Kareem: 20 Things I Wish I’d Known When I Was 30

1. Be more outgoing. My shyness and introversion from those days still  haunt me. Fans felt offended, reporters insulted. That was never my intention.  When you’re on the public stage every day of your life, people think that you  crave attention. For me, it was the opposite. I loved to play basketball, and  was tremendously gratified that so many fans appreciated my game. But when I was  off the court, I felt uncomfortable with attention. I rarely partied or attended  celebrity bashes. On the flights to games, I read history books. Basically, I  was a secret nerd who just happened to also be good at basketball. Interacting  with a lot of people was like taking someone deathly afraid of heights and  dangling him over the balcony at the top of the Empire State Building. If I  could, I’d tell that nerdy Kareem to suck it up, put down that book you’re using  as a shield, and, in the immortal words of Capt. Jean-Luc Picard (to prove my  nerd cred), “Engage!”

2. Ask about family history. I wish I’d sat my parents down and asked  them a lot more questions about our family history. I always thought there would  be time and I kept putting it off because, at thirty, I was too involved in my  own life to care that much about the past. I was so focused on making my parents  proud of me that I didn’t ask them some of the basic questions, like how they  met, what their first date was like, and so forth. I wish that I had.

3. Become financially literate. “Dude, where’s my money?” is the  rallying cry of many ex-athletes who wonder what happened to all the big bucks  they earned. Some suffer from unwise investments or crazy spending, and others  from not paying close attention. I was part of the didn’t-pay-attention group. I  chose my financial manager, who I later discovered had no financial training,  because a number of other athletes I knew were using him. That’s typical athlete  mentality in that we’re used to trusting each other as a team, so we extend that  trust to those associated with teammates. Consequently, I neglected to  investigate his background or what qualified him to be a financial manager. He  placed us in some real estate investments that went belly up and I came close to  losing some serious coin. Hey, Kareem at 30: learn about finances and stay on  top of where your money is at all times. As the saying goes, “Trust, but  verify.”

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