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Fortune has a very good article on Emmitt Smith and his passion for real estate investing and development. Many of us think we are committing to excellence in our fields, but you read about Emmitt and all the successes he has had, he was always pushing to learn more and develop himself to be better.

Inviting himself to the table and learning from successful real estate business men who charted the same course as he has, such as Jerry Jones and Roger Staubach, Emmitt learned the business before he took the plunge. That is a great lesson to keep in the front of your mind.

Smith/Cypress is a joint venture (Smith owns 51 percent) with Cypress Equities, the retail development arm of Staubach’s real estate services company. Early in his own playing career, Smith approached the former Cowboy quarterback with an interest in learning more about real estate. Skeptical at first, Staubach told Smith to spend some time at his company’s offices during the spring and summer if he was sincere.
“I was 27 with three kids when I was a rookie,” Staubach says, sitting in an office with nary a trinket that would tell you its inhabitant is an NFL icon. “My motivation to work during the off-season was to make sure that if I got hurt I could take care of my kids. Today’s athletes make so much money they don’t have to work. You’ve got to pay the price to get anything in life.” 

Smith typically arrives in his office just down the hall before 9 A.M., but he convinced Staubach long ago that he brings more than star power to the job. “He has the leadership skills to build a real business,” Staubach says. “Someday he may come in here and say ‘I’m buying you guys out.’”  via Fortune

And with Jerry Jones, Smith did very much the same thing.

Smith was pondering the endgame of his career while other young players were still discussing their next extravagant purchase. Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, who made his own fortune (estimated to be about $1 billion, give or take) in real estate, recalls Smith approaching him early during the player’s career with a unique request: Could he observe Jones “doing business” in order to see how a successful entrepreneur conducted himself?

“During breaks in practice he’d sit on a couch in my office and just watch me talk on the phone,” Jones recalls. “He was soaking it all up and figuring out ways he could put what he heard to work.” Jones says Smith’s request reminded him of, well, himself, when as a young man he traveled to the now defunct American Football League meetings and sat in the lobby in hopes he’d “brush into” Lamar Hunt, one of the league’s founders (who died in December). “I was 23, 24 years old and was starting to think the opportunity to get into pro football had passed me by. But you’ve got to have the vision. More than any player I’ve had, Emmitt has always had a vision.”

Smith recalls another encounter with Jones in which he wrote down a list of all the goals he wanted the owner to help him achieve. He handed the list to Jones and asked him to check the ones he thought were doable. “He looked at the list and checked every one,” Smith recalls. “He said, ‘We’ll get to some of these now, and some of these later, but we’ll get to all of them.’ I’ll always appreciate that.”

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