Baylor graduate Todd Etter, who is one of the founding employees and partner of the non-traditional investment advice company known as the Motley Fool, spoke to students and faculty about the lessons learned from setbacks and failures. Etter was on campus as part of Baylor's Alumni Speaker Series.
"How a person handles adversity is the greatest character builder that I know of. A person can succumb to his defeats, or rise up, conquer his fears, and reach a level of success even higher," Etter said.
"During the course of your life, if you haven't failed at anything, you've done something wrong. Because if we live in constant avoidance of failure, we become tentative, predictable, stale. If we eliminate failure from our lives, we also eliminate creativity, risk-taking, and innovation. Failure is not the opposite of success, it is a by product of success."
Etter currently serves as Creative Director for the Motley Fool, which he helped jumpstart along with brothers David and Tom Gardner. The business has evolved from a newsletter with a few hundred subscribers to a forum reaching millions of people every month.
In addition to its online presence, the Motley Fool column is carried in 200 newspapers and its radio show can be heard on more than 135 stations nationwide. It appears on the business section of the Chattanooga Times Free Press on Wednesdays and Sundays.
Etter was valedictorian of Baylor's class of '86 and won a Jefferson Scholarship to the University of Virginia. He graduated from there in 1990 and was working for a consulting firm in systems programming when he decided to help with the Motley Fool venture.
He is the son of Baylor's veteran baseball coach Gene Etter, and Eddie Etter, who is also on staff in the school's athletic department. He is the grandson of well-known former football coach E.B. "Red" Etter.