You Might Also Like : Superhero Leadership with Peter Cuneo

Hi, it's Mike Carruthers.

I want to share something with you.

It's an episode of a podcast called Superhero Leadership, and it is hosted by Marvel's former CEO and legendary turnaround expert, Peter Cuneo.

Each week, Peter is joined by top performers from business, media, and beyond, leaders who have mastered the art of impact, resilience, and vision.

In this episode, John Harris, the CEO of Ath Life, explores how leaders create lasting impact by empowering others, fostering empathy, and embracing lifelong learning.

I think you're going to enjoy this.

And if you do, you can find more superhero leadership episodes wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to the Superhero Leadership Podcast, hosted by former CEO of Marvel Entertainment, Peter Cuneo.

Listen as he explores outstanding leadership through the lens of successful superhero leaders.

Here's your host, Peter Cuneo.

Welcome to Superhero Leadership.

Today's guest is someone who's been quietly changing lives in the world of sports, education, and leadership for more than two decades.

John Harris is the founder and CEO of Athlight, an organization that supports current and former professional athletes as they navigate life beyond the game.

He works with all the major sports leagues, but John's journey didn't start in the boardroom, it started on the court.

He was a four-year letterman in basketball at DuPaux University, where he also earned both his bachelor's and master's degrees.

His master's thesis explored the role of higher education in helping NFL players transition to post-sports careers, work he's been living out ever since.

He's a father, a mentor, a leader, and a true builder with ventures like AthLife Unlimited and Hustle that continue to push the intersection of sports, business, and culture forward.

Welcome, John.

John, I'm fascinated by your career.

You've been involved in sports at various levels from amateur to professional your whole life.

Maybe this started just when you were growing up and you got interested in athletics.

What What was it about your early life

as a young kid?

And

how were you raised?

How did that affect, I think,

your aspirations to be a leader?

I grew up in central New York, near Syracuse.

And Syracuse at the time was part of the Big East and basketball was everything.

And growing up in central New York,

You're not outside as much for about six months of the year.

So basketball was a thing and I really fell in love with it.

My size, I probably should have stuck with baseball.

But,

you know, I had a brother who played college, a sister who played college, and athletics was really just important

to us.

And ironically, my parents really weren't big into athletics.

And my dad actually,

as a hobby, played musician, but at one point.

actually recorded an album.

So

it was interesting that my parents didn't really push that.

Yet, that was really important

to me and to my brothers and sisters.

I was one of six and we grew up in a really small house.

Actually,

my first house was a trailer.

So you had to learn to negotiate when you got eight people in a really small space.

And

I found that I just really like people and I like to play.

So I always found myself.

getting everyone together in the in the neighborhood to play baseball or to play basketball.

And I had a really good mentor and my high school basketball coach who really cultivated that with me.

And so I ended up being the captain of my JV team and then my varsity team.

And I wasn't the best player, but I think I have a positive can-do attitude.

And I was really always trying to get people together.

And that led to some great success for me, both on and off the court.

I think they both kind of feed each other.

The poll is in Chicago.

Chicago, yeah.

How did you get from upstate New York to Chicago?

There was a player, Rod Strickland, who was pretty good.

And we got cable TV when I was in eighth or ninth grade.

And plus they were on NBC a lot, all those famous matchups with Louisville and Notre Dame.

And I just became a big fan.

I got to see them as much as I got to see Syracuse play.

And as I was exploring going to college, I really was thinking, man, I want to go in a city.

I want to be in a city when I go to college.

And

I wasn't recruited by DePaul.

I was actually recruited by some smaller schools.

And I reached out to Joey Meyer, who was just, you know, a couple of years off of being National Coach of the Year.

And I said, hey, I want to be part of your program.

I want to be a coach.

I don't know if I can be part of it as a player or not.

But fortunately, as a freshman, I was able to walk on.

And by my senior year, I was able to earn a scholarship.

So it wasn't a star by any means, but the fact that I was able to get four years at a Division I school, and it really did open up doors for me, being able to play at a school like that really opened up doors for me in a lot of ways in my life.

You're coming out of school.

You want to be involved in sports, maybe as a coach, you know, or in some manner.

And suddenly you land a job with the NFL.

So 1993 NFL collective bargaining agreement was kind of the official official birth of player development.

The players said, hey, we're willing to give up some of our game check money, but we want more financial education, career development,

educational advising, and employee assistance type programs.

So

1995, I graduate.

The NFL didn't even know if all that was going to work.

So they outsourced it to an organization called the National Consortium for Academics and Sports, led by Richard Lapchak.

And Richard is, you know, his dad, Joe, was the coach of the Knicks in St.

John's.

And Richard was a social justice warrior, still is to this day.

I count him as a dear friend still.

So his organization got that.

The Midwest Regional Office happened to be housed at DePaul University.

The guy who ran that office happened to be a seasoned ticket holder.

So

I was interviewing for that job for four years before I even knew it.

And that's one of the things we always try to talk to athletes is you never know who's watching.

And so when I walked in for that that interview,

he had seen me.

He had seen the work I had put in and how I carried myself.

And I got an internship and that opened the door for me.

It wasn't a foregone conclusion that he would hire me.

But when he did nine months later, I was full time.

It was really working.

And so he helped me figure out.

My boss, Tom Kowalski, helped me figure out.

what master's program I should go in and he helped pay for some of that.

So I spent five years.

I still was thinking about coaching.

So I was coaching high school on the JV level, but I was also chipping away at my master's one course at a time.

And I did that for, you know, four and a half, five years.

And

when that all came around, the NFL said, this is really working.

We had a lot of players engaging and utilizing the service.

So that's when the NFL said, hey, we're going to bring you in-house.

We're going to bring this in-house and we're going to bring you in to set it up and run it, which was

yes,

I said.

And the coaching stuff, you know, now I coach my kids, but I decided at that point

it was time for me to come to New York and take this challenge out.

Yeah.

Well, you know, we often talk about here on superhero leadership that

our guests and

my own experience is there were times in my life when

people believed in me, sometimes even more than I believed in myself.

They saw something in me.

They saw something in our guests like yourself

and

gave us a break, gave us a push in some cases.

And the rest is history.

We often want to make the point with our listeners, with our viewers, that very often take a risk.

You have nothing to lose.

You know, if someone wants to support you and you're not even sure you can live up to

that promise, go for it.

That's right.

Our mutual friend Dan Buckley actually did that with me

with starting the business when I did.

And,

you know, he saw something in me that I didn't see in myself.

And

he was certainly a major influence in me taking that step into entrepreneurship.

Yeah.

So for people listening and viewing, Dan Buckley is a senior executive at Marvel Entertainment.

He's been there a long time.

He is the publisher of the comic books, but he's also involved in other

media efforts for Marvel.

And

he

has worked with John

to

create, and you might want to talk about this, John, to create some very unique promotional experiences

for

fans and for players in the leagues, coupled with the Marvel characters.

And that came along pretty early on in my entrepreneurial journey.

I left the NFL.

There was really nothing meaningful at the time being done for former players.

So I would be working with current players and then they weren't working for the company anymore.

So

there wasn't anywhere to send them.

So while I was creating that,

I was open to other ideas.

And I had integrated an educational technology to help athletes with retention that I had came across.

And we were having lunch one day, telling him about it.

He said, hey,

we're building out MarvelKids.com.

Maybe this could work.

So we did a little bit of that.

And then this movie Iron Man came along, which is pretty good.

And he said, hey, we're going to go all in on this studios thing, which was a pretty smart idea.

But he said, I've always, he and a couple of the other executives there were always,

they love sports.

And, you know, back in the day, you had to kind of sit in the closet and read your comic books if you were an athlete.

But he had this idea of kind of bringing the worlds together.

So I knew a lot of people in sport.

I said, hey, we'll give it a try.

And, you know, it started off slow.

We were just figuring out a few things, you know, did something with the Philadelphia Eagles and the Miami Dolphins.

And it turned into last year, we had over 200 activations across sport.

You know, we worked, we've worked with everybody from the New York Giants and the New York Yankees to the Eugene Emeralds.

So anytime you see

Marvel show up in sports, like in a stadium celebrating a player characters, we were able to do that.

And now we do that with Mattel with, you know, Barbie and Hot Wheels.

And we're doing some stuff with entertainers.

So

really,

been a really fun building that we got a small team at Ath Life that does that.

You work with literally thousands of athletes to help them make a very important, a life-saving, I'm going to argue, a life-saving transition successfully, easily.

Unfortunately,

being human beings, there are going to be a few cases where it just doesn't work for them.

It may end badly even.

How does that get to you?

Or do you feel feel it when you see that there's a situation occurred with a particular athlete?

It just didn't work for them and the whole situation ended up poorly?

Yeah,

the team of advisors that we have cares very deeply about the work and who they serve.

We also,

you know, philosophically, we're all aligned that we're not going to do something for someone that they wouldn't do for themselves.

So there is a level of teaching that does go on in the process.

And

there are times where people, they need to fail or

as we say, we give advice for a living, you know, and,

you know, there's financial advisors, there's doctors, there's all kinds of people who give advice.

We really want them to take our advice, but they don't always take their advice.

It could be anything from they're applying for the wrong types of jobs or they don't have the credentials for the types of jobs they have or their resume is terrible or they're terrible at interviewing.

and if they won't take the advice then you know the best we can do is is say well that may be one of the things that's getting in your way what i do find though is sometimes somebody goes on and maybe things work for them maybe they don't or they come back and they say you know what i did try it my way and it didn't work so i think us holding our ground in terms of philosophically making sure we're rooted in best practices, you know, all of our staff, they're master certified career development specialists by the National Career Development Association.

We're always trying to, you know, educate ourselves and maintain, you know, all the latest education so we can be the best at what we do.

We're learning all about AI and

how that impacts the career transition process.

And to your point, at the end of the day, sometimes people just don't take your advice.

And it hurts your heart.

And,

you know,

we also give ourselves some grace that, you know, we're we can't do everything.

Right.

We often talk about

the role of culture in a successful organization.

And the organization could be any kind.

It could be a for-profit situation.

It could be public company, not public.

It could be a non-profit situation, whatever organization you're talking about.

Culture matters.

And in my situation, because I've done a number of turnarounds of distressed businesses, and I always found going in that the culture was wrong.

That the, and I'll define culture for you, the way I see it.

Culture has two parts.

The first is how we treat each other in the organization and how we treat the people outside the organization as well, as just as important as our own employees.

It could be a client.

It could be a supplier.

It could be an investor.

Whatever form those outsiders take, how we view them and how we value them is very important.

I found in a lot of turnarounds, the culture was all wrong.

It's shockingly all wrong.

And the second part is, okay, what's as part of the culture, what do we need to do to be successful?

What matters?

In our particular business, new products need to be 25% of sales every year.

Okay, how come we don't have a new products organization?

Or we don't have our best people

in new products or what have you.

Your situation is a little bit different because you started the company and you created the culture from day one.

And it sounds like, and this is my question to you, but it sounds like to me it's the same today as it was those years ago when you started it.

Have you had to make any adjustments in culture?

I feel like

who comes into the organization and who is attracted to the organization, they're very service oriented.

I can tell you great stories about how people ended up.

And

ultimately, it's about having a can-do attitude.

It's about having a servant leadership.

You know, that's something I know from, I went to DePaul University and servant leadership was certainly something that I felt I had a piece of that in me, but they really emphasize that from an educational standpoint.

We went through an exercise when COVID hit where I brought in

a friend of mine who was a CMO.

And I had to really dig in with

all the stakeholders, not only people on our team, but people who pay us money to provide a service and helped us write a brand book and went through it with the team and talked about our organizational philosophy and how

there are times where somebody would want to partner with us, but we wouldn't do it because it didn't fall in line with our organizational philosophy and how important that is to us.

And there are some, there's every once in a while we've had somebody come into the organization.

It wasn't a fit, and that's really hard, but it's very evident

when it happens.

And so we've had to move on from a few people, but mostly who people have come in mostly don't leave.

And when they do, they go to a wonderful opportunity.

My old COO is now running athlete services for the USOPC.

So I could brag about all the great people who've come into our organization.

And the people that are there now, I'd say on average, have been there 10 years.

That's great.

Yeah, I think culture is very important.

At Marvel,

the great advantage we had and the reason I always like to say that Marvel was so successful was, yes, we made great movies and published great comic books, but even before that, the culture, the culture was one of,

I would say, we're going to change the rules of the game.

We were not going to make movies the way Hollywood did.

We were not going to publish and create comic books the way other people in the industry did because we could see that various ways we could do it better and in some cases cheaper.

And so we're always looking.

And as a turnaround person, I'm always looking for those opportunities.

And at Marvel, we had a couple of other people on the board who were similar to me, were turnaround types.

And so I had a lot of support for these kinds of changes from the board to change the culture.

Yeah.

And you all did an incredible job with the turnaround coming.

I mean, we remind people sometimes when we're working with them that they were in bankruptcy and that

the incredible turnaround, it went from bankruptcy to selling to Disney to where they are now is in,

again, created the opportunity for us to do, to take all the

the great infrastructure that existed within Marvel and all the incredible IP and storytelling and then, you know, applied in sport.

We had a great run,

but I think it comes back to we were doing things differently,

changing the rules of the game.

I have lots of stories about that.

And

I can remember, you know, I'd have

talent agents calling me and saying, you need to cast so-and-so in your movie.

And so-and-so will cost a lot of money and is a well-known star, male or female.

And I would always always say, all we really care about is the characters

who make the movie.

We need good actors and actresses, and they're going to be behind a mask a lot of the time anyway.

So we hired people that weren't necessarily huge household names, and the rest is history, because today they are household names, many of them.

But we just wouldn't give in.

You know, I can't tell you how many times an agent would say to me, so-and-so can make your movie, meaning just by casting them, they're in it, you're going to have a profitable movie, which I never believed.

It was much more complicated than that.

Yeah, people probably don't remember

that Mr.

Tony Stark prior to being cast was

coming out of a tough time.

Well, I have a story about that.

You know, and Robert Downey Jr.

talked about doing things differently.

So when we cast him as Tony Stark, Iron Man,

his mug shot had been everywhere.

I think it was about three months before.

And needless to say, Hollywood wasn't too excited about hiring him.

And he did it, but he did a screen test for us.

And the board, including myself, and at this point I'm vice chairman of the board of Marvel,

was very reluctant to hire him.

And to the credit of the people running Marvel Studios, they said to us, well, we thought you would feel that way.

We understand.

And we got Robert to screen test.

The screen test, as I recall, was the first seven or eight minutes of the movie.

Okay.

He's in Humvee.

He's smoking a cigarette.

He has a cocktail and he's quipping.

And Robert was, you know, on this, on the script for the first three or four minutes.

And then he just, as he can, he just went off.

And he became Tony Stark.

There are people today who still think he's Tony Stark in real life.

That's right.

Hollywood was in shock when we announced.

And we really felt that there was no better male actor in the world at the time than Robert Downey Jr.

All right, Flash, this was in 2005.

We cast him.

The movie came out in 2007.

It's now 20 years later.

Well, how has he done?

He's doing all right.

That trailer they dropped for

Doomsday.

There were a whole bunch of chairs.

Then there was him just doing this.

It was like 273 million views in a day or something crazy like that.

He's still playing Tony Stark 20 years later.

Yeah.

He

has done great.

He's been on the straight and narrow.

And he's made all these other films outside of Marvel that have done very well.

So I think we're all at Marvel, those of us who are involved, are very proud of that particular moment when we...

the board saw his screen test and said, do it.

And I think sometimes, particularly when you have to make radical changes in an organization,

you have to take a risk and you have to do things differently.

You know, we were talking a little earlier before we started recording and we talked briefly about the fact that

in sports, the best athletes don't necessarily make the best leader.

Sometimes they do, but sometimes they don't.

And so,

you know, leadership doesn't come naturally if you're great great or even good or even average in a particular sport.

It comes,

you know, it comes from other places.

It comes from your life's experiences, what you've learned about other people.

You've learned the instincts of leadership.

And I'm just wondering, you know, are there any lessons you think you've learned in your life that you might want to impart?

to the audience about leadership, about your successes, about your failures.

Yeah, something I've learned and I'm a lifelong learner.

I'm always reading and something I read that really stuck with me is

don't read about a great leader and try to be that leader.

Like different people lead different ways.

You have to do what works for you.

My team would agree that I try to be a point guard, right?

I try to give people opportunities to be successful and give them autonomy.

And, you know, there are times where I'm going to take the shot, right?

But I do try to

lead with empathy, ask questions, listen.

And at the end of the day, someone has to make the decision, right?

So trying to gather as much information and then make the decision.

And I may be wrong and saying to the team, you may agree or disagree, but this is the direction we're going to go.

And I may be wrong and we're going to have to be okay with that.

I do feel like the team does feel valued.

They feel heard and I think that's part of the reason why people stick around.

They're doing very

important and valuable work

in all the verticals, you know, whether it's our foundation or whether it's the athlete services or whether it's the sport and entertainment.

And they're doing impactful work that you know, and it's service work and it reaches a lot of people.

And when you feel valued and you're doing, you know, work that you value and you're not going to get in trouble unless, you know, you go off like way off our philosophy.

But we, you know, we talk about our athlete services.

Like if you're doing something and you're thinking about the person you're serving first, that's defensible

by me and by our partners.

Current or former player might not like it.

But if it falls in line with our philosophical approach, then you're going to have all the cover from me and from our partners because that's part of the conversation we have with our partners is making sure we're all aligned in how we're articulating our value proposition in the market.

One of the things I find again doing turnarounds where things are very difficult, one of the problems often is that the previous leaders were very poor communicators.

They may not have even communicated to the organization at all.

If they did, it was not very often.

And it was inconsistent what they said.

And, of course,

when leaders are inconsistent, they don't say the same thing.

You know,

the organization gets nervous, needless to say.

And so communications

are,

you know, are super important to any organization, whether it's a turnaround or not.

And it sounds to me like you're a regular communicator.

How many people do you have in your organization?

With the athlete services and the entertainment, there's 13.

And then with the foundation, we kind of have it set up differently where

those folks are employed by the schools, by the high schools, and then we help grant fund and support and train them.

So that's over 100 people.

They don't work for us, but certainly have an impact and influence on the work that they do.

Well, they're in effect an advocate for you.

They're an extension.

They are, yeah,

I think they are,

dare I say it, apostles for your company.

Yeah.

In the sense that, you know, and that we talked about how important culture is and what have you.

I think it's very key.

I don't go back, if I can, though, to your early days in life for a minute.

I thought it was very interesting that you had six, five siblings,

and you lived in a trailer.

To start, yeah.

Yeah.

And so you had a diversity of experiences, it seems to me.

You had to cope with

a lot of different people, a lot of different personalities.

And we find that great leaders have had very diverse lives

in general, as you study.

They may have been geographically diverse, but certainly they dealt with a lot of different personalities with different backgrounds,

both in,

you know, I'd say personal life and professional life.

And I often say that,

and I think you'll relate to this, the greatest gift that my parents gave me and my siblings is we were raised with absolutely no prejudices about anybody.

We never heard anything about someone's color, religion, sexual orientation.

ethnic background or whatever.

I can't think of anyone who deals with a more diverse set of people than you do.

What was the atmosphere you grew up in?

Was it similar to what I had where I just had to figure out who was a good person and a bad person, but had nothing to do with how they were born or what have you?

I grew up and

my mom in particular had us going to church every week.

And I was an altar boy.

I was very.

I was a very devout Catholic, I would say.

And, you know, that's evolved for me.

However, I think the thing that is most important, and I think it's important in any religion, is that, you know, do unto others and treat others with respect and dignity.

And

I feel like I do.

And I think that translates in the business.

I think the most diverse place, the locker room is an incredibly diverse place.

Athletics is very diverse, you know, being in the athletic department, being in the city of Chicago, being on a very diverse campus like DePaul University.

It is considered one of the more diverse college campuses in the country.

So I've had that exposure through sport and through life, then obviously living in New York City.

And even now we moved out to Huntington, New York, and Long Island, where my kids are the minority in the school.

And they go to public school and we're having our kids

in the same way experience this is what the world is going to look like when you're older.

And this is the world that we live in.

Me and my wife both work in very diverse environments.

And

being able to, whether it was with my brothers and sisters negotiating over that, you know, the second helping of dinner or in the locker room, you know, dealing with a guy who grew up on the south side of Chicago in a really tough neighborhood.

You know, being able to communicate effectively with them and build relationships is something, I think that's something that

is one of my superpowers, if you will.

Well, I love that, actually.

You know,

when we talk about leadership again, and I do speeches around the world and what have you, and

my themes right now are twofold.

The first is that we simply have less good leadership in the world than ever.

And just turn on the news.

I don't care what your political leanings are.

It doesn't matter.

It's chaos in many cases.

And it's not just the U.S.,

it's everywhere.

And

I think that's very important.

The second, you know,

and what do we do about that?

But the second theme is that young people are not learning leadership.

And why not?

And what can we do as parents, as grandparents, as well, young people can do for themselves to learn leadership?

My website is petercunio

cu Neo.com.

And I have a list of 15 things I recommend for young people, starting at age five, by the way, and going up to age 30,

to breed the instincts of leadership.

Because

the only way, in my mind, you really learn leadership, and I appreciate people are listening to us and watching us today, and hopefully we can help with that, with what we're doing right now.

90% of learning leadership is face-to-face interactions with a diversity of other people in a diversity of situations.

That's how you learn the instincts.

Leaders, in my mind, are not born.

This phrase about he or she is a born leader drives me crazy sometimes.

It's not that way at all.

And you're talking about your children, and it sounds like they've already, you're probably practicing the things on my list already.

But I think, you know, again, letting your kids be exposed to a world of diversity whatever that brings is really important and it's not happening very often anymore our problem is that young people growing up

don't have the opportunities for face-to-face that you and I had part of the problem is technology you can't learn anything about anyone off of a cell phone and in fact cell phones can be poisonous the opposite problem as we all know unfortunately a zoom call is nice and i i'm on on three or four Zoom calls a day, you know, and that's fine with people I already know.

But most of the time, I'm actually meeting new people, and I don't pretend that I really know them from a Zoom call at all.

So

Zoom calls are very useful, you know, for conducting business and so on, but you're not really going to learn much from the person on the other end of the call.

So I think it's about that.

It's about

we have over-parenting, in my opinion, in this country.

Sometimes people call it gentle

parenting.

Parents, for some reason, want to be a friend to their kids, not a parent.

And

one of the things I say in my speeches is, let your children fail.

That's right.

The problem with most young people, and this is not their fault, and it's really, in a way, I don't mean to demean parents, because they're very well-meaning.

They're very loving.

They think this is the right thing to do.

No one wants to make your child unhappy on purpose or whatever.

But the way young people prosper is they learn their strengths and their weaknesses.

We're all human beings.

We all, by definition, have some weaknesses.

And if you learn early enough in life to know yourself, you know your strengths.

But you discover your weaknesses and you can work to get better or you can avoid.

Either way might be appropriate for a certain weakness.

But the kids today, a lot of them don't get that because they're never allowed to fail.

They're never allowed to make even the most minuscule decision on their own.

You know, and no matter what goes wrong, it's not their fault.

You didn't make the elite

the sports team, it's the coach's fault.

You got a bad grade on a test in school, it's the teacher's fault.

You're great.

And it may be the coach's fault or the teacher's fault, but guess what?

Life isn't perfect.

That's right.

You're going to get, dare I say it, screwed from time to time.

We all have been in life.

It just happens.

Yeah, those are sometimes good life lessons, you know, and we see this with our kids that,

you know, we encourage them to get online, to get offline, right?

Use it to find the opportunities to get out there.

And I will say,

my wife does a great job of balancing that, you know, and the kids do get out there.

And, you know, we bought a house with a big yard so the kids would be out there and they do use it.

And I see what you say that we talk to the athletes we're working with, like, can't just keep hitting apply on LinkedIn.

You need to find those connections on LinkedIn, get coffee with them, go out and have lunch.

Yes.

Interact with them so they can cut through the paper to get to the people.

So,

and yeah, and

that is a challenge sometimes we get when we get an athlete that,

you know, between the parent and the coach in the school and the team, the professional team, so much has been done for them that they hadn't had to go and do some of these things on their own.

And it's not all of them.

You know, we have some, you know, we were talking earlier about You know,

we have 47 former NFL players getting their doctoral degree.

And even though though they have scholarship money

that they've collectively bargained,

they're still doing this.

And they're in their 40s and sometimes their 50s.

And I got to tell you,

that's an amazing, like the commitment that they're making is an amazing commitment.

Like, I don't have time to do that right now, but yet they're finding time to do it.

They're getting master's degrees.

They're finishing undergrad degrees.

They're getting,

you know, certifications and real real estate and financial advisors.

So there are some people doing wonderful things.

And one of the challenges is sometimes when you transition from being a player, let's say you did take care of all your money and you got $10 million in the bank.

You're still going to do something, right?

So figuring out what they're going to do and not spending

years figuring that out because then you're spending money and not making money.

Then you lack that sense of purpose.

So

there are people doing wonderful things,

former players, and there's some that do struggle.

And I think it does trickle down, you know, through our foundation, we work with a lot of high school athletes.

Very few of them make it to college and very few of them make it to the pro.

I can count maybe on one hand, the number of pros who then are connected back to the work we did, you know, through our foundation.

We see really, really positive and we do see some of the things that you talk about where

some of the kids really struggle and

a lack of leadership.

So

we do a lot of leadership programming with our foundation to try to build that as well.

But that's going to be, you know, that work's going to continue for a while.

I want to make it clear that I'm not knocking parents per se.

It is much harder to be a parent than it was, say, when I was a parent or my parents.

I mean, basically,

My life growing up was more or less, my father was a lieutenant at New York City Fire Department.

My mother was an emt

and so they worked and they were give back type people but basically

you know and i did play sports and so on and whatever but essentially it was do your homework get back here for dinner at six o'clock at night get out there that was that was it yeah it's not managing the devices and i mean and yeah i mean our kids they have

you know, sports after school.

They might have a little time to do their homework in between.

And then it's dinner, homework and then you know lately I've been with my kids they give them a little break and then we're doing more math we're playing catch-up I really feel like that the homeschooling during COVID I mean the statistics say that a lot of kids kind of got behind and and I see it with my with my older kids that some of their foundational math skills are so we put in that extra work because again, I could point to

there's nothing I can do about what happened there.

What we can do is say we can either solve this or not.

So we spend the time doing that together, but it takes a lot of work.

You know, it's exhausting after a day of work, to be honest with you, to do that.

But,

you know,

to your point about like having to navigate all of these other inputs that are coming in that I certainly didn't have as a kid.

We didn't get cable TV till I was like eighth or ninth grade, right?

So I didn't even have that distraction.

I see how hard it is being a kid.

So

the social pressures on the kids, too, are worse than ever.

And so, look, it's a real challenge for parents.

They want to do the right thing.

So I understand it.

But

if your kids,

anyone's kids, grandkids, kids, whatever, can learn to be effective leaders, they're going to crush it because they're not going to have a lot of competition.

Unfortunately, I hope what I'm saying is wrong.

Believe me, I do.

But

again, I would encourage all all our listeners and

people that are actually watching

our podcast that

go and take a look at the list that we have on petercunio.com that we recommend.

I think it'll be pretty clear.

I don't think there's too much on it.

It's a surprise.

To some, let your kids fail is a surprise, but you know, there's some others.

But for the most part,

they'll get it.

Just a good reminder, too, sometimes you get caught in it.

The easy thing to do is to do something for the kid.

And you're tired and it's been a long day and I could do that, whatever for you.

But, you know, if you can stick with

some of the, to your point, like not doing for them, my work has actually influenced my parenting, right?

Me not doing for my kids what they can do for themselves, just like with the athletes, not doing for them what they can do for themselves.

And that's harder.

I remember I had, we had hired somebody who said, man, it would just be easier just to do the resume for them.

Like, that's not what we do.

They have to own it.

So that way, they can speak to it in the interview and they can modify it later.

Otherwise, you're going to be doing this for them all along.

And they're all capable.

They just haven't been challenged to take ownership of their own, you know.

So, trying to do that with your kids, I find that actually harder.

And have to remind myself of some of those things that I've learned in my day job.

I also on PeterQNio.com, we have something we call the 32 Essentials of Superhero Leadership.

And they are one-liners

about instincts, philosophies, actions that I think I've learned over a long time of being involved in leadership.

I'm a Vietnam veteran.

I was a leader in college and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

I also recommend these to people who are current leaders, who want to get better, or or people aspiring to leadership.

And you can use them, if you're honest with yourself, just as a report card.

You don't need to show it to anyone else.

How are you doing?

And people often ask me,

I started this over 20 years ago, and people sometimes say, so you must give yourself an A on everyone.

And unfortunately, I have to admit, no.

I'm not an A on everyone.

I'd love to be, but there's some of them, the best I can do is a C.

I have have my various human flaws

and sometimes, you know, I have to fight them.

And just getting a passing grade is really just about all I'm going to be able to do.

Well, and being honest about those and surrounding yourself with people who aren't afraid to like

remind you that maybe, you know, that's not the thing you're best at.

So I got this one.

Well, you know, again, one of the 32 says,

find people who will tell you the truth even when it hurts that's right and i think that's number 11 or something i may not have the number right but a lot of the things that you've mentioned actually apply directly to that list i was thinking before did john read the list for oh i i did

i don't feel better now i don't remember i don't remember but uh but yeah i do i embrace lifelong learning and i'm always uh okay good yeah i'm always trying to get better yeah

Another one which we've discussed today is remember your failures, forget your successes.

Because I think that people learn much more from their failures if they're, again, honest with themselves

than from your successes.

Well, John, this has been great.

I really appreciate you coming by.

I appreciate being by.

I really enjoyed it very much.

You're actually most of the people we have talked with on this show.

in season one and now starting in season two were people I knew somewhat before.

You and I just just met really face to face today

before we started doing this.

And so

I've really enjoyed it.

You've taught me a few things.

I've been listening very carefully and I really do appreciate it.

I appreciate you having me.

I learned a couple of things about leadership from you today.

Thank you.

So again, thanks so much for being on and the best of luck to you and best of luck to all the professional athletes and the other people that you help.

Thank you.

Thanks again.

That's it for this episode of Superhero Leadership.

I want to thank John Harris for sharing his experiences.

I hope you'll join me again next time.

Until then, stay focused, stay driven, and keep leading like a superhero with purpose, passion, and integrity.

I'm Peter Cuneo.