How To Reach Your Full Potential As A Player - Becoming A True Competitor (Podcast Episode 62)

Foreign. Welcome to the Vision Driven Basket Training Podcast. Appreciate you guys for tuning in. Shout out to everybody who's an Apple podcast or Spotify listening right now, and of course, everybody who's watching on YouTube. Make sure if you're on YouTube, drop a like and subscribe. And then leave me a comment. Let me know what you think, what you got out of the episode, any suggestions you have for future episodes. Always appreciate those. If you guys are listening Apple Podcasts right now, do me a favor, scroll down to the bottom of the page and leave a review for me. Let me know what you think of the show. I don't have any new reviews this week, but you guys who listen before know that at the beginning of every episode, if I have new reviews on Apple podcasts, I read them. So again, I really appreciate that. Helps the show to grow. So go down and drop a review for me. Thank you guys in advance for that. So we'll hop right into it. You know, there's a word or really a phrase that gets thrown around a ton in the game of basketball, and it's all centered around the word compete, right? You guys have all had coaches who will tell you guys, you got to go out there and compete, guys, we got to compete harder, okay? You guys got to be competitors. And that might be in practice. It could be in the context of a game. We got to go out there, we got to compete, all right? We got to go compete on the board. We got to go compete on defense right there. And I want to talk about specifically how to become a better competitor. I think this is one aspect that doesn't get talked about a ton in depth. It's kind of a buzzword that gets thrown around. So no one really knows exactly what it means. They hear the word compete and they think about, okay, well, you know, that player is a competitor. Kobe Bryant is a competitor. Michael Jordan is a competitor. But that doesn't really help you understand how you can become a competitor, how you can be a competitor as well. And when you think about competitors, guys who are the best at just straight up competing, those are the guys who ultimately are winners, right? Those are the guys who win games for their teams, who, who are players that coaches want to have. When you have teams that, you know, upset other teams, you think about like March Madness or even, you know, in the play, in the NBA playoffs or even just kind of game to game, right? There's upsets at every level of basketball in every sport. Every level of basketball, you're going to have teams that. That get Upset. And a lot of it comes down to you've got guys on teams who might be, you know, the underdog, who might be the team that's not favored. And you have teams that go out there and a lot of times they out compete that team that might be ahead of them. And so if there's one trait that you can have that is going to be valuable in every single team that you ever play on, regardless of how good of a player you even are, if you have the ability to compete and you want to win and you do everything in your power to, to compete and to get better and to put yourself and your teammates in a position to win games, you'll be a player that impacts winning at a high level and that makes you valuable in any team that you're ever going to be on. So I want to talk today a little bit about how you can become a competitor and why it's so valuable. And ultimately I want to give you guys some steps you can take so that you become as good as you can possibly be as a player. And the first thing to understand about being a great competitor is that every great player out there long term sees the value in being a competitor. Okay? There's a lot of players out there who might be talented, but they aren't competitors. And so short term they might be, they might have good games, they might even have maybe a good season. But long term they're not going to be successful. They're not gonna be able to stay consistently successful because as their competition gets better, as other players improve and catch up, if you don't have the ability to compete, then you're gonna be at a loss. When you have a player on the other side of the floor who is as good as you but competes harder, okay. Or approaches competition in a different light. So the first thing I want, that I want to do is really read this, this story, this, this article from Kobe from the Players Tribune. It's from December 15, 2014. It's called Zero. You guys, you guys might have heard this story before, but I thought this was really well written and it, it kind of goes with the exact point I'm trying to make right here. So says just kind of as a preface. On Sunday night, Kobe Bryant passed Michael Jordan on the NBA's all time scoring list, moving into third place behind Karl Malone and Kareem Abdul Jabbar. After the game, Kobe sat down and wrote down his thoughts on the historic moment for the players tribute. And this is where it starts. Zero. That's the number of points I scored the entire summer while playing in the Philadelphia Sunny Hill Futures League when I was 12 years old. I didn't score. Not a free throw, not an accidental layup, not even a lucky throw the ball up. Oops, it went in the basket. My father, Joe Jellybean Pryant and my uncle, John Chubby Cox were future league legends in their day. My father has a 6.10.4 and my uncle has a 6.4 point guard. I was putting my family to shame. I considered maybe just giving up basketball and just focusing on soccer. Here's where my respect and admiration for MJ was forged. I learned that he had been cut from his high school team as a freshman. I learned he had no he. I learned he knew what it felt like to be embarrassed, to feel like a failure. But he used those emotions to fuel him, make him stronger. He didn't quit. So I decided to take on my challenge the same way he did. I would channel my failure as fuel to keep my competitive fire burning. I became obsessed with proving myself to my family and more importantly, to myself, that I can do this. It became an obsession. I learned everything about the game. The history, the players, the fundamentals. I wasn't just determined to never have a summer of zero again. I was driven to inflict the same sense of failure on my competition as they unknowingly inflicted on me. My killer instinct to score was born. 24 years later. I passed my museum. What a journey this has been. Setting this mark is a huge honor. I'm aware of Father Time's curfew. He has sent me to my room to brush my teeth before he tucks me in. But I wouldn't be me if I didn't walk to the bathroom slowly. I wouldn't be me if I didn't act as someone. As if someone misplaced the toothpaste. I wouldn't be me if I didn't brush every tooth twice, brush my tongue three times, floss until my gums bleed, and rinse with mouthwash until the inside of my mouth burns and then goes numb. I would not be the kid that bounced back after zero, and. And I would not be honoring the man that inspired me to challenge everything. Thank you all for your love and support. It is much appreciated, even if the villain in me refuses to acknowledge it all the time. Much love, Mamba out. So very well written article and I think that we get a really great look inside. A turning point in Kobe Bryant's career as a basketball player. Okay, so he goes back to, you know, he's a kid, right? He's just a young kid, 12 years old, playing in, you know, one of the most legendary summer leagues in the country, where, you know, he's expected to go in like his father's a legend in the league, his uncle's a legend. Both those guys went on to be professional players. And all of a sudden, you know, Kobe comes in there and scores zero points in an entire summer. And there we find the value of competition, okay? Because we recognize that obviously if Kobe scored zero points that summer, it was probably a pretty competitive league, okay? So he's playing as other really, really good players. And because of that, he's in a position where he has a pretty bad, to say the least, experience in that summer league, okay? But the thing that you understand is that although obviously it's not ideal to score zero points, what he gained from that summer changed the rest of his life because as he said, you know, I'll read it back word for word, what he said, he says, it became an obsession. I learned everything about the game, the history, the players, the fundamentals. I wasn't just determined to never have a summer of zero again. I was driven to inflict the same sense of failure on my competition as they unknowingly inflicted on me. My killer instinct score was born. So let's say Kobe looks at that league, okay, and he says, you know what? I think I'm not going to play. You know, these guys are really good. Maybe in a couple more years, when I'm. When I'm better, maybe I'll do it then. Kobe doesn't have that experience of scoring 0 points in the summer. How is his drive to be as good as he was? Does he. Does is that the same anymore? Does he still have that drive to be as good as he became because he has to wake up, look in the mirror and say, hey, I was zero points. How am I going to make sure that doesn't happen to me again? How am I going to make sure that. Take it a step further. I now am the guy who's holding other players to zero points, okay? So that they know what it feels like. So because he had that bad experience where he lost, the competitor in him was born, okay? So the first thing I understand is that winning is overrated, especially when it's not in the season. If you're, you know, middle school, high school player outside the season, you should be looking for as many situations as possible where you can lose. And situations where you might lose by a lot aren't bad either, right? A Lot of players are going to try and shy away from situations where, you know, they know that they're going to lose. They know that there's going to be other players who are better than them there, and they think that that's because, oh, well, what's the point of going if I can't compete, if I can't win? Okay? It's this story right here where Kobe goes to summer league, gets held to zero points, and because of that, it fuels the fire in him. It gives him that drive to become the player that he became, okay? And he wouldn't have had that had he not been willing to go out and compete and score zero points in a summer. Okay? And I see it now with players who they're. They're scared to go out and play against players or play against teams that they might lose to, that they might get blown out by. And because of that, they're really only doing themselves a disservice because they're never going to. They're not going to get to feel what that's like to lose that game. They're not going to have to see, okay, well, look, I'm going to have to get better at this. If I want to be able to compete at this level, then I'm going to have to be able to do this. Clearly, you know, maybe what I've been doing, hasn't that been working? It hasn't been enough. Maybe I haven't been focused enough. Now I've got to make sure I take it up to the next level so that now, as time goes on, you. You have that understanding of what happened, of where you need to get better. And that all comes from a situation where you might lose. You might lose by a lot. Okay? So competitors see the value in losing, right? Everyone talks about competitors being winners and competitors this. And of course they are. But competitors also aren't afraid of losing because they understand that there's just as much, if not more value in losing at something than you're going to gain from actually winning it. Okay? So that's the first thing to understand and to take this. That a step further. Competitors will go at anybody, and it doesn't matter who that person is. Okay? So again, maybe you're in a league where you've got players who are older than you, bigger than you, and you have to be willing to go at those players because again, whether or not you beat them, it doesn't matter. What matters is the experience, because what matters is the long term. So when you get that experience of Playing as players who are better than you, who are bigger than you, might be older than you, again, even losing it, you're going to get that, that experience and that understanding long term. So when I was thinking about, about topics for this episode, I actually got a DM and it says, hey, coach, I was wondering what your opinion is on playing against higher competition, because today I had a practice with the U18, the U20 of the Pro club in my town. I just turned 14. It's safe to say that I, that I got my ass whooped. Do you think this is good for my progression or should I play against competition at my skill level? And you know, I basically said that it can definitely be helpful for you to play against older competition. Right. I don't think that's a bad thing at all. I think it's good to see guys who are obviously playing at a high level around where you are, who are where you want to be at. You get a chance to see why they are where they are right there. Okay, that being said, I told him, listen, you're 14, you're playing as guys who are, you know, 18, 20, like, understand you're probably going to lose most of the time and you can't let that deter your confidence. You can't say, oh, I lost, so that means I'm not good. Well, you're playing as players who have four, five, six years of just straight up growth development on you. Right. You shouldn't be winning at 14 against those guys. Okay. But again, what it's going to do is it's going to tell you, okay, this is waiting to get better. This is where I need to improve. Oh much. And this guy do this, he does this really well, you know, so maybe I get a chance to learn some stuff from these other guys as well. You know, I train a couple players who are in high school, like early high school, and I work them out with some of my college guys. And I'm always telling them after, like, because obviously a lot of times there's a three, four year age difference. All my college guys are really good players. And at the high school level they, they dominated, they dominated people. And so I tell them, I'm like, listen, you should lose to those guys. I'll tell this to my, to my, my high school guys who will work out with them. We have group workouts where we're, it's going to be competitive pretty much the whole time. I'll tell them, okay, listen, you should, like, you should lose to those, to those guys because they're going to play at the college level. They've already been at the high school level and they've already, you know, done it. They've already been guys who average 20 a game. They've been all state, right? They've. They've scored a thousand points and they've done it already. Okay? They have that experience on you. What you have to understand is that this is all building for you long term. So you're playing these guys. When you go back to playing as your own age, you should feel way more confident in yourself because you're like, okay, well, these guys aren't anywhere close to as fast or as big or as good as the players that I've been training against. That should give you a boost in your confidence right there because you're willing to go out and compete against players who are better than you, bigger, faster, stronger, all those things. Okay? You might not win any of the drills that we do during the workouts, but when you go back and you're playing games and it actually matters, the wins and losses, that's where it pays off for you. Okay? You have that confidence knowing, hey, I already did this against this guy, right? You know, I'm 14. I did this against a guy who's 6, 7, going to play college basketball. Well, I don't see anybody in the core who's that same size now or moves like that. So I feel way more confident being able to do the stuff that I do. Okay? That's ultimately the goal right there. You want to make sure that you move that direction. You want to go the opposite way of saying, oh, man, I guess I just. I guess I'm just not very good. I guess I just can't compete. I can't play. It should help to boost your confidence when you keep that in mind. That's what I'm always reminding, like, listen, you should lose this right now. But eventually you're going to be in a position where you're going against players who haven't had that same experience as you. They haven't gone out and played against guys like that. And so your confidence level is. Is going to be very, very high. And that's going to translate into you having success as you start to get older and play against your own level of competition. Okay? And the other aspect that I said, the other part that I said in my answer was like, you want to develop your ability to be a competitor, it's okay to play against older or better players and lose. There's absolutely no shame in that. And that's going to help make you better long term. The only bad thing you can do is go the opposite way and avoid situations where you might lose. It's all about getting better. And that takes me to my next point of this, which is competitors prioritize getting better over winning. So what I mean by that is that winning is really not an important factor when it comes to anything outside of the regular season, okay? When you're actually playing regular season games, winning does matter, right? You play for your high school team. The goal is to win games, okay? It matters at that point because that's what gets written down, right? People actually remember that. But when you're playing in workouts or travel basketball or obviously you want to win all that sort of stuff, right? You want to win. When you go against, you know, you go play two on two after a workout or you play three on like you want to win that. But it doesn't really matter if you win because you have to think about it like this. If you have, you know, let's say there's two players you could play against. One player, you're clearly better than. You guys play, you know, best of seven series, one on one and you know you win four zero, like you win the first four games, okay, you can go home and you can tell everybody, hey, you know, I went 40 today when I play one on one, right? That's great. Or maybe there's a player who is a little bit better than you and you guys play a seven game series and that player beats you four, three in that series. So you lost, right? And if you just take it at face value, then you can say, well, one player won today, one player lost, one player 1, 40 and. And that other player, they lost 3, 4. But is it really better to win those four games against somebody worse than you? Or is it better to lose four games against somebody who's a little bit better, who's probably going to push you, who's going to have to make you work, who again, you're going to have to be thinking yourself, oh, what could I have done better? What am I going to have to improve upon to beat them next time? Okay? It gives you a goal to aim for. It forces you to be better. Whereas if you just stay in your comfort zone and you don't push yourself out of there, then there's only for you to aim for, okay? You. It's almost like you feel like you've made it, like you've accomplished something. But when you always are constantly going outside of your Comfort zone. Playing as guys who push you, putting yourself in uncomfortable situations, right where you might not be too familiar places, players where you know, again, you're not like you're outside of your comfort zone is not something that you might normally do that's going to help you to grow as a player. And like I said, guys, players who are great competitors ultimately value dominance, development and getting better over everything else. They value it over winning, they value it over being comfortable. And because of that, that's why player we talk about as being competitors. Kobe Bryant, Michael, like guys who we think about, we think of our competitors. That's why they were guys who won because they prioritized getting better. They pro, they prioritized maximizing what they could do over winning in the immediate moment. So ultimately being a competitor is about having a long term view of your game as a basketball player. And what I mean by that is that you can't be, you can't make choices based on the day to day. Am I going to win today? Am I going to lose today? Okay, if you look at a situation, you say if I go to that open gym right there, I, I'm going to lose. Like there's going to be players there who are really, really good and I might get ran off the floor. Okay? So I'm not going to go. If you look at it as a day to day thing, then you're going to severely stunt your own ability to grow. Whereas if you look at that and say, okay, you know, I'm going to go there and I might lose, I might be against players who are really, really good and I might lose today, but I'm going to learn something from this. I'm able to take something from this so that, you know, the next time I come back, I'll, I'll have something that I can improve on. Okay. I know long term, if I want to get to this level, I've got to get better at this. And because of that I'm going to go to this, I'm going to put myself in a position to lose potentially so that long term I become the best player that I can be. I always talk about with, with, with, with guys and I think that this is something that is a great mindset to have, is that I love walking into a gym or walking onto a court and realizing like, oh man, I might be the worst player on this court right now. Right? Like that to me is great because that means that I'm going to have to elevate my game if I want to compete And I don't want to be the guy who's going to let my team down. So I have to elevate what I do now. And that forced me to be a little bit uncomfortable. But ultimately it maximizes what I do out there. Okay? It maximizes how good I can be because I have to be good, I have to get better. So when you put yourself in situations where there's a lot of really good players around you, players who might be better than you, it forces you to be your best. And again, if you prioritize that long term development, being as good as you can, then putting yourself in those situations where you have to be a competitor, that's what you ultimately need to do. So there's one trait, guys, you need to develop if you want to become the best player you can be. It's your ability to be a competitor. And ultimately what you got to have to think about is put yourself in uncomfortable situations and don't be afraid to lose. In fact, encourage situations where you might lose. Encourage situations where you, you know, you might go out there, you might, you might get destroyed. Right? It's not, it's not a bad thing if you use that to recognize what you have to improve on and if ultimately you have a long term view every time you step out on the floor. If you guys enjoyed this episode, make sure you drop a like and subscribe if you're on YouTube right now. Like I said, Apple podcast dropped me a review. Follow me on Instagram at Vision Driven Basketball if you have any questions for me or any podcast suggestions as well. Always appreciate those. I'll talk to you guys soon. Peace.