April 16, 2008 11:58AM

My Notes From UNM Student Recognition Speech: “Dream Big”

By Cody Willard

It was quite a rush being treated so nicely with an entourage and outpouring of support as soon as I’d landed in Albuquerque last Thursday.  I spoke in front of students during a lunch break in the Anderson School of Management and then even jumped headfirst and gave my “Flip It’ lessons from whatever the students in a micro-economics and a commercial banking class were currently working on.  (I think I might have destroyed some perfectly good young minds.)  I got a little rest and then had a wonderful dinner in Nob Hill and then gave about a 10-15 minute speech at the University of New Mexico Student Recognition Reception.  They asked me to talk about success.  I angled the speech with the idea that you gotta “Dream Big and Never Let It Go”.  I ad libbed the speech, but here are the notes I wrote on my Blackberry on the flight there:

August 1996 and I am trying to figure out what I am going to be when I grow up (come to think of it, I am still trying to figure that out in April 2008) as I am just a few days away from graduating at this heavily tax-dollar subsidized university.

I figure I have three main choices -

1. Go to europe and try to extend my basketball career which had for all practical purposes expired under the evil tutelege of former lobo coach Dave Bliss.  Fact was I was sick of being known as an athlete my whole life anyway, and I felt it was time to let go of that dream. And find another.

2. Join the naval academy and serve my country.  But it was 1996 and the US was in a historically unique time of peace…which lead me to option three.

3. I could break up with my girlfriend, leave everything I’d ever known behind and go to the center of the universe to take on the world (why we don’t go to the center of the world to take on the world is a point you guys can discuss on your own later). 

My parents and everybody I knew here thought it made no sense to walk away from the six figure real estate appraisal partnership in Ruidoso to go to nyc with no prospects for a job.  Nobody could understand why I’d choose to go live with rats and roaches in harlem and brooklyn with a matress on the floor, not having a single connetion to the city or even the biz of wall street.

But I decided I could go to nyc and take on wall street in large part because I wanted to start from scratch - wanted to prove to myself that I could take on the world.  I told my mom I was heading to the big apple to become a wall street rock star. My mom asked what the heck that meant.  I didn’t have an answer - still don’t, really.

Any major success I have had in my career - and life in general, I might add - has come hard. It’s come only after being totally true to my own thoughts and goals - being independent.   But thinking free thoughts isn’t enough of course (as an aside, is there such a thing as a thought expense?  Does our brain have a balance sheet?).

But thinking free thoughts isn’t enough of course, you also have to act on those thoughts and independent goals.  You have to take risks and see the long term and constantly be putting more wheels in motion towards those goals.

And then, most importantly - you’re gonna have to persevere, man.  Its going to suck.  A lot.  Your life, your career, your family, your lover (lovers) - it will seem, as it probably does right now if I had to guess - that the whole world is conspiring against you.  You’ll have to deal with losses - emotional, financial, logistical. The losses are part of the risk.  And there will ALWAYS be losses.  Always.

I could tell you about some of the things that have gone right over the last dozen years.  But more meaningful to you should be my stories of things gone wrong.

A year after starting at my first job in nyc at the first starbucks there, I had gotten my foot in the door at a big wall street firm and gone from a $24k salary to quitting my job the day I got a $24k pay check and a million dollar offer.  I didn’t like what I was doing.

It was hard over the next year as I spent all that money supporting myself as I wrote the great American novel as I trekked across europe (why we don’t go to america to write the great American novel is something you guys can discuss later).  That novel not only never got published, I sent out 80 query letters to agents and publishers and not even one ever read it.

The day before I started my hedge fund in 2002 I was in Jim Cramer’s office, literally crying because both my two biggest seed investors backed out on me.  Without my oldest friend in the world, and NM native, Neil Patrick Harris, my hedge fund wouldn’t have been built up to what it eventually was. 

I quickly made my partners a bunch of money.  Only to lose those gains.   There are always gonna be losses.  The day Nortel admitted fraud in 2004, my Wall Street career could have ended.  I spent hours in the bathroom puking in pain that day - and woke most days to that sickness for the next I don’t know how many months as I persevered through those losses and we made the money all back and more.

Did I mention we’d closed the telecom company I was working at on September 4, 2001, and I lived through and lost my home on 9/11?  Like I said perseverance is key, because life is really and truly gonna suck sometimes.

There just aren’t any haircuts, er, I mean short cuts, at least there haven’t been for me in any, ANY, of any success I might have had in my life.

One more parting thought, and this one is as much for me as for any of you.  I am so thrilled and tremendously honored to be here tonight talking to you guys.  But I don’t frankly consider myself or my career successful yet.  Not even close. I got lots of big dreams still.

Dream big and never let it go.