Architects

The boy who said no to ten million dollars.In May of 2003, an eighteen-year-old kid from a public housing project in Akron, Ohio walked into a boardroom in Canton, Massachusetts, and pushed back a $10 million check made out in his name. The man who had designed the offer — Steve Stoute — clapped in the room. "He turned the money down and went to homeroom the next day," Stoute later said. "I'd never seen anything like it."Twenty years later, LeBron James was the first active billionaire athlete in the history of the National Basketball Association.In this episode I read LeBron, Inc. by ESPN reporter Brian Windhorst — a book by the man who has been covering LeBron since LeBron was fourteen years old. We pull out the five blueprints that built an empire: the Reebok refusal, the VitaminWater lesson, the Four Horses, the Sun Valley billionaires, and the I Promise School in Akron.Every episode of Architects ends with one principle you can apply this week. This week's: the architect does not optimize for the first check. The architect optimizes for the back end of every check that comes after it.Subscribe so you don't miss the next blueprint. New episode every other Monday.