Kobe Bryant's SHARES What It ACTUALLY Takes To SUCCEED (Mindset Of A Winner)|Lewis Howes

Rest at the end, not in the middle. And that's something I always live by. I'm not going to rest, I'm going to keep on pushing now. There are a lot of answers that I don't have, even questions that I don't have. But I'm just going to keep going. I'm just going to keep going and I'll figure these things out as I go. You just continue to build that way. So I try to live by that all the time.

How important is understanding human psychology and human behavior to work with a team as opposed to just relying on your gifts and talents?

It's probably the most important thing. You know, when you're in this culture in our society, you can do some phenomenal things individually, but they'll never reach their full potential unless you do them collectively. You have to figure out how to do that. And, you know, Phil Jackson was great at that. He wouldn't just coach the team or coach the game, but he'd read everything about every single player. He'd learn about your history, how you grew up, how you were raised, where were you raised, he'll read every interview, and he'll learn about you and gives him a better understanding of what's motivating you, what your insecurities are, right? And then it just helps him communicate with you better. or even push a button here if he needs to.

When did you learn that it was important to understand who your teammates are, what their likes or dislikes are? Was that in high school for you or more?

No, I learned it from Phil. There was a stretch in '03 where Shaq was out with an injury and Phil called me up to his office and said, okay, we need you to really turn on the afterburners and start scoring the ball if you have to win. I did, and I wound up scoring, I think it was nine straight games for 40 plus points.

Nine straight?

Nine straight games. And then Shaq comes back second to last game of that. And then Phil calls me up to his office and says, Kobe, okay, I need you to dial it back. I'm like, why? Like, we're winning one. I don't understand. It's because our goal is to win a championship. And we can get through the Western Conference with you playing this way. But in the East, you know, we can dominate them inside with Shaq in the post. But if you continue to do this, we'll lose Shaq. We'll lose him.

His motivation, his excitement, what triggers him, right?

So, I need you to pull back so we can pull Shaq forward for June. And I just looked at him like, this is a smart dude.

Wow.

That's one smart dude, man. So I pulled pulled it back.

Wow. Yeah. What do you think has been the greatest challenge you've had since leaving the game?

The greatest challenge. I think it's, you know, I mean.

You won an Oscar. You're launching podcasts and shows and you got a book coming out.

Yeah, but it's, it's, it's different, though. like, you know, we were just talking about it here in the office the other day. You know, when you play the game, you hit a game-winning shot, you miss a shot, the reaction's there. You can see how people are responding to it, right? You can feel it.

The energy is there.

The energy is there. What I do now, you don't. Like, I don't see how people are affected by your basketball or, you know, creating the punies and you put it out there. Like, I wish I could see a car ride of a family the first time their daughter hears Lily's Lemonade and what she's doing, you know, she's singing along to it, that's not there, right? So that's the challenge. That's the one thing that I miss is being able to feed off of the energy.

The instant feedback that you get from shoot, missing or scoring a shot, winning or losing a game, it's like either.

Way you're getting a result, right? Yes, yes, yes. That's the one thing. And when I went to, 'cause I spent a lot of time with mentors as well. Up at Pixar and Disney Studios, they've been absolutely wonderful animation, Disney animation. And I've talked to them about Frozen and Moana and how our kids love them. And they're always like, oh, that's awesome.

And they want to hear it because.

They don't ever get a chance to truly see it. They're not sitting in a movie theater. No, no. And they don't have time to go to Disneyland and walk around the park and see how many families are enjoying.

The content that they've created because they're busy making the next. Creating. Yes.

Yeah, so that's the one thing.

What do you think the biggest challenge is for most athletes after they retire?

I think it's the fear of starting anew. And that was certainly present for me as well.

Really? Yeah, identity you mean?

Well, it's starting from scratch, right? Because when you play for 20 years, I played for 20 years, you reach a certain level, you're like, okay, wait a minute, I have to start again at the base of a mountain and try to climb the top of this mountain. First of all, what mountain am I climbing? I don't even know. Like, what the hell am I going to be doing? And it's very scary. It's very scary.

Even for you.

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And the thing that helped me actually was hurting my Achilles. Because that forced me to sit there and say, okay, the day could be today that your career is over.

At any time when you were playing, I mean, yeah.

Now what do you do? You have these ideas about doing something with your life after basketball. But what if today is the day that you, that's it. Now what do you do? So I had all this time sitting there with my Achilles injury and contemplating and thinking and I said, I better get to work. That was that.

What was the vision for you afterwards then? Was it to do what you're doing now or did you have other ideas or what is, what's the vision for you?

I struggled with it at first. 'Cause the first question I asked, which is the wrong question, is what's the biggest industry I can get into?

Was it more money thinking or? Yes, money thinking.

Saying, okay, athletes are saying you can't make more revenue when you retire. This is your source of your income is here. Saying, okay, that's a challenge.

What can I do?

And I remember going, Didn't you launch.

A fund or something?

I did, I did. And so I started, I went for a ride and I said, okay, stop thinking of it that way. You're thinking of it the wrong way. Why'd you start playing basketball?

Because I loved it.

All right, what do you love to do? Oh, I love to tell stories. All right, let's do that. And then that's where it started for me. And then on top of that, it became things like, you know, you start learning more about the financial industry and about players going broke once they retire and saying, okay, how can I minimize the chances of that happening? What are things that I can do to invest my money smartly? also helped control some of that outcome to a certain extent. And that's when I called Mike Repole, who Mike Repole was an entrepreneur who built Vitamin Water, Pirates Booty and some other companies and started learning from him. And then from that came the opportunity to invest in body armor.

Yeah.

And which, yeah, which we're doing now.

It's delicious.

But all that came from the injury and really having to self-assess and face that really dark room of what comes next.

Storytelling is something you're really passionate about. What's a story over your life that's been a constant theme that you go back to? Is there something you heard as a kid that really resonates with you, or a book, or a movie that just feels like, this is me.

Yeah, that's funny. Movies are plenty, but there's a quote from one of my English teachers at Lower Marion named Mr. Fisk. He had a great quote that said, rest at the end, not in the middle. And that's something I always live by. I'm not going to rest, I'm going to keep on pushing now. There are a lot of answers that I don't have, even questions that I don't have. But I'm just going to keep going. I'm just going to keep going and I'll figure these things out as we go, right? And you just continue to build that way. So I try to live by that all the time.

Rest at the end.

Rest at the end.

What's the question that eats you alive the most that you haven't answered yet?

The question that eats me alive that I haven't answered yet.

But you're still looking for the answer.

I'm still looking for the answer. How to tell a good story. I don't think anybody has that answer. You know, like when I sat down to write your basketball, I was like, okay, what do I want to say?

Say.

And you have certain acts and how you can structure certain things, the ebbs and flows of story, certain formulas that have been there since the beginning of time. But it's such an exact science.

So challenging, yeah.

Right, and so that one question is really interesting.

Why do you want to tell a great story?

I think stories is what moves the world. Whether it's an inspirational story, it's an informational one, nothing in this world moves without story. You know, being from the political world, sports world, nothing that we have moves without story. And so I think that is the root of everything. And if we're gonna try to make the world a better place, story's the right place to start.

I agree.

But most people don't understand, like my last year people would come up to me and say, okay, what are you gonna do? I said, I'm gonna be a storyteller.

Really?

And they go, they're like, what are you talking about? All right, man. So what are you really gonna do?

Yeah.

Like, what's gonna happen when you retire is you're gonna go through, like, a week of depression. Yeah. Then the second week is gonna be, like, denial. Right. I'm like, dude, seriously, I'm good. So after a while, I just got sick of it, and I just.

Just said, I don't know.

I'll go play golf or something, right? Just tell them a lie.

I'm not gonna do anything. I'll just tell them real estate.

Yeah, whatever.

I'm not gonna do anything. I'm just gonna sit What does losing feel like to you?

It's exciting.

Why is it exciting?

Because it means you have different ways to get better. There's certain things that you can figure out that you can take advantage of, right? Certain weaknesses that were exposed that you need to shore up, right? So it was exciting. I mean, it sucks to lose. But at the same time, there are answers there. If you just look at them.

Because you get the information from losing more than from winning probably.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, the answers are there when you win too. You just have to look at them.

Yeah. Right?

So it's a constant process. It's exciting when you win, it's exciting when you lose, because the process should be exactly the same. Whether you win or you lose, as you go back and you look and you find things that you could have done better, you find things that you've done well that worked, figure out how did they work. Why did they work? How can you make them work again?

Yeah.

But the hardest thing is to face that stuff. That's a really, really tough challenge. You mean face it? You mean look yourself in the mirror.

And say, okay, this is how I showed up or this is what happened. I'll give you an example.

So Katie Lou Samuelson is one of the best college basketball players in the country. She plays at UConn. She's gonna be a senior. Right now. Right now. Yeah. And she's from Huntington Beach out here by us. And so she comes down and she works with some of my girls on the team and she helps coach.

Yeah.

And they just had a really tough season last year where they lost to Notre Dame in the final.

That's right.

Really tough.

First loss in like years, right?

And so I asked her, I said, have you watched the Notre Dame game? She was like, no. I said, well, why not? She said, I don't want to watch that. I said, I know you don't, but you're gonna play Notre Dame this year, yeah? Yeah. Was it chances you see him again in the final? I said, well, you probably see him again. She said, well, you can't show up and play them without knowing why you lost that one. Right, so, you know, the mistakes that you've made in that game, you have to do the hard stuff and watch that game and study that game to not make those mistakes over and over again just because you weren't brave enough to face it. So she came down to the office. I brought her down to the office and we sat down. We watched that game together.

Wow.

Right, and you gotta deal with it.

Face it.

Gotta deal with it. Face it, learn from it.

Wow, it must have been cringing for her and she'd be like, oh, replaying.

Like we could have won all these things.

That's exactly it, isn't it? If I just did that one thing.

If I didn't get that foul, if I was scored that layup.

Exactly right.

You're looking at it and say, oh, there's the mismatch. Oh, there's the gap, you know, and all those little things and it sucks. But you don't want to have that feeling again, do you, right? So you gotta really study it, face it. And not to say you'll win the next time you face it, but at.

Least you'll give yourself a better chance. Yeah. And did you, what was your routine and ritual like after every game? Would you watch almost every game over or certain games?

All of them.

Every game you watch?

Every game.

The whole game back?

The whole game.

No way.

Yeah, so it started with me when I was a, when Phil Jackson's, his first year here with the Lakers, one of assistant coaches, his name was Tex Winter, and I call him Yoda. I mean, he was like 82 when he got here.

Wow.

And he was responsible for teaching me the triangle offense.

How old were you then?

I was 21.

So three years, four years in the league?

Yeah, so about my fourth year in the league. And so I go up to his room and this is when there were no iPads or anything like that, right? So when you're on the road, you have to call down to the front desk and they have to bring up the TV with the whole, you know, the rollie thing and the VHS and the cassette tape, you pop it in. And I thought we were gonna watch what we call touches. So watch all your touches when you have the ball, all the decisions you make, good ones and bad. No, we're watching the start of the game.

Oh my gosh.

To the end of the game. And not like the TV feed. Watching the in arena feed. The layup line, the timeouts.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah, rewinding, stopping, fast forward, rewinding, slow motion, every little thing, every game of that season, with the 82-year-old Yoda.

Oh my gosh.

Who is as brutally honest as you can get.

What did that teach you that season?

It taught me to look at detail. Look at things at their smallest. Look at body language. Look at the energy between players. Our team and the other team. Look at the tactics. Look at the overall strategy and look at how tactically things are manifesting themselves. And because I watched so much film, then it gave me the ability to see game in real time as if I was watching film.

Wow.

Where I can see, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. 'Cause a lot of times the game starts moving really fast. But if you train yourself to watch hours and hours of film, the game's.

Not moving that fast anymore. You can really recognize who's doing what and why. Then you can position guys in the right places in real time. Seeing it before it happens. Yes. Yeah. We, you know, in football, we'd watch.

It once a week, game film, but.

Not, you know, after every game, it was only one game a week. You got like three weeks sometimes. Yeah, you gotta go. And I know Tom Brady's obsessed obcessive over Game of Thrones as well. I mean, watching his show that came out in Tom's of Time was all about him just in there studying. Even months after the game, he's studying to prepare, right? It's just like he's a stop. And that's one of the keys you think. It's like if you're not watching film, whether it be as a speaker on stage or a performer and a musician, if you're not watching yourself back, you gotta learn, man.

I mean, Beyonce is the same thing.

Really?

After a performance, she's immediately on her laptop re-watching the performance.

No way.

Yes, seeing how to do things better. What could we have done differently?

Right?

I mean, it's just, it's an obsessiveness that comes along with it. You want things to be as perfect as they can be, understanding that nothing is ever perfect. But the challenge is try to get them as perfect as they can be. And what can you do? It's in your control. So control what you can. I can watch film all day long. It's gonna help me get better.

Yes, yes. Now did you have your teammates also follow on this obsessiveness that you had as well? Or did you just encourage them or what was the?

No, you can't push somebody to do that, right? But what you can do is alter behavior and also change the vernacular of how they speak about the game. So on team buses, team planes, in a locker room after practice, I would look at the film, I'd pull Powell, Lamar, D. Fish, pull them aside and say, let's look at this, right? We probably should have done this, that and the other.

So you'll show them the game film a little bit here and there.

Yeah, and then you speak to them in executional terms. It's never, come on, guys, we can do better. Come on, guys, we can do better. That's rah-rah stuff, right? A leader must give very tactical you know, things that we can do, adjustments. Okay, the defense is doing this, that and the other. That means we should probably do this, this, this, this, this. By midway through the season, through that behavior, you start seeing them communicating the same way back to you, right? And it's like, okay, Cole, they're doing this, that and the other to you.

Maybe we should do this and that. And then you're like, okay, yeah, awesome. Great. Let's do it. Yeah, yeah.

What about season 16, 17, 18? Are you still watching every game film as obsessively as the first 10 years? Not now, no. Well, when I was playing.

When you were playing.

Yeah, so when I was playing, what I would do is study the film, but study our younger players and see what areas do they need to develop in and how can I help them develop. I mean, that was the big challenge, as you move from, you know.

Being.

The single dominant player to understanding, okay, I have to help these other guys.

How do I lift everyone else up?

It's tough.

I mean, you were so dominant in your whole career, one of the greatest of all time. Was there a weakness that you had? Or did you, 'cause obviously you're always trying to master your weaknesses so they became strengths. But did you, at the end or towards the end, did you ever feel like, gosh, I still haven't mastered this one part of the game?

The challenge for me was always compassion and empathy.

'Cause you're like, guys, let's go. Get results. Shut up.

Don't complain, right? I don't wanna hear your whining. I don't wanna hear it, don't tell me. No excuses. Don't tell me how rough the water is, just bring the boat in. You know, I don't wanna hear it, you know? And it's understanding like, okay, these guys have lives outside of here.

They have other things happening.

They have other things happening to them that may be affecting the way that they're practicing or the way that they're performing, right? And it was hard for me to understand that 'cause nothing bothered me, you know, anything personally. Never phased me when I was a freshman.

You compartmentalized it.

Very well. So I couldn't understand how my teammates couldn't do that either. So I had to really work on that aspect of it.

That's hard.

Yeah, it is.

Did you feel like you never really had the compassion you wish you would have had? Like until the last maybe couple of years?

Yeah, I think about '09 things started changing for me. I started really making a conscious effort to better understand. And that doesn't mean you have compassion and empathy so you go softer on them. It's more like you put yourself to the side and you put yourself in their shoes and understand what they're feeling. And then you have to make certain decisions of, okay, what buttons do I need to push for this player to get them to the next level? So it's never, it's not sit around and all, it's all happy-go-lucky type of thing. If you're a leader, your job is to get the best out of them. even if they may not like it at that time.

Yeah. Wow. What are you most proud of from your 20 seasons?

Honestly, it was sounds. May sound a little shallow, but I gotta say beating the Celtics in Game 7. That's what I'm most proud of. Cause it was the hardest. You know, they were playing with Rajon Rondo, Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett, All-Stars. Ray Allen. And, you know, it was myself, Powell, and players that other teams didn't want. And, you know, how do we figure out as a group what to do? And the reason why I love that series so much is that we went down three games to two against Boston. and now you got two games coming home. I remember sitting in the locker room and they beat the crap out of us, too, that game. So we're sitting in the locker room, and it's really, really quiet. I'm sitting there looking around, and we just lost the Celtics in'08. So this is like Revenge, right? And they're kicking our butt again, right? So I sit around. I just started laughing. I started laughing. And then I remember Derek Fisher looked at me, like, and Lamar looked at me and goes, what? What is funny? I said, dude, they beat. They just beat the crap out of us. They just beat the crap out. I'm missing the part where that's funny. I said, man, listen, if you start this season and they say, you know, all you have to do is win two games at home and you're NBA champ, would you take that? Yeah. Right. That's all we got to do.

Yeah.

Go home. Win two. We're NBA champions. All we gotta do is win two games in a row. That's it. We'll take care of the first game. I promise you, they're not winning game seven on our home floor. It's not happening. So we all just laughed about it. And then we went out and we figured it out. But that game seven was, we're down 15 points in the fourth quarter.

Right?

And that's when you have to collectively look at each other and say, you know, the spirit of your team must be good. Because at that moment is when teams fracture. If the energy amongst each other isn't there, that trust isn't there, you're done. And we were able to collectively dig deep together and say, all right, we're going to figure this thing out. And I wasn't playing well. I wasn't shooting the ball well at all. And so my teammates picked you up and they delivered. Yes. Wow.

Thank you so much for watching this clip with Kobe Bryant. And if you want to watch the full interview I did where I sat down with Kobe and talked about his entire life, go right here to watch this video right now.

Happiness is such a... I don't really think I would describe love as happiness. I think I'd describe it as a beautiful journey.