"I remember when, as a kid, I got my first real basketball. I loved the feel of it in my hands. I was so enamored with the ball that I didn’t actually want to bounce it or use it, because I didn’t want to ruin the pebbled leather grains or the perfect grooves. I didn’t want to ruin the feel. I loved the sound of it, too. The tap, tap, tap of when a ball bounces on the hardwood. The crispness and clarity. The predictability. The sound of life and light. Those are some of the elements that I loved about the ball, about the game. They were at the core and root of my process and craft. They were the reasons I went through all that I went through, put in all that I put in, dug as deep as I dug. The core and root of my process and craft. They were the reasons I went through all that I went through, put in all that I put in, dug as deep as I dug. It all came back to that special tap, tap, tap that I first grew infatuated with as a boy." --Kobe Bryant
“To sum up what Mamba Mentality is, it means to be able to constantly try to be the best version of yourself,” Bryant said.
“That is what the Mentality is,” he added. “It’s a constant quest to try to better today than you were yesterday.”
A Student of the Game
In Bryant’s first game as a rookie in 1996 with the Los Angeles Lakers, he did not score and played just 6 minutes. Later in Bryant’s rookie season, he played five minutes and scored two points in a disappointing game against the Houston Rockets.
“I needed to work harder,” he wrote in an article for The Players’ Tribune. He did. Neverthless, three years later, he remembers, NBA legend Allen Iverson scored 41 points and made 10 assists while playing against him.
“Working harder wasn’t enough,” Bryant says. “I had to study this man maniacally.” And he did: “I obsessively read every article and book I could find about AI. I obsessively watched every game he had played. ... I obsessively studied his every success, and his every struggle. I obsessively searched for any weakness I could find.”
Bryant’s obsessiveness paid off. A year later, he had a second chance at guarding Iverson. He didn’t score once, Bryant recalls of the rematch: “When I started guarding AI, he had 16 at the half. He finished the game with 16.
“Revenge was sweet. But I wasn’t satisfied after the win. I was annoyed that he had made me feel that way in the first place.”
From that point on, Bryant decided to “approach every match-up as a matter of life and death,” he writes. “No one was going to have that kind of control over my focus ever again.” He went on to win five NBA championships over his 20 seasons with the Lakers.
Bryant’s approach is applicable beyond the NBA. As self-made entrepreneur, Grant Cardone writes in his book, Be Obsessed or be Average, ”fixation is the key to achieving massive success: “Sure, you can be successful without being obsessed, but you can’t reach the levels of success I am talking about without being obsessed.
“It’s the single common factor that super successful people around the world share.”
If anyone knows Kobe Bryant well, it’s retired Laker head trainer, Gary Vitti. Vitti is the guy who helped keep Bryaynt in shape for two decades.
Throughout his 20-year NBA career, Bryant worked alongside Vitti.
“He was talented, but what if I told you he wasn’t the most talented guy out there?” Vitti said. “I’m telling you, and I’ve had them all, there’s nothing really special about Kobe. I mean he’s a big guy, but he’s not that big. He was quick, but he’s not that quick. He’s fast, he wasn’t that fast. He was powerful, but he wasn’t that powerful. I mean, there were other players that had more talent than he did, so what was there about him that more talented players had zero rings and he ended up with five?”
Bryant not only worked harder than anyone else, he worked smarter than everyone else, and he was intellectually brilliant at his job, Vitti said. During halftime, when other players looked at messages, emails, and tweets on their phones, Bryant watched film from the first half of the game on a laptop in the training room to see how he could do better in the second half. The superstar athlete himself has attributed his past progress on the court to an intense work ethic and obsessively studying other players.
“He was tough in the sense that he took ‘can’t’ and ‘won’t’ out of his lexicon and he just believed that he could do it,” Vitti says. “Kobe taught me that talent is the most overrated thing in life; it’s what you do with your talent.”
Vitti tells the story of when Bryant was hanging out with a bunch of Navy SEALS; he even asked them to waterboard him in order to understand what it was about (and says the player went through with it).
“There’s certain things about him that make him very, very special,” Vitti says. “The hard work, the smart work, yes, the talent – but what he did with the talent, the toughness, the mental toughness.”
Early in his career, following some disappointing losses, Kobe reportedly began been exchanging text messages regularly with NBA legend, Michael Jordan.
“Michael has told me before, ‘You have all the tools. The mental part of how to elevate your teammates is the last piece you have to master,’’’ Bryant said. “I find [getting players involved] requires me to be more focused than usual.”“When I’m scoring, I have a narrow, laser focus. I get totally lost in the rhythm of shooting. But when I’m facilitating, I have to take a step back and look at a much broader picture. I have to wait for things to develop, or make them develop. It takes patience.’’“I’ve shared with my teammates how I prepare for games. My hope is that my mentality rubs off on them. I want them to see what I see, think about what I think about: Why did you turn the ball over? What was the defense doing? What were your options? If this guy cuts here and the defense does this, who does that free up?“We’ve got guys who are gym rats, who want to work hard, who want to win. The trick is to get everybody playing together, trying to accomplish the same goal. If you have the talent and the sacrifice on top of that, you have a championship-caliber team. One player can do only so much. If you haven’t gotten to that next level, you haven’t figured out how to get everybody on the same page.”
He started his NBA career out of high school at the age of 17. Yet, despite his success, Kobe continued to refine his game by:
- Visiting the former Houston Rockets center Hakeem Olajuwon over the summer for a 5-hour tutorial on low-post play.
- Hiring a consultant to analyze various NBA teams’ and individual opponents’ weaknesses.
- Working with Tim Grover, Michael Jordan’s former trainer, to address weaknesses in the physical aspects of his game.
- Traveling with a portable DVD player queued to games to analyze and review.
“When you first come into the league, you’re trying to prove yourself as an individual, do things to assert yourself and establish yourself. But then once you’ve done that, there’s another level to the game that’s more complex than figuring out how to put up big numbers as an individual,” Bryant said, discussing his evolution as player and teammate.
“The strengths that I have now were weaknesses when I was a kid,” Bryant said. “The strengths that I had as a kid may be weaknesses now. So you just kind of flip-flop and get the same results.”
“He’s always trying a new angle,” Houston Rockets head coach Mike D’Antoni said about Bryant. “His work ethic is better than anybody I’ve seen, so he’s going to improve.” D’Antoni added, “Whether he can do the same things he could do when he was younger, I don’t know, but he’ll keep getting to be a better basketball player.”
It’s been more than two decades since Kobe Bryant graduated from Lower Merion High School, a public school in the suburbs of Philadelphia. But the retired NBA star, now 40, still remembers one teacher in particular: Mr. Fisk, who taught English.
“He had a great quote: ‘Rest at the end, not in the middle,’” Bryant told podcast host and best-selling author Lewis Howes on an episode of the podcast, The School of Greatness. “That’s something I always live by.”
Hard work has been a key ingredient in Bryant’s recipe for success since he was a teen. The emphasis on perseverance started as a defense mechanism, he told Howes: “In middle and high school, a lot of the kids that I was playing against were inner-city kids. They’re looking at me as if, ‘OK, this kid is soft. He’s from the suburbs of Philadelphia. His father played in the NBA.’”
The challenge for Bryant became, “How can I mentally figure out ways to break you down? How can I show you that, no, I have the edge?”
His solution was dedication. “We used to have an all-American camp that I used to go to,” Bryant recalled. “One of the things I would do is — everybody would be at the cafeteria eating and I’d just go back to the gym. They’d see me leave. … And that was my way of showing them, ‘Yeah, maybe I’m from the suburbs, but you’re not going to outwork me.’”
He maintained an intense work ethic throughout his career with the Lakers. and often worked out harder and earlier than his peers. And he saw results: He won five NBA championships, collected two Olympic gold medals, earned one NBA MVP title and made Lakers history as the team’s all-time leading scorer. He still holds that record.
Today, Bryant runs a venture capital fund with business partner Jeff Stibel and still wakes up before the sun for a workout. He even was awarded an Academy Award in Hollywood, for producing the Best Animated Short Film, “Dear Basketball.”
As he told Howes, even though he as retired from the NBA, “I’m not going to rest. I’m going to keep on pushing now.”
