In 2020, Jrue Holiday was in the middle of the NBA's restart bubble when he made a decision that had nothing to do with basketball: he and his wife, Lauren, a former U.S. women's national soccer team player, pledged the remainder of his season salary — about $5 million — to launch a fund supporting Black-owned businesses and nonprofits in the cities that shaped them.
Holiday has said the decision came from a simple realization: he had resources most people around him didn't, at a moment when a lot of people needed help. So he used them. Since then, the Jrue and Lauren Holiday Social Impact Fund has distributed more than $5.3 million in grants and delivered hundreds of hours of coaching to nearly 200 businesses across the country — work that earned Holiday the NBA's Social Justice Champion award and the Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Trophy.
He didn't slow down to do it. He won an NBA championship in 2021, made multiple All-Defensive teams, and kept building the fund the entire time. The two things happened together, not in sequence.
That's the model. You don't have to choose between excellence and generosity, or wait until one is finished to start the other. Do the work. Give as you go. Let both compound.