The Biography of Kobe Bryant

1. 0:00 – 4:10

   Introduction: Belief Before Ability and "Kobe Is Crazy"

   1. DSDavid Senra0:00

      In the midst of the chaos of his third season, Bryant was a very lost, lonely, frustrated 20-year-old. "I just want to be the man," he told me, reaffirming his goal of making himself into the NBA's top player. "I don't know how I'm gonna get there. I just have to find a way." And he would, despite how unlikely such a goal seemed at that time. As he closed in on the end of his career, Bryant could look back at the numbers he racked up in 20 seasons and declare that he had earned a seat at the table with the game's greatest players. Though that night he said he didn't know how he would get to the top, he had settled in on an answer that he had known all along. He was gonna grind his way there, implacably, relentlessly grind away at the challenges of the game night after night, game after game, until he found a dominance born of his ability to outwork everyone else. He is easily the most driven competitor in the history of the game, one who over the seasons quietly gained a reputation among the insiders of the sport as an absolute master of study and intense preparation, with a singular focus on detail that astonished those around him. In turn, his life also proved to be a machine that churned out immense conflict, just about all of it the byproduct of his push to dominate the sport. Night after night, day after day for two decades, through injury and turmoil, through the rupture of one key relationship after another, there would be no price he would not pay to have his greatness. What follows in this book is my effort to capture his fascinating story, in many ways a cautionary tale. That was an excerpt from the book that we talked about today, which is this giant 600-page biography that I'm holding in my hand. It's called Showboat: The Life of Kobe Bryant, and it was written by Roland Lazenby. So in addition to reading this book, I also watched and then took notes on this new documentary on the Redeem Team, which is the 2008 Olympic basketball team that Kobe was on. And I think I'll quote some notes from the podcast, but I'm also gonna put all the notes that I took while watching the documentary in the show notes. So I want to start an introduction with a few themes that you and I have discussed a few times, and the first thing is that belief comes before ability, and I think most people mistakenly reverse the order. And we see this demonstrated because way before he even gets to the NBA, Kobe believed that he was gonna be one of the greatest basketball players to ever live. From his teen years, Kobe Bryant had been shockingly bold in his prediction that he's gonna make himself the greatest basketball player ever. At every turn, this is gonna be a second theme that you and I have discussed over and over again, when you have a giant goal for your life, other people around you are not going to be able to under- understand that. That is an extremely rare trait, and so as a result, they're gonna be extremely dismissive, and many times they'll call you crazy. The word Kobe is crazy, the phrase cozy, Kobe is crazy is repeated over and over and over again in this book. So it says, "At every turn, his declarations of future greatness have been met with head-shaking and raised eyebrows because such dreams are ludicrous. They're impossible to fulfill. 'Kobe is crazy,' the people around him concluded time and time again with a laugh." And this next paragraph is happening, I think Kobe's around 12 years old. So his dad played in the NBA. In many cases, we're gonna talk a lot about that actually, the fact that you can always understand the son by the story of his father, and that the story of the father is embedded in his son. His dad, in many ways, is the anti-Kobe. He made it to the NBA, but lacked discipline, started doing a bunch of drugs, had problems with alcohol, had problems with gambling, and soon no team in the NBA wanted him, so he winds up having to, uh, play in Italy. And it says, "Since a young age, when he rode on bus trips with his father's second-tier Italian league team, he promised the old man and his father's teammates that he was going to be far better than either of them. Bryant's existence has been a singular, almost inhuman pursuit of that greatness."

2. 4:10 – 5:40

   His Father Joe Bryant: The Anti-Kobe

   1. DSDavid Senra4:10

      So basketball was a lifelong obsession with Kobe. It starts even at a very early age. At four years old, his dad is taking him to NBA games because he's still playing in the NBA at this time, and he said, this is a quote from his dad, "I've taken Kobe to Lakers games and introduced him to the players. He's a huge Magic Johnson fan." And this is the first hint that his father is the anti-Kobe. And really, this is just disgusting level of irresponsibility from, coming from a father. I think at this point he's got two daughters, and I think Kobe is the youngest, and look what he does. So his father's playing for the Houston Rockets at the time, and it says, "In his last season, uh, he played 81 games. The one game he missed made headlines when he went bust in an all-night poker game and didn't have money for a cab to make the team bus. After that season, it became clear that absolutely no one in the NBA wanted the Jellybean anymore." The Jellybean was, uh, his dad's nickname. "He was just 28 and in his prime years as a player. Looking back much later, Jerry West would observe he threw away his career." And so there's several stories in this book about how irresponsible and, like, the bad decisions that his father makes. If you put Kobe and his father on a spectrum, all the way on the left, you would have his father, like, uh, doing cocaine. In one case he, he gets pulled over by the cops. I think he's dr- he's also drinking and driving, and he, he takes off. They stop him, and then he, like, leads them on a high-speed chase, then winds up crashing his car, gets arrested, and in the car they find not only another woman, but several vials of cocaine. And so on one end of the spectrum, you have that level of behavior, and then on the far other end of the spectrum, it's almost like Kobe's insane level of dedication was, like, overcompensation for the bad decision-making of his father.

3. 5:40 – 9:35

   Learning in Italy: Fundamentals and Studying the Greats

   1. DSDavid Senra5:40

      So let's go to a description of Kobe when he's eight years old. He's playing at a basketball camp. The family's already moved to Italy at this point, and this is how his teammates were describing him: "No smiles, very determined. He was always so serious about everything he did as far as sports. Always so intense. He was eight years old. The rest of the kids just wanted to play, and he was like, 'I want to win.'" And so later in life, Kobe talks about the benefit of learning how to play basketball in Italy and the fact that he thought it gave him an edge. And so this part was especially great because spread out over two pages is a bunch of different ideas. And the note I left myself here is he's laying out a blueprint and there's four parts to it. Master the fundamentals, improve your weaknesses, study the greats, and concentrate. And so he says, "I started playing basketball over there," meaning Italy, "which was great because I learned the fundamentals first. Most kids who grow up in America learn all the fancy dribbling. In Italy, they teach you true fundamentals and leave out all that other nonsense." And so I've told this story before on, on past episodes, but I think it's worth repeating here. Shortly before he died, one of the last conversations he had with Michael Jordan, and we're gonna get to Jordan today a lot because he's a, a main character in this book as well. Jordan and Kobe are on the phone because this idea about just forget the fancy stuff, master the fundamentals at a deep, deep level is something Kobe repeated a bunch. It's in the book, it's in interviews with him. And so he calls up Michael Jordan and he's talking about the way they're teaching his daughter how to play basketball. And he thought that they were prioritizing like fancy stuff over fundamentals, so he calls up Jordan. He's like, "Hey, I'm trying to figure... Like, I'm trying to... I'm having a hard time remember- remembering what I was learning when I was 12 on how to play basketball, but I'm pretty sure it's not all this stuff." And Jordan's response was, "Dude, at 12 I was playing baseball." And so the point Kobe was making in this interview is like, think about that. The greatest player to ever live hadn't even picked up a basketball yet. Your 12-year-old doesn't need all this other fancy stuff. Just focus on the fundamentals. So back to the book. It says, "Throughout his career, if he was deficient in something, Bryant would display the work ethic to build every element of his competitive portfolio with an almost manic insistence." So that's the second part, master the fundamentals, number one. Number two, improve your weaknesses. "He never seemed to stop working at the game, even at that very young age. If he wasn't playing the game, then he was watching videotape of NBA stars." That's number three, study the greats. And then finally number four, "He would show that he had already grasped the powers of concentration." And then we skip ahead and that third part, study the greats, is repeated, I'm not kidding, like a dozen times in this book. And when they're about to describe it, it's exactly what you and I are doing on Founders. Listening to Founders is like watching game tape of history's greatest entrepreneurs. So it says, "Soon Joe," which is his dad, "was subscribing to a service that delivered video of games directly." They're still in Italy at this point. "Joe and Kobe would pore over them together, taking notes of all the key subtleties, the footwork, the various offensive and defensive styles of NBA teams and their stars. 'I used to watch everybody from Magic to Bird to Michael Jordan to Dominique Wil- Wilkins,' Bryant recalled. 'I used to watch their moves and then I'd add them to my game.' It was the beginning of a career-long focus on studying game recordings. He would invest long hours each day in breaking down his own performances and those of opponents, far more than what any other NBA player would ever contemplate undertaking." So there's this guy named Tim Grover who trained both Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, and I heard him in an interview talk about this. And Tim said, "Everybody watched film of the current players. Kobe would get film of players going way back. He would say Jer- he would watch Jerry West, Oscar Robinson. He'd say, 'I wanna see what those guys did to be successful.'" So during the off-season, they'd come home from Italy to Philadelphia, where they're from, and Kobe would play in the Summer League. And one of the counselors of the Summer League tries to give Kobe terrible advice, which is advice a lot of people say, and it's, they say, "Be realistic."

4. 9:35 – 11:16

   The Dream of Being the Exception

   1. DSDavid Senra9:35

      So it says, "One of the counselors was looking over the applications and noticed that under career plans, Kobe had listed NBA. So the counselor made it a point to admonish Kobe. 'Only one in a million make it to the NBA,' the counselor said, 'so you have to plan on a future other than basketball.' 'I'm going to be that one in a million,' Kobe replied. He was 11." And that kind of self-belief and desire to be, quote-unquote, unrealistic is very common in these stories that you and I study. When, when I got to this part, the first thing that came to mind was actually one of my favorite quotes from Jay-Z's autobiography, which I covered back on episode 238, and he's describing like, uh, think about th- like how, quote-unquote, unrealistic Jay-Z's life is. If you were describing it, it sounds like fiction. It's like, okay, well, you're the, the youngest of four children. Uh, you don't have a dad. You're being raised by a single mom. You live in the projects. If you could picture Jay-Z at maybe 15 or 16 years old at this point in his life, the idea that he's gonna get to the top of his profession in an industry that's just beginning, which is the hip hop industry, that he's going to found and sell multiple companies for hundreds of millions of dollars, eventually become a billionaire, and marry one of the most beautiful women on the planet, there's no way anybody would have predicted that at that point in his life, but that actually happened. And so Jay-Z understands it's all the same journey, right? Whether you're playing basketball, you're trying to start a company, you're trying to climb a mountain. He calls it the dream of being the exception. It's perfect. This is what Jay-Z wrote: "There's no way to quantify all that on a spreadsheet, but it's the dream of being the exception." And we see that with Kobe right there. It's like that's nice that all these other people failed at getting to the NBA. Maybe one in a million, that's fine. I'm that one in a million.

5. 11:16 – 15:05

   High School Work Ethic and Raising the Bar

   1. DSDavid Senra11:16

      So then we skip ahead. Now they're living in Philadelphia full time. Kobe is in high school, and we see this legendary work ethic is already present. "That fall in high school, his coach discovered that Bryant had a startling work ethic. He pushed himself through a grueling self-improvement schedule that included road work, weights, and seemingly nonstop basketball. In team practices, he was determined to never lose a team drill or contest. For almost four years, he would maintain a perfect record in that regard." And then we see that he matches a fierce work ethic with a relentless learning machine-like mentality. This is his coach saying, you know, the work ethic's one thing, but he also had a sponge-like mentality to be the best that he could, and to do so, he would absorb information. "I always thought his brain was a sponge," the coach said. "And obviously, if you've ever coached, you know that you just can't say that about all of your players." And then the coach continues to talk about the fact that his level of intensity raised the bar for everybody else. And so this part made me think about one of my all-time favorite Steve Jobs quotes, where he says, "Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected." And so this is his high school coach describing that. Once the- they, meaning his other teammates, saw how hard he worked and how passionate he was about the game, it was hard for them not to get on board with what we were trying to do. And so if you watch that Redeem Team documentary that's on Netflix, they tell a story, and this story went viral. I saw it on a bu- on a bunch of different platforms. And it talks about, hey, they're, they're in Vegas, they're doing, like, a training camp for the Olympic basketball team. All the other players go out to a club, and they say, "Hey, we're com- we had a great time." We come back at 5:30 in the morning back to the team hotel, and we see that Kobe is already working out. And this is what, this is a direct quote from LeBron James, who's very young at this point in his career, and he says, "This motherfucker Kobe was already drenched in sweat. Yeah, he's different." And this was the end result. By the end of the week, the whole team was on Kobe's schedule. So it, what is ex- exactly what is happening at this point in the book, right? He's in high school. He sets the tone with an increased intensity level. His high school teammates match it. That exact same thing happens on the Olympic team. And then back to this section of the book. There's three, th- this is the third idea that's on this page I thought was really important, and it's the importance of maintaining a singular focus. His singularity, the focus, was just in... They're still describing him in high school, but he had this, this trait his entire career. His singularity, the focus was just incredible. I don't know if crazy, there's that word again, is the right word, but he was certainly unique. Next page, still in high school. Then I left myself on this page. This will happen. You can help me or you get out of my way. Kobe Bryant had a clear destination in mind, and if you weren't on board, he had clearly conveyed the idea that he was the sort who wouldn't hesitate to grab you by the collar and throw you right off the train. And if you think about it, it's the s- that's the same idea expressed in a different way. We saw this idea before. If you have ever read Jeff Bezos's biography, The Everything Store. Somebody working with Jeff described him the same way. He said, "If you're not good, Jeff will chew you up and spit you out, and if you are good, he's gonna jump on your back and ride you into the ground." So let's go back to another description of Kobe. He's still in high school. We're still here. Now, keep in mind, he's doing all these crazy workouts, he's dedicated to winning, and when he's not working, he's studying the greats. So it says, "He worked harder than any other kid that I've ever seen." This is the guy that's running the actual summer camp. And he wanted it more than anybody else. And it says, "If you're breaking down tape of Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan," which, which Kobe's doing as a fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen-year-old kid, right? "If you're breaking down tape of Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan and so many other greats, you come to consider them your teachers."

6. 15:05 – 17:39

   Adidas, Nike and Phil Knight's Competitiveness

   1. DSDavid Senra15:05

      So one of the things that makes Kobe's story unique is the fact he jumped right from high school to the NBA. In fact, when he was drafted, his parents had to sign the contract 'cause he was seventeen. And so this book spends quite a bit of time talking about the fact that, hey, you have all these shoe companies like Nike and Adidas, they're playing a huge role in the basketball industry 'cause they're making just so much money. And so Kobe's gonna sign with Adidas, and they're gonna put a lot of resources behind him, making him obviously extremely, like, well-known and making sure that people buy the shoes. But I'm skipping over that part because really what I found so interesting, and what per- personally interesting to me, is if you read Phil Knight's autobiography, Shoe Dog, which I covered for the second time on episode one eighty-six, it's a fantastic... It's one of the best autobiographies of an entrepreneur you can ever get. But you have an indication that he's really competitive in his own words. What I always find interesting is how people say, "No, no, he's even more competitive. Phil Knight is even more competitive than you could possibly imagine." And so I just wanna pull out one paragraph 'cause I thought this was interesting. Jordan and Knight certainly shared a competitive nature that bordered on insanity. If you think Jordan and Kobe are competitive, go meet Phil Knight. He's a no-bullshit competitor. It's, "You play for me, or I can't stand you, and I will kill you." That's Phil Knight, full stop, and he is not shy about it. And so if you wind up buying this book and reading it, read the chapter the, called The Rising. There's a lot more detail about the... It's the early days of Nike, how, how they're competing with Adidas, the amount of money that's involved here. It's actually really fascinating, um, 'cause if you think about it, like, uh, they, they bet their entire marketing budget on Jordan when he was r- he was somewhat known, but not nearly as world famous as he was obviously going to be. But just this idea where you can even think about, like, Jordan the influencer is getting equity forty year- forty years ago. And that was a real important turning point in early Nike history because they gave him a deal that no one else, like Adidas and Converse were courting Jordan as well, but Nike eventually gave him a royalty. So it says neither Adidas nor Converse could come close to matching the Nike deal, which offered an unprecedented royalty on shoes sold. No endorser up until that point had gotten a percentage of profits as Nike had offered Jordan. And so then you fast-forward, I think that's happening in nineteen eighty-four, if I'm not mistaken, and so you fast-forward, you know, forty years, and that deal makes Jordan, you know, a hundred, somewhere around, like, a hundred and fifty million a year today, which sounds crazy and is obviously fantastic for Jordan, but it wound up being an even better deal. The m- the main point of me telling you the story is, like, it sounded crazy at the time, but it wound up being a even better deal for Nike. Okay, so we're still not to the NBA in the story yet. Kobe's still in high school. I wanted to pull this part out 'cause it made me laugh. Kobe's known for playing, engaging in, he believed

7. 17:39 – 20:57

   Mind Games, the Lockout, and Believing He Could Skip College

   1. DSDavid Senra17:39

      in engaging in psychological warfare. He thought you should play mind games with your opponents. And so he's doing this in high school. Uh, so he's gonna call up one of his opponents. The voice on the line said, "Don, what's up?" "Who's this?" Carr said. "It's Kobe. What's up, man? I was just thinking, I'm looking forward to the game." Bryant had heard a rumor that Catholic, which is the team gonna be his opponent, it's the team that Carr, the guy he's playing, uh, calling, pl- is, plays for, okay? So it says Bryant had heard a rumor that Catholic was losing Arthur Davis, who was a top fifty player who partnered with Carr. So Bryant was calling and wanted to know if Davis would still be playing in the upcoming game. Carr already knew that Davis was leaving the school, but he replied that he didn't know. And then this is where the s- y- the psychological warfare jumps out. "I just wanted to see if he's gonna be at the game," Bryant told him. "Because if it's just you, I don't even know if it's worth me coming." Carr was stunned. "He was letting me know," Carr said, "I'm coming to kill you. I'm coming to rip your heart out when you get on the court with me." So something important happens that was outside of Kobe's control, and it's the fact that when he was a senior in high school, he's able to play pickup games against NBA players because the NBA is on a lockout. And this experience boosts his already excessive amount of confidence. So he plays these pickup w- games against NBA players, and this is what he says: "I'm telling you, man, whenever you get a chance to play against these guys, don't be afraid, man. Just play your game. You'll be surprised. They go for all the moves that high school guys go for." And this is important, because at the time, he's like, "Okay, maybe I should go to the NBA." He's thinking, "Maybe I should go to Duke. Maybe I should play in college." Like, he's not entirely sure what to do, and this really pushed him over the edge. It says, "It remained difficult to draw too many conclusions from Bryant's experience working out with pros that summer, except for one impression that really mattered: Bryant's own. He came away thinking that he could do it, that he could play against NBA players right away." And so when I got to this part of the book, it made me think of this ... I've told you before that I have, like, the, these folders on my phone [chuckles] and I save, like, quotes and videos, just as a way to, like, hype myself up and, and, and really brainwash myself. And so one of these things is this video of Larry Bird, a young Larry Bird, specifically talking about this experience, which is very, very similar to what is happening in Bryant's. It's just always amazes me how these things connect together. It's like the same story over and over again. He's like, the book says, he came away thinking that he could do it. He could play against NBA players right away, therefore he could skip college and go right to the NBA, right? So there's this fantastic video I've watched, I don't know, 1,000 times. And Larry Bird is talking and he's like, you know, they, the ... And he's talking essentially about the doubters, right? They're like, "You, you went to a tiny school," uh, y- and so th- that's the background to what I'm about to quote f- him here. He says, uh, "They said, 'You never played against a UCLA or a Notre Dame or an IU.' They said he," meaning Larry, uh, he's talking about himself, "They said he won't be able to get his jump shot off in the pros. He's won't be quick enough. He won't be able to rebound. It took me three days after rookie camp. I found out, hey, this league is nothing. I can play in this league, and I will dominate in this league." And that is so important, 'cause he's like, "Wait, everyb- everybody, all what the critics were telling me," this is a critics don't know shit that you and I have talked about over and over again, right? The critics are saying I can't do this. I get to the NBA, I'm playing against other NBA players, like, no, I can do this and I'm actually way better than them, too. I absolutely love, love that video.

8. 20:57 – 23:13

   Outworking Everyone: Training Schedules and Obsession

   1. DSDavid Senra20:57

      And then we go back into Kobe's work ethic. Again, it's not just saying, "Hey, I'm, I'm good enough." No, it's like you have to back that up, and you should be putting in the work to do so. He says, "Man, let me tell you something. That's when I first saw it." This is one of, uh, th- his high school teammates. Uh, or in, the other high school players in this camp that he's in. Uh, he's, he's a, Kobe's a senior in high school. "We worked out twice a day. We would start at 10:00 in the morning. Kobe was there at 8:00. We'd get done at 12:00. Kobe would stay till 2:00. We'd start again at 7:00 at night. Kobe would be there at 5:00. We'd finish at 9:00. He'd stay till 11:00. Every day. None of the pros were doing that." And so when I got to that part, I thought about another video that I saved. And this is Kobe actually talking about how to get an edge, which can be applied to any domain, right? He says, "Your job is to be the best you can be. You wanna train as much as you can, as often as you can. Imagine you wake up at 3:00, you train 4:00 to 6:00. Relax, now you're back at it again, 9:00 to 11:00. Relax, now you're back at it again, 2:00 to 4:00. Relax, now you're back at it, 7:00 to 9:00. Look at how much more training I have done just by starting at 4:00. As the years go on, the separation that you have with your competitors and peers just grows larger and larger. By year five or six, it doesn't matter what work they do in the summer," which is when most other players do, like, their, their training and try to, to focus on improving their game, right? So he says, "By year five or six, it doesn't matter what work they do in the summer. They'll never catch up." And this is just a quote from his AAU coach at this time. "Kobe's a genius in basketball. He studied the game harder than anyone else has ever studied the game." The note I left myself on this page, how many high school seniors are this focused, part one. Being, talking about the girl he's dating in high school, being Kobe Bryant's girlfriend at that age meant lots of evenings at Bryant's house watching basketball videos. A few pages later, how many high school seniors are this focused, part two. One day just before pr- uh, practice, the team was informed that it couldn't use the gym because there was flooding. 14 guys, practice had to be called off. 14 guys just sprinted out of there, high-fiving each other, excited about no practice. "This is bullshit," Bryant screamed, slamming a ball on the floor. "This is bullshit. We've got to practice. I want to practice. This is ridiculous."

9. 23:13 – 26:23

   Imitation, Jordan's Influence, and Passing Down Knowledge

   1. DSDavid Senra23:13

      Okay, so now we get to the point where Kobe is, is going to the NBA. He's already made the decision, and this part is really important to understand, is that imitation precedes creation. This is something I learned from Stephen King, that it is perfectly normal for you to imitate other people before you create something unique. That is fundamental to the human experience, and we're seeing that here because Kobe is spending so much time. He's idolizing Michael Jordan. He's watching his game tape. He's studying over and over again. And so it says, "They were struck by how much Bryant was beginning to play the part of the next Jordan. His head was shaved, just like Jordan. He talked just like Jordan. He had adopted many of Jordan's mannerisms. He's 17." And later on in the book, I'm pretty sure I have a highlight where Jordan is just like, "Stop this nonsense. Like, this is perfectly normal. Kobe copied me just like I copied the people before me." He's like, and Jordan even says, "That's how human beings learn." And so one of the promoters that's w- I think working at Adidas, if I'm not mistaken, is, is talking about this. It says, uh, his name's Michael Harris. So he says, uh, he, yeah, um, he's talking to Kobe about this. He says, "Kobe had a closet at home filled with critical research. It held all these VHS tapes of Michael's games." I wrote founders and then exclamation points, because essentially like you're walking around in your pocket with a podcast that does this for you, right? "Kobe had a closet at home filled with critical research. It held all these VHS tapes of Michael's games. He'd pull them out and study them and do the moves. 'Look at what I added,' Bryant would say, and then he would do a move." I think it's important to sit here and pause on this because this is not unique to Kobe, right? If you've seen The Last Dance, which is a fantastic documentary you should watch over and over again, the, the, the, the episode where Kobe appears in The Last Dance right before he tragically dies, right? He says something, I, it gives me goosebumps. Like, I'm not, I'm not kidding. And he says, "I truly hate having discussions on who would win one-on-one or fans coming up to me saying, 'Hey, Kobe, you'd beat him, Kobe.'" And he says, "I'm like, 'Yo,'" and he puts his hands up like, "Hey, stop. What you get from me..." I'm getting goosebumps now. "What you get from me is from him. I don't get five championships without him because he guided me so much and gave me so much great advice." That happens in entrepreneurship too. If you listen to episode 107, which is the biography of Sol Price, everybody knows the business Costco. The founder of Costco is this guy named Jim Sinegal. Jim Sinegal started working for Sol Price when he was like, I think he was a teenager, and later on, I think this is after Sol Price passes away, Jim had known him for like 50 years at that point. And a reporter's talking to him, and he's like, "Oh, you've known Sol for a long time. You must have learned a lot from him." And he's like, "No, I didn't learn a lot. Everything, everything I know came from him." It's the same idea. When Kobe says, "Stop. What you get from me is from him. I don't get five championships without him because he guided me so much and gave me such great advice," it's the same role that Sol played in Jim's life. Everything I know, I learned from him. That knowledge passed on from one generation to the next made Jim a billionaire. That is incredible. How could this not excite you?

10. 26:23 – 30:29

    The Draft, Jerry West, and Missing Prom for Game Tape

    1. DSDavid Senra26:23

       So a couple pages later, more, uh, more observations by this promoter, this Harris guy that's working with him. They're doing all kinds of like media stuff. They, they arranged for Kobe to take the, the singer Brandy to his high school prom, which I'll get to in a minute. So it says, "In the coming weeks, Harris got a view of just how ambitious young Bryant was. He would stay out until 1:00 AM, but no matter how late Bryant stayed out, he was up early and going through unbelievably demanding workouts each day." Are you crazy? There's that word again. I think this is the third or fourth time I've mentioned it. It's all over the book, I'm telling you. Just expect for people around you not to understand you. People that do not have founder mentality cannot and will not understand it. "Are you crazy?" Harris thought to himself. "He believed," me, me and Kobe, "in himself far more than I or anybody else did." So they arrange all this media obligations. They're gonna have like, they're gonna make this like big media spectacle about his high school prom and him taking Brandy. It says People Magazine was there, a bunch, dozens of other reporters are there, but Bryant almost disappointed them. He and a teammate were watching basketball videos. Think about that. He almost missed his prom because he was watching game tape. This made me think about when I did the biography of Rick Rubin on episode 245. Rick Rubin missed picking up his Grammy because he was working. So before the Lakers agree to figure out a way to draft Kobe, they're doing workouts. And Jerry West is a legendary, like he's the logo. Like when you look at the NBA logo, that's Jerry West. This is also the guy that, uh, Kobe had been watching videos of and winds up being a really close mentor, uh, throughout like his entire life. And so West says something interesting here that I think this is why I'm bringing this to your attention. But it says, "Before the workout, Bryant got his first opportunity to talk at length with West," and this is what Bryant said after that. "He just knows so much about the game." And according to this, the workout that West put him through was very short. And he says, "Within a few minutes, West told Bryant that the franchise was gonna do everything within its power to draft him." And then he describes why, and then this is just me being selfish where I wrote on this page like I'm trying to be like this. I want it to be obvious to other people how much work I'm putting into what I'm doing. I'm not lollygagging. I'm taking this very seriously. It says, "West had long held to the belief that as a scout you could see what a player could do on the floor, but it was much harder and almost impossible to read a player's heart, which was where real greatness lay. But Bryant's workout had been so impressive that for Jerry West it had revealed his heart. It was there in his skill set alone, just the amount of work that a player would have had to do to possess such immaculate moves, the footworks and fakes and execution, the hours that must have been put into to get that kind of perfection." So now he's playing on the Lakers. He's a, still a, a massive Magic Johnson fan, and he's gonna copy something that Magic believed as well. And it says, "Magic was the kind of player that didn't let his teammates get out of focus. It was all about the ultimate prize, and there were no exceptions. You either won the NBA championship or you did not. There was no second place." Just one line on this page for you. "Bryant was an intense introvert." Famously, there was a clause in Michael Jordan's contract called For the Love of the Ga- Game clause, meaning he could play basketball anytime and anywhere he wanted, which I guess was rare because, uh, from, from my understanding, NBA teams were trying to restrict when they could play basketball because they didn't want you to get injured. Kobe actually injures himself playing a pickup game in Venice Beach, and so I'm gonna tell you about that, but then I thought Jerry West's response to this, considering he just drafted Kobe, was very interesting. All right, so it says, "Kobe had injured his wrist playing at Venice Beach. I just couldn't believe that a guy would be playing, uh, pickup ball there, an NBA guy would be playing, playing pickup ball here. That was my first experience with how excited and enthusiastic he was just about playing the game. He truly had a passion for playing regardless of where it was, what time of day he was gonna play." West didn't seem worried. This is what he said: "This guy will play in a Little League tournament, tournament. It doesn't bother me. He loves to play basketball. He's one of the most dedicated players I've ever seen." And

11. 30:29 – 34:48

    Visualization, Reading, and Bouncing Back from Failure

    1. DSDavid Senra30:29

       so his first few years, his coach is not playing him that much. He's not getting minutes. Kobe's getting depressed. And so he does something very, very smart here. Larry Ellison did the exact same thing when Oracle was going through rough times. He'd read biographies of great figures as a way to motivate himself and convince himself that things will get better. Kobe does the exact same thing. Part of his strategy for keeping his disappointment at bay was to focus on others who had faced far more difficult, difficult circumstances. "I read the autobiography of Jackie Robinson," Bryant said. "I was thinking about all the hard times that I'd go through this year, and that it'd never compare to what he went through. That just kinda helped put things in perspective." He would also read fiction and do this as well. He actually, the, the note I left myself on this page is build your own world. And then we gotta talk about all the founders that use this idea of visualization. So it says, Kobe always loved Disney and Star Wars and Jedi Knights. When Tex Winter ... So Tex Winter is this coach, he coached Jordan and Kobe. I think he's the one that came up with, or maybe he was the greatest expert on the triangle offense, and he's like this wise, old man. And Kobe essentially uses an idea from Star Wars. He's like, "Oh, Tex is gonna be my Yoda." So it says, when Tex Winter showed up to help coach the Lakers, Bryant immediately dubbed him his Yoda. He had this very symbolic, Kobe that is, Kobe had this very symbolic, metaphorical way of seeing things. He viewed the world through the lens of a fabulous narrative. His favorite book had been the sci-fi fantasy Ender's Game, about a protagonist trained from a young age to face increasingly difficult challenges in order to save the world. For the next six years, Bryant had lived his life as if going on a mythical quest. The only way he could keep the whole dream going was to work harder and harder and harder to spin his fantasies around and around until they wrapped him tight in a new reality. Visualization was immense for that. It drove his many hours of solitary practice time. So this idea of visualization, seeing something in your mind before you see it in reality, sounds like willy foofoo to a lot of people. I understand that. All I'm telling you is, pops up over and over and over again in these books. Kobe Bryant, Bob Noyce, Edwin Land, Steve Jobs, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Estée Lauder all did this. This is a quote from Estée Lauder's autobiography, episode 217. If you have not heard that podcast, you gotta listen to it right after you're done with this. "Visualize," she says. "In your mind's eye, you see a successful venture, a deal made, a profit accomplished. It has a superb chance of actually happening. Projecting your mind into a successful situation is the most powerful means to achieve goals. If you spend time with pictures of failure in your mind, you will orchestrate failure. Countless times before the event, I have pictured a heroic sale to a large department store every step of the way, and the picture in my mind became a reality. I have visualized success, then created the reality from that image. Great athletes, business people, inventors, and achievers from all walks of life seem to know this secret." So there is this well-known event that happens early in Kobe's career. I think this is the first year, his rookie year. They get eliminated from the playoffs, and he is blamed because he shoots a bunch of air balls. And so I wanna read his immediate reaction to this unbelievable disappointment that he had to endure, and how it compares to Michael Jordan and the founder of IKEA. And so it says, that evening after the loss, Bryant went straight to a gym at a neighborhood school as soon as he got home to LA. "He went in the gym that night and shot until 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning," Scoop Jackson said. "There was no crying, none of that shit. He went straight to the damn gym. I think that game was vital to how good he became. That level of embarrassment to happen to somebody like him, the next year he came out like a fucking maniac." And then I wrote a quote that I learned from the founder of IKEA, which is, I think is absolutely fantastic. He says, "Only those who are asleep make no mistakes. Making mistakes is the privilege of the active." And so Kobe's response was the perfect, correct response. Let's go to Michael Jordan's autobiography, Driven From Within. He says, "Look around and just about any person or entity achieving at a high level has that same focus. The morning after Tiger Woods rallied to beat Phil Mickelson in the Ford Championship in 2005, he was in the gym by 6:30 to work out. No lights, no cameras, no glitz or glamour. Uncompromised."

12. 34:48 – 40:23

    Asking for Help: Jordan, Gary Payton and Learning from Rivals

    1. DSDavid Senra34:48

       And very soon after this, he does something smart. This is also advice that Estée Lauder said, that you should embrace peer relationships in your field. He goes out and he tries to build a relationship with Michael Jordan. He's like, what, 21 at the time, I think. Michael Jordan's 35. And this is a perfect illustration of Steve Jobs' point that asking for help is a superpower. And he s- and it's a superpower Steve Jobs says that most people don't use. He's like, "If I needed help, I would just pick up the phone and call and ask for help, and almost everybody would always help me, even early in my career." This is Steve talking. "Even early in my career, and most people just won't even pick up the phone." So they're playing against each other, and Bryant does something smart. He says during a pause in the play in the fourth period, Bryant brazenly went up to Jordan asking his advi- his advice on posting up. "In the fourth quarter of that game, he asked me about my post-up move in terms of do you keep your legs wide or do you keep your legs tight," Jordan said later. "I told him I always use my legs to feel where the defense is playing so I can react to the defense. His bigger challenge," now this is Jordan talking about Kobe, "his bigger challenge, his biggest challenge will be harnessing what he knows and utilizing what he's got and implementing it on the floor. That's tough. That's experience. That's the things that Larry Bird and Magic Johnson all taught me." And so Kobe also said that when they were having the conversation on the court in the fourth quarter, he's like, "If you ever need anything, call me." And so you tell a learning machine like that, and what do you think Kobe's gonna do? We know what he's gonna do because earlier I was quoting from The Last Dance documentary, and Kobe said, "I don't get five championships without him because he guided me so much and gave me so much great advice." This won't be the last time that we talk about the relationship between Michael Jordan and Kobe. It is a main theme and a really important part of the book. This is later on in Kobe's career. This is his teammate, Derek Fisher, talking about the importance of self-confidence. "The more you experience time around him and get to see him in different situations, the more you understand that that's all it is. It's confidence. He's just a guy who has an immeasurable amount of confidence in his ability to play the game. That really was," he's talking about the, the level of intensity he brings to practices, "that really was the way we all should have been competing. We should have been competing with Kobe's spirit." And Kobe was always standoffish. They talk about that in the Redeem Team documentary too. He's a little older in his career, so he was, you know, somewhat open, but he is a lone wolf very much. And in many cases, he had a hard time. Uh, he... Essentially, like, if you wanted to develop a professional relationship with Kobe, he would view it through the lens of basically one thing. And the reason that he was as close as he could be to another player, that would be with Derek Fisher, is because he saw Fisher's work ethic. He's like, "Fisher may not be a superstar like I am, but he works his damn ass off, and so therefore I respect him." Work ethic was the one standard by which Bryant measured another player. One of Steve Jobs' favorite quotes was that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. This is an example of that. The great basketball players, and really great at, at anything, right? The great basketball players try to take complicated things and find simple ways to do them. Another example of Bryant talking about how Jordan was in the development of his own career, Bryant said that getting advice from Jordan is like getting advice from the Buddha that sits on top of the mountain, who has everything figured out and passes on some of his knowledge to the next guy who's trying to climb that mountain. We also see that Kobe's willing to ask anybody for advice. If he feels you have, uh, talent that he lacks or information he lacks, he's gonna go straight to you, even if you're a competitor. At this time, he's like, "I have... I'm making progress on offense, but my defense is lacking." So he goes up, there's a... This takes place during All-Star weekend, and it says another important moment happened, uh, when Seattle's Gary Pa- Payton helped Bryant understand screen and roll defense. So again, go back to what Steve Jobs said. Most people are never even going to do that. Bryant has a giant ego, thinks he's gonna be the best ever, and he's still willing. He's like, "Hey, Gary, like, help me with this, man. I don't know how you do what you do." This is huge, and I try to copy this as, uh, well in my own life. So it says Gary Payton helped Bryant understand screen and roll defense. "I don't think Gary knows how much he helped me," Bryant said. Bryant demonstrated dramatic defense improvement afterward. So something that jumps out in this book but also jumped out... Because, oh, I forgot to tell you. This is the same... So I told you. W- w- I've said this a few times now. The book that I did on 212, the, The Biography, it's like a 700-page biography of Michael Jordan, it's written by the same guy, Roland Lazenby. That book changed my mind. Or, not my mind. That book changed my life. I think about it all the time. So what was interesting to me is how much, and it shouldn't have been interesting, really, it shouldn't even be surprising, uh, is how much of the Jordan biography is about the importance of mental strength. And a lot of the lessons Jordan learned about the importance of taking care, of, like, being in the moment, like the Zen training, the taking care of, like, the, the mental anguish and, and stress you're under, he learned from Phil Jackson. And so we see in this book that Phil Jackson is doing the same thing with Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant. And so I'm gonna... This is gonna happen over a few pages, but I got a couple things I wanna pull out here, 'cause I thought it was interesting, where they call this guy their secret weapon. And I think the, the parallel here is obviously very important, that entrepreneurs are going to... It, it's inevitable. If you're building a company, you will have times of mental anguish, depression, that you wanna give up. Episode 200 on James Dyson is the best, like, thing I could point you to on how to get through it. But it's what Mark Andreessen said. Like, there's only two emotions that entrepreneurs experience, and it's either euphoria or terror. You feel at the top of the world, and then the very next day or the very next week, you, you are convinced that you're doomed. Any time I put that quote out on social media or I talk about it on a podcast, I get a ton of messages say, "Yep, that's exactly how I feel."

13. 40:23 – 48:33

    Mental Training, Conflict, and Ruthlessness as a Cautionary Tale

    1. DSDavid Senra40:23

       So let's go into how they try to, like, deal with this, right? So it says George Mumford had been brought in to lead the Lakers in meditation and mindfulness training, just as he had for Jordan and the Bulls. He offered specific mental training, much of it in the Zen mold, for reducing the stress of competition. "He's our secret weapon," O'Neal would say of Mumford. Bryant was content to discuss the mental elements of competition with Mumford, as were his teammates. "It was good because it gave people a chance to talk about the things they m- that might be on their mind. The hype, the pressure," Bryant explained. "I think it's good for them to talk about those things. It's increased our performance a lot. I'm surprised other teams don't do this kind of stuff. Working with George helps us get to the issues, or helps us get issues out of the way before they even start." This is more on the inevitable conflict. All great teams, whether business or otherwise, have conflict. In fact, Jeff Bezos prefers it that way. Uh, when I read the book, uh, the second biography of him, Amazon Unbound, uh, for episode 180, uh, there's a line in there that I never forgot where Jeff says, "If I have to choose between agreement and conflict, I'll take conflict every time. It always yields a better result." And so we see that here. Jerry West had reportedly told Shaquille O'Neal, "I played with two of the all-time greats, Wilt Chamberlain and Elgin Ba- Baylor. You don't think we had personal rivalries going on back then? You've got to stop being a baby. Put all this personal stuff aside and do what's important. Put the team's success first." So at the beginning of the book, the author says, "Hey, you might wanna look at this story as, like, a cautionary tale," the fact that he would sacrifice anything in service of this goal. There's a fantastic quote, uh, by my friend Sam Hinkie. He was on, um, Invest Like the Best with my friend Patrick, and he brought this up 'cause s- something that, uh, he really enjoyed was Robert Caro's multiple-part biography of Lyndon Johnson. And I thought Sam, one of Sam's takeaway, takeaways was very similar to Kobe Bryant, and it talks about, like, how ruthless a person can be. And understanding this is just part of human nature. These personalities appear over and over again. Like, you're, you, you have to understand that there's people out there that literally don't care. And if you get in their way or if you're naive to the fact that this personality, it appears over and over again, like, they can cause an incredible amount of damage in your own life. And so Sam says, "If you want something like the presidency or being a billionaire," I think that, that was my, uh, quote, not his, uh, like the presidency, "you should presume there is someone out there who will devote all their time, money, relationships, sense of ethics, everything in sacrifice of that one goal." Of course, that kind of person would win that race. Now, he's clearly not saying you should be a person that has no sense of ethics. He's just telling you this is part of life, and we see that with Kobe. A huge part of this book is him sacrificing the relationship with his family. I, I left it out because I don't actually understand it that much. They have, like, these falling outs. A lot of it had to do with money, but he didn't just do it to his family members. The guy that brought him to Adidas that made him famous, that, uh, this guy named Sonny Vaccaro, he's this, like, famous figure in Nike history and Adidas history, and all... He's, like, this interesting backstory. Anyways, eventually, he ceases to be useful to Kobe, and this is what Kobe does to him, and I just wrote the word ruthless. And it says, "In making his exit," he just cut, basically cut him out of his life but never even bothered to tell him. And so it says, "In making his exit, Bryant never even bothered to phone Sonny and thank him for the experience, which had included money for his parents and guaranteed millions for Bryant before he ever played an NBA game. More than a dozen years later, Sonny still has never heard a word from Bryant." Ruthless. If you want something like the presidency, you should presume there is someone out there who will devote all their time, money, relationships, sense of ethics, everything in sacrifice to that one goal. Another main theme of the book that you and I have talked about a few times now, don't expect people to understand you. So this is just somebody that knows both Kobe and Michael Jordan. He wind up working with both Jordan and Bryant. His name's Schaefer. And it says, as a result of these experiences, says Schaefer had made a study of competitive personalities. This is about Jordan's Hall of Fame speech. And so again, main theme is expect to be, uh, misunderstood. I saw Jordan's Hall of Fame speech. The public's general reaction took me by surprise, where... And it's gonna take Schaefer by surprise, too. It says, "Whereas the public seemed infuriated by Jordan's emotional Hall of Fame speech in 2009, Schaefer deeply admired it. 'I remember sitting there on my couch with my wife watching it,' he said. 'And I turned to her about halfway through, and I said, "This is the most real he's ever been with cameras on before." It was authentic. It was him. It was everything about him that I love personally. I thought it was great.' It was far from easy for such competitors to be real, he said, adding that Jordan got crushed for doing so. He is just this person who I think is unparalleled as the greatest player in the history of the game, telling us what he thought. It was a privilege for everyone to hear what he thought." And so going back to that theme that this is maybe a cautionary tale, be careful what you wish for, these are very old ideas that are passed throughout human history. There's, like, an entire chapter. It goes on and on. I, I don't even have to pull out anything, like, uh, any specific quotes. What I was struck by is how similar this was to what you learn if you watch The Last Dance documentary, how Jord- like Jordan in The Last Dance, a lot of Kobe... W- the, the more famous you get, right? It's like they can't go anywhere. And the crazy thing is, like, by the time in Jordan's career that we see in The Last Dance, it's what happening to Kobe here at this point in the book. It's like a lot of their time is spent in isolation in hotel rooms. And so let's go back to this idea that they have the secret weapon. They have the psychologist. They're working on, like, the mental part, the maybe even, like, the personal relation parts you can think of. Really, the, the, the... There's two paragraphs here I'm gonna, I'm gonna quote from. This is the main theme, I think it's Founders 265, of Becoming Steve Jobs and why I think that Steve Jobs b- biography, if you're gonna read one, I'd read that one because it talks about the transition, the fact that he evolved, uh, you know... The subtitle is E- evolution of a reckless upstart into a visionary leader. Like, the Steve Jobs at 25 or 29 could not be, lead the, the quality of, uh, an organization that Apple became when Apple, when Steve came back when, you know, he's in his late 40s. And so I put Steve Jobs' way of interacting with people is very similar to Michael... Uh, young Steve Jobs and older Steve Jobs, really, uh, is the same way that Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant reacted to people that didn't meet their very high, almost ridiculously high standards. And so I think this is actually an, uh, important part for founders as they think about managing other people that are not l- founders, right? It would become Mumford's goal to help supremely competitive players find a means of contending with what made them different so that they'd be able to not just compete at the highest level but also to find a means of channeling compassion into their everyday lives despite their astronomical competitive instincts. Highly competitive personalities like Jordan and Bryant could absolutely kill a team atmosphere with displays of ruthlessness or selfishness. That, that sentence right there, you put, take out Bryant and Jordan and put in Steve Jobs or really a ton of the people that you and I talk about, and it's still true. They could absolutely kill a team atmosphere with displays of ruthlessness or selfishness, so therefore, you have to learn the skill, right? From the beginning, Kobe was not adept with social skills. He did not realize how to get through relationships and interactions with other people. He was a young guy, and it took the course of his career, just like Steve Jobs, to fil- figure out how to deal with people on a one-on-one basis and in a team atmosphere. And he was not perfect in this regard, even if he improved, right? They're never gonna be perfect at it. They're just so f- different than anybody else. And so we see an example of this. This is what Kobe told his teams after they missed the playoffs. He had already won three championships at this time, but Shaq's not in, on the team anymore. And it says, "The Lakers missed the playoffs. It had been 11 years since the last time they had missed." And this is what somebody in the locker room said happened. So after the last game in the locker room, the coach goes to the usual bullshit. You know, "You guys played hard," blah, blah, blah, uh, "trying to be positive. I appreciate your effort." Kobe says, "I've gotta say something." He stands up, points around the room, and says, "You motherfuckers don't belong in the same court with me. You're all shit." And he walked out of the locker room.

14. 48:33 – 59:55

    Search for Limits, Jordan's Defense, and the Farewell Letter

    1. DSDavid Senra48:33

       And so the rest of the book is on Kobe's drive to get back to the championship. That's all he, he's like, "I have one goal, one determinant in whether my career was a success or not, and it's, like, how many rings did I get?" And so there's many pages where I don't have any highlights, and then I get to a page like this where there's two or three pages in a row where I highlight almost the entire thing. And so I'm gonna read my note. First, uh, and I, and I'll leave this in the show notes as well, this is important. There's another four ideas on, spread out on these pages. Search for your limits, extreme personal practice, resourcefulness, find a way, that's number three, and number four, study the greats. And so it says, "If the scoring displays," meaning he's just scoring a ton of points, 40, 50, 60 points a game. "If the scoring displays showed anything, they revealed that Bryant, Bryant was clearly a man in search of his limits. His ability to perform at this high level was solidly based on his years of extreme personal practice. It began with his immaculate footwork, an array of pivots, reverse pivots, jab steps, and feints that allowed him to create the room to rise up in a tight space and make seemingly impossible shots under impossible circumstances." This is really the way I think about this is all, all, really resourcefulness, right? Taking something that other people could do, yet finding an opportunity in, in something that's available to everybody else, where, like, you see opportunity where other people see nothing, right? "This unique skill was the perfectly formed product of his study of untold hours of videotape of every single one of the game's great scorers. It would also involve conversations w- and more film study with Tex Winter about footwork and time spent with Jerry West talking about a million important details." And this is the end result of putting all this together. "Bryant was building respect among his, among his peers. 'Every time we played them and the game was tight, we guarded him well,' said San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich. 'But he'd still knock down the shot.' Popovich had a full understanding of what allowed a singular player like Bryant to stand far above so many others. He was one of the rare few who simply cared far more about the game than anyone else." So now we go back to this guy, Schafer, who I was referencing that had worked with both Bryant and Jordan. Uh, "Chip Schafer became Bryant's go-to aide as far as workouts, which meant that Schafer was on call around the clock. Schafer had an endless supply of Jordan stories to share with Bryant, uh, to share when Bryant wanted to take a break in between his workouts. Schafer recalled, 'Kobe would ask me specific questions about how he w- how Jordan would handle situations. Kobe was often curious about how, not just basketball-specific stuff, but even some of the peripheral things, like if a team was going through something, how would Michael react toward a teammate? He was interested in what kind of leader and m- what kind of leadership and management Michael would have.'" And so on the next page, Schafer continues to tell us, like, give an inside look into Kobe Bryant. The note I left, this is a note, a personal note to myself. I'm asking myself as I get to this page, well, like, what would your equivalent level of dedication look like? And so this is what Schafer said. "A, a game would end, and we would fly to the next city. We'd get in at 3:00 in the morning, and he'd want me to come and do a stretch with him instead of just going to bed. He couldn't switch it off. On the flight, while his teammates were sleeping, Bryant would watch the game he just played to review his and the team's performance. Then he'd watch a scouting video of his next opponent." And then we get to the point where I mentioned earlier how Jordan actually sticks up for Kobe. It's like, well, this is actually how humans learn. So it says, "Jordan talked about how hard Bryant had worked to be great. He and Bryant were obv- were obviously close, and Jordan spoke up to defend Bryant against critics that claimed he was merely copying Jordan. Jordan said he didn't see what all the big fuss was about. After all, human behavior was mimetic. That's how humans learned. They copied and aped another, one another. Jordan acknowledged that Bryant was the best of a generation of players who had sought to be like Mike, quote, unquote, 'But how many pla- people lighted the path for me?' Jordan said. 'That's the evolution of basketball. There's no way I could have played the way I played if I didn't watch David Thompson or guys prior to me. There's no way Kobe could have played the way he played without watching me play. That's the evolution of basketball. You cannot change that.' Bryant was the one who had done the work in the face of the example he presented, Jordan said." And it says, "His retirement was announced in a love letter he wrote to the game, citing his obsessive passion for the sport, and it's la- letter that I wanna close on. 'Dear basketball, from the moment I started rolling my dad's tube socks and shooting imaginary game-winning shots in the Great Western Forum, I knew one thing was real. I fell in love with you, a love so deep I gave you my all, from my mind and body to my spirit and soul. As a six-year-old boy deeply in love with you, I never saw the end of the tunnel. I only saw myself running out of one, and so I ran. I ran up and down every court after every loose ball for you. You asked for my hustle. I gave you my heart because it came with so much more. I played through the sweat and the hurt, not because challenge called me, but because you called me. I did everything for you because that's what you do when someone makes you feel as alive as you made me feel. You gave a six-year-old boy his Laker dream, and I'll always love you for it. But I can't love you obsessively for much longer. This season is all I have left to give. My heart can take the pounding. My mind can handle the grind. But my body knows it's time to say goodbye, and that's okay. I'm ready to let you go. I want you to know now so we can both savor every moment we have left together, the good and the bad. We have given each other all that we have, and we both know, no matter what I do next, I'll always be that kid with the rolled up socks, garbage can in the corner, five seconds on the clock, ball in my hands. Five, four, three, two, one. Love you always, Kobe.'" And that is where I'll leave it. As you can imagine, it is a 600-page book. There is so much more in this book. If you want the full story, buy the book using the link that's in the show notes, and you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. If you don't get this book, make sure you order and read Kobe's book, Mamba Mentality. I'm doing a bonus episode very soon. It'll be the next upload that you see from me. I'm rereading that book for the second time and making a new episode on it. And as you read more and more, it's important to remember what you read. If you wanna use the same app that I use that stores all of my highlights and all of my notes on everything that I read, it's Readwise. I'll leave the link down in the show notes, but if you go to readwise.io/founders, you could try it for 60 days free. That is 272 books down, 1,000 to go, and I'll talk to you again soon. Okay, so real quick. In case that you want to get access to my version of Readwise, which is called foundersnotes.com, you go to foundersnotes.com to sign up. That's founders with an S, just like the podcast, so foundersnotes.com. So when you sign up and you get access, I'm gonna tell you how-- what, what are the features that I use the most. And so at the very top is the main feature, the one I use b- every day. And it says Search Highlights, and there's a search bar. And very simply, I just search by whatever keyword that I'm thinking about. So it could be about hiring, about marketing, about obsession. Uh, it could be about a specific entrepreneur like Rockefeller. Whatever I happen to be thinking about or whatever problem I need to solve at the pr- at the time. So, like, the, the greatest example, and I actually made, like, a 30-minute, like, short AMA about this. It was asked, like, "How do history's greatest founders think about hiring?" And so if you type hiring in that box, you'll see what, what did Jeff Bezos say about it? What did Thomas Edison say about it? What did the people that founded PayPal say about it? What did Estée Lauder say about it? And on and on and on. And so I think that's pretty self-explanatory. Again, this is a product for people already running successful companies. I think I don't have to elaborate. You already know what the value of that would be. So the highlights feed is, uh, the search-- Excuse me. Searching the highlights is what I use the most. Now, it's-- the thing I use the second most is called the highlights feed. And the highlights feed, I'm loading it right now, essentially is just, like, these little almost, like, tweet-sized highlights from all different books. And so it is completely randomized, and it's almost like you have history's greatest entrepreneurs speaking to you. And then I just read through them and see what thoughts respond. So, like, the first thing that came up was actually, uh, it's actually a highlight from one of Warren Buffett's shareholder letters. He's talking about diversification and its relation to risk. The next highlight is a quote from Ed Catmull, the founder of Pixar, talking about he didn't even realize at the beginning of his company how poor the communication was and that there was things going on in his company that, that his, the peop- his employees were not telling him, and his thoughts on how to fix that. Then there's a quote from a book that I read, like, six years ago, and it's actually the, The Biography of Alibaba. And he's talking about the importance of listening and that poor listeners actually have second-rate negotiation skills. And so that is the second most used feature for me personally. This might be different for you. Third feature, books. You have a list of, uh, all the books that are in there. I think right now it says I have 307 books in here. I still have a bunch I need to put in. And then that, that's very simple. Like, I just went through. The reason I reposted the Mike Bloomberg episode, for example, is 'cause I've been rereading the highlights. And so I went back. If I don't have time to reread the book, which I will in the future, but I just read through. I think I have, like, 44, uh, highlights of Bloomberg's autobiography in here. And you read through them, and you-- there's just so many ideas, and this is happening in, like, 15 minutes. It's absolutely incredible. So that's self-explanatory. You can search by book. The last feature that I use the most is the favorites feature. You know, I have 20,000 highlights. It's y- there's a ton of information in here. And so what I'll do is, as I go back through the highlights, and I've done this forever, and that's why th-this number will always go up. I have 839 favorites now, but, you know, if you're listening to this months from now, it's, it's going to be higher. And, uh, whether it's through searching, whether it's through rereading the, the highlights on a specific book or through the highlights feed, which is the random, um, just showing me, like, the random highlights that I've done. If there's something that's like, "Damn, that's a good one. I really want to remember that," and so I, I highlight it, or actually, I favorite it, and then now that goes into the fav-favorites feed. So then I have an even more, like, specialized feed of ideas and highlights from different books all on one page. So again, need to reiter-reiterate, I think if you are like me, and there's a good chance that you're-- if you're listening to this, you're like me. If you're like me, you're already running su-a successful company. I think it's a, it's a no-brainer. I would at least test it out for a year. There's a chance that you don't like it. I'm not gonna share that opinion with you because, like I said before, I listen to it, or I should not listen to it. I use it every day, and I think what I-- what this is gonna be good for and what I hope to do is, like, man, like, for a founder to just have a browser, this, this notebook sitting in a browser that they can tap into any time, I think that's going to be very valuable. And I can say that because it's been very valuable for me. So hopefully that makes sense. If you wanna test it out, it is foundersnotes.com. Again, foundersnotes.com. And I also leave a link down in the show notes if you wanna grab the link from the podcast, the show notes on your podcast player, foundersnotes.com

Episode duration: 59:56