NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland – During a candid and at times humorous Convention keynote address Wednesday, CNN’s Soledad O’Brien shared with a near-capacity crowd how her experiences as an NCAA student-athlete influenced her life.

As a track and field, lacrosse and rugby student-athlete at Harvard, O’Brien said she picked up far more than techniques to improve her athletics performance.

“The coaches made me learn about process and that has been applicable to everything I’ve done in life since,” she said. “Coaches teach you that the getting there is even more important than the end goal of winning – that natural talent is certainly part of the equation but not the main part. It’s buckling down and doing the work that has far more correlation to success on the field, off the field and in life.”

Drawing on an engaging mix of personal and professional stories, the popular television anchor and special correspondent stressed the importance of mentoring and encouraging others – and of resisting pressure to stray from core values. O’Brien, whose mother is Cuban and whose father is Australian, also talked about the importance of diversity.

“Diversity is critical in all we do because when the face of the game changes – whether it’s the television game or the presidential game or the golf game – so many people who didn’t think they had a chance get opportunities, and they get those opportunities because it opens their minds to those opportunities,” O’Brien said. “When hard work and perseverance are the key messages, not what you look like, that is critical and requires different thinking about the same old stories.”

O’Brien worked in television news in Boston and San Francisco before joining MSNBC. Since joining CNN in 2003, she has covered a variety of stories and was part of the groundbreaking “CNN Presents: Black in America,” investigating the life for black America 40 years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. She also covered Hurricane Katrina and the tsunami in Phuket, Thailand.