Powerful. That stuck with me. And it is one of the principles I still carry with me today.

In one sense, Mr. Dunkley meant that it was important to have leadership over your life, to take command of it. Too often, I have found that most people do not know how to do that. They get set into a mundane routine and exist instead of creating a winning lifestyle for themselves.

I play to winand Im not just talking about basketball. My name and some of my story are familiar because of the motion picture that depicted an integral part of my life.

But what I accomplished with the young men on the Richmond High School basketball team was far more than about the results of the games. Those results were extremely important; you play the game to win, and we were so adamant about it that I never even kept any second-place trophy we received.

But the bigger and more important part of that experience was the teaching of leadership and discipline and self-pride and work ethic. Those are the character traits that had to be built up as we went on the basketball journey.

They called me Coach Carter, but I called myself a teacher. A coach designs plays and sets up specific things for a player to do on the court. A teacher explains why you do certain things to get the desired results.

My players learned about the game and the fundamentals and how to attack an opponent based on knowing their strengths and weaknesses and understanding basketball. Thats not coaching; thats teaching.

When I first got there, we had no nets on the goals, no socks, no towels, which didnt matter because the showers didnt work. But the only thing that bothered me was that our boys looked like losersand they acted like losers.

So I told them, All that changes. Today. Winning in here is the same as winning out there, in life.

If you take a basketball and hold it over your head and drop it, every time it bounces, it loses fifty percent of its momentum. Thats the way a basketball career is. Every year someone comes behind you a little bit stronger, a little bit faster, a little hungrier.

Every shot you take, youre getting closer to the end of your career. But hopefully youre getting a little bit smarter. You want to talk numbers? Only one in every five hundred thousand people even gets an opportunity to play any type of professional sports.

So its okay to put all your eggs in one basket if its the family business and you have control of itbut not in becoming a professional player.