#340 Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant

On the night that the Chicago Bulls were eliminated from the 1995 NBA playoffs by the Orlando Magic, I sat with Michael in the darkened arena until 3 AM.

He had just returned to basketball 2 months earlier, following his first retirement and brief baseball career.

So much had happened in the last year.

Dressed in a suit and tie, he looked around the brand new arena that had replaced the legendary Chicago Stadium earlier that season and said, I hate this fucking building.

You built this fucking building, I said.

During that series, some of the Orlando Magic players said that he didn't look like the old number 23, which he didn't.

He was wearing number 45 and he wasn't ready.

And I knew it better than anyone else.

His endurance, his shot, there just hadn't been enough time to get him back to the level of excellence that people had grown accustomed to.

Predictably, there was plenty of talk about how his baseball career had failed.

His basketball comeback had failed.

He had failed.

Michael Jordan was done, they said.

And as usual, they were wrong.

Michael Jordan is done when he says he's done, not when you say he's done.

In fact, you saying it usually ensures the opposite.

At the end of that game, he had a message for the Orlando Magic as all the players shook hands and left the court.

Enjoy this win, because it ain't gonna happen again.

The following season, he led the Bulls to an NBA record 72 wins, swept the Orlando Magic in the playoffs, and won the first of 3 more championship rings to go with the 3 rings he already won before he had failed.

That was an excerpt from 1 of the 2 books I'm gonna talk to you about today.

Both were written by Tim Grover, who was Michael Jordan's trainer, for 15 years, and he also trained Kobe Bryant.

In fact, Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan both blurbed both of the books.

So the first book is called Relentless From Good to Great to Unstoppable, and the second one is called Winning, The Unforgiving Race to Greatness.

So what I wanna do is a little different than I normally do.

I've already done 2 episodes on, Michael Jordan, 2 episodes on Kobe Bryant.

This is just going to be, stories that Tim Grover has about Michael and Kobe and then insight into their mentality.

Further, like, life history, their biography.

For Jordan, you can listen to episode 212 and 213.

For Kobe, it's episode 272 and 273.

So I'm gonna jump right into relentless.

This is the updated version of the book.

I read the audiobook or I listened to the audiobook many years ago, and I decided, hey, I'm gonna buy the paperback version and do a podcast on it.

And so the updated version, he's talking about all the feedback he got from the first version and the most common criticism he got he got was it doesn't the book doesn't tell you what to do.

And this is what Tim Grover said about that.

That is a 100% accurate.

Why would anyone want to be told what to do?

The whole point of this book is that in order to be successful, to truly have what you want in your life, you must stop waiting to be told what to do and how to do it.

I can't give you a 10 step process or a checklist.

What I am giving you is insight into the mentality of those who have found unparalleled success by trusting their own instincts.

And so there's a very old story that's very reminiscent of what he's talking about.

Obviously, he's talking about Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, some other people he trained as well, But there was a the story about back in Mozart's day, and a man, a young man was 21 years old, and he asked Mozart.

He's like, well, how do you write a symphony?

And Mozart replied that you're too young to write a symphony, and that young man said, but you were writing symphonies when you were 10, and I am 21.

And Mozart's response was very much the point that Tim Grover is trying to teach us right in the first chapter.

He's like, yeah, but I didn't go around asking people how to do it.

And so he talks about why he titled the book Relentless.

And he says the word relentless is used to describe the most intense competitors and achievers imaginable.

Those who stop at nothing to get the end result.

And what popped to mind when I read that is, of course, Kobe and Michael are relentless.

But when I hear the word relentless, the first person that comes to my mind is not Kobe or Michael Jordan.

It's Jeff Bezos.

In fact, to this day, you might already know this, but Jeff Bezos owns the domain relentless.com.

If you go in your browser and you type relentless.com, it will forward to Amazon for for a brief moment.

He's he loved the word so much.

He was thinking about, naming Amazon relentless.com.

I've done, I don't know, 8 podcasts, 6 podcasts, something like that on Jeff Bezos.

And that's the word the one word I would choose to describe him.

One of the reasons I would heavily recommend getting the audiobook, if you like audio books of relentless is because it talks about a lot of things in this book that most people, you know, kind of omit.

You'll see them in biographies, but this idea, the dark side, the dark side of Michael Jordan and Kobe's personality is mentioned a lot in this book.

And so I just want to go into a little bit here.

He says, I understand how they think, how they learn, how they succeed, and how they fail.

I understand what drives them to be relentless, and it's not all pretty.

If you're aiming to be the best at what you do, you cannot worry about whether your actions will upset other people or what they'll think of you.

Your strategy is to make everyone else get on your level.

You are not going down to theirs.

You're not competing with anyone else ever again.

They're gonna have to compete with you.

And so that idea that, hey, I'm not going down to your level.

You have to rise to mine or you need to leave is something that Kobe and Michael repeat over and over again across decades.

It's something that their teammates mention over and over again.

It's something their competitors mentioned over and over again.

I'll I watched or we watched The Last Dance over the last week.

I kinda keep that documentary playing over and over again.

Most of the times, I'm not even listening to it.

Like, it's just on the background if I'm reading or or working or whatever.

But there was something that popped out this, you know, I don't know, the 10th time I've watched this documentary or something like that, maybe 8th.

And he he's talking about why he was so hard on his teammates.

The fact that he came to Chicago, he's like, listen.

We were a terrible franchise.

I had to fail and fail and fail and fail year after year after year after year.

I think it was 7 or 8 years before he won his 1st championship.

And then you come in here, you know, now you're you're joining a world class organization, yet.

You didn't do any of the work to build it into a world class organization.

So you're, I'm not coming down to your level.

You're going to rise to mine.

And he says something, he goes, we were shit when I got here and we elevated to being a championship quality team.

There are certain standards that you have to live by.

You do not come pussyfooting around.

You have to come in and ready to play.

And so those are Michael Jordan's words, and then Tim Grover's words on that is your strategy is to make everyone else get on your level.

You're not going down to theirs.

You're not competing with anyone else ever again.

They're gonna have to compete with you.

And then Tim Grover has a unique vantage point because he starts working out with Michael and training him way before Michael ever won his first championship.

And so he says, Michael was the best because he was relentless about winning.

No matter how many times he won, he always wanted more.

And he was always willing to do whatever it took.

Michael never cared about achieving mere greatness.

He cared about being the best ever.

And then he immediately starts comparing people like Michael, Kobe, Pat Riley, Phil Jackson, Larry Bird, and this is really a list of traits that Kobe and Jordan share.

He says these are the most driven individuals you'll ever know with an unmatched genius for what they do.

They don't just perform a job, they reinvent it.

So this idea, you're gonna hear see repeated over again.

They're the most driven.

They're the most competitive.

There is no one in their industry like them.

Another trait they shared, they expect to succeed.

They expect to succeed.

And when they do, they never celebrate for long because there's always more to do.

Another thing they take responsibility for everything.

So in addition to reading these 2 books, I collect I'm I'm I think I've already said this.

I'm slightly obsessed with both Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant.

I collect stories about them all the time.

So in addition to reading both books, I also I also have a bunch of these, like, stories saved on my phone.

They're little short videos, and I watched this excellent interview.

One of the best I've watched all the Kobe Bryant interviews that I can find.

One of the best ones happened shortly before he passed away, and it was actually with the Hall of Fame, baseball player, A Rod.

I will leave it linked down below.

I highly recommend, watching and listening to the whole thing.

I've probably watched it 4 or 5 times.

In fact, I'm supposed to meet A Rod soon, which is kinda cool.

I'm looking forward to that.

But this idea where they say, hey, you know, people like Michael and Kobe, they take responsibility for everything.

There is so there's a fascinating exchange that happens in that interview between a rod and Kobe Bryant, where Kobe says the following.

He says, the people that have always had issues or problems with are people who don't demand excellence for themselves.

I will not tolerate that.

Because when the career is all said and done, no one they're not going to be looking at you, just a player on this team, saying, oh, you didn't win a championship.

No.

They're gonna be looking here, meaning him as the leader of the team, as the founder.

Think about the founder mentality.

Right?

Everything is always the founder's fault.

The founder has to take responsibility for everything.

And so back to what Kobe says, he's like, listen.

When the career is all said and done, they're not gonna be saying looking at you, a player in this team, saying you didn't win the championship.

No.

They're gonna be looking here.

So it's my responsibility to make sure I'm holding everybody accountable.

And so that's what I think of when I get to this page and it says, hey, they take responsibility for everything, more on traits they share.

They never stop working physically or mentally because it gives them too much time to think about what they've had to endure and sacrifice.

There's two examples of this, and and you can actually see it with your eyes, when you're watching The Last Dance.

The first time is when he wins, when Michael Jordan wins his first NBA title ever.

You know, 7, 8 years of struggle, really an entire lifetime of struggle.

And he's, you know, like, just he's got his head.

There's this famous picture of him, like, with his head on the Larry O'Brien trophy.

And, you know, he's he's happy, but he's, like, also very emotional.

What was fascinating about that is the his teammates said that he had never up until that point, they didn't even know if he was human, that he had never showed them any, other emotion other than anger and frustration.

And so they they make the point of the documentary.

They didn't even know that was that he had that side to him.

And then there's an even more extreme version of this because think about this.

It's like they never start working physically or mentally because it gives them too much time to think about what they've had to endure and to sacrifice.

And the 2nd title or excuse me.

It was his 4th title, but it's the the the first NBA title that he wins after his father is murdered.

And it is visceral what happens.

It's this is something that's also famous.

You can see it on YouTube.

It's in The Last Dance 2.

But he's on the floor in the locker room, and he is just heaving and sobbing.

Like, you can hear the sobs, but what I would do is when you watch it, I would pay attention.

You just see his entire it's like his entire chest cavity.

He is shaking.

It is a complete emotional release.

And I think it goes back to the fact that, hey, you never stop working because it it will give you too much time to think about what they've had to endure and sacrifice.

And in sports, unlike business, like, there is a finish line.

Right?

And so he can stop, and everything comes rushing through.

They're never in it for the money.

He knows what he's worth, and he'll remind you if you make the mistake of forgetting it.

But the money is secondary to what really drives him, the most important thing, the one thing that defines and separates him from any other competitor.

He's addicted to the exquisite rush of success, and he'll alter his entire life to get it.

Another trait that Kobe and Michael shared, something that's mentioned over and over again is their just how strong their mentality is, the fact they had control over their minds.

I'm gonna read you something that's in Michael's autobiography, which I covered a little bit back on episode 213 in one second.

But he says, you can't excel at anything before you train your mind.

Mental dominance is what ultimately makes you unstoppable.

Michael talked about this in Driven From Within, the book Driven From Within, and he says, like, your mind will play tricks on you.

So he says, the mind will play tricks on you.

The mind was telling you that you couldn't go any further.

The mind was telling you how much it hurt.

The mind was telling you these things to keep you from reaching your goal, but you have to see past that.

You have to turn it all off if you're ever gonna get to where you want to be.

And I don't think that part can be overlooked because your own mind can be your worst enemy.

It can actually stop you from even trying.

There's this great, speech, talk Kobe Bryant was given, given I think he was doing it, on a tour in China, and he said something that was fascinating to me.

And he says the greatest fear we face is ourselves.

It's not anything that's external or anything that's superficial.

I think the greatest fear that you face is yourself because we all have dreams.

And it's very scary sometimes to accept the dream that you have.

And it's scarier still to say, I want that.

It's scary because you're afraid that if you put your heart and soul into it and then you fail, how are you gonna feel about yourself?

So being fearless means to put yourself out there and going for it.

No matter what, go for it.

Not for anybody else, but for yourself.

This dedication to learning how to control your mind is something that's mentioned over and over again.

Later in the book, it says, if one thing separated Michael from every other player, it was his stunning ability to block out everything and everyone else.

He was able to shut out everything except his mission.

In the very last episode of The Last Dance, it talks about this.

It says most people struggle to be present.

Most people live in fear because we project the past into the future.

Michael is a mystic.

He was never anywhere else.

His gift was that he was able to be completely present.

The big downfall of otherwise gifted players is thinking about failure.

He would say, why would I think about missing a shot I haven't taken yet?

And you see this even after they win the 6th and final championship in Chicago.

They're having this big celebration.

There's a bunch of Michaels in his hotel room with a bunch of reporters.

He's playing the piano.

He's smoking a cigar.

He's having a good time.

And then somebody asked him, hey.

You got another one in you.

And he just stops.

He goes, it's the moment, man.

It's the moment.

It's that Zen Buddhism shit.

Get in the moment and stay there.

Just stay in the moment until next October, and then we'll know where the hell we are.

And so this idea of controlling your mind, controlling your emotions, not panicking, not letting emotions blur judgment, and staying in the present moment is repeated throughout both books.

There's another example.

People like Kobe and Michael, they feel the same excitement and anxiety and nerves before big adventures like you do.

The difference is they have the ability to control these feelings.

Michael used to say that he had butterflies before a big game, and I would tell him get them all going in the same direction.

They're not going away, but now you're controlling how you feel about them.

Michael would think, if I'm feeling nervous, how the fuck are they feeling?

They have to deal with me.

That subtle reframing of a negative emotion into a positive one, into actual fuel.

And so another thing that Michael and Kobe had in common from Tim Grover's perspective is the ability to keep it simple and to master the fundamentals.

And so it says, at some point, you've made something simple into something complicated.

I get frequent calls from athletes who are completely overwhelmed by all the experts and trainers and nutritionists and coaches coaches, everyone throwing so much of them that they lose their natural ability that made them great in the first place.

The boxer Leon Spinks once said, when asked what he does for a living, he said, I knock motherfuckers out.

That is it.

Simple.

You don't mess with it.

You don't alter it.

You don't teach it to be something different.

And so there's a great story later in the book that talks about, like, okay, for Michael Jordan and Kobe, you know, if you ask them what to do, it's like I'm win championships.

Kobe would also say, I give them numbers, and I need to tie this together.

So So we're gonna come back to this.

I'm gonna I'm gonna jump ahead so I can just give you this part about Kobe.

And so Tim's talking about the fact that there's just a lot of people that are dabbling way too much and they're not focused, and they're wondering why they're not they're not successful.

So he says, there's a lot of people that are dabbling in a lot of things and and succeeding at none.

I listen to those people and I think, as far as I can tell, the only thing you're good at is keeping busy.

I wanna hear someone say, I do this.

If you ask Kobe what he does, he says, I give out numbers.

Numbers?

Yeah.

I gave them 81, or I gave them a triple double, or I gave those guys 61 points.

I want to make you excellent at this one thing.

When people talk about someone who can do this, you're going to be the first name on the list.

People get paid a fortune for being the expert at one thing.

Anytime others need that one thing, you're the only one that they're calling.

And so one of my favorite books that I've ever done for the podcast, I did all the way back on episode 191.

It's actually written it's a book written by my friend Eric Jorgensen.

It's called The Almanac of Nepal Ravikant.

And Naval said something genius in that book because really talking about, like, the effect of, like, the modern age, the fact that we're living in the age of infinite leverage.

And so it really affects everything, what you're doing for work, how to do it, how to think about it, really.

It's the book that I give out as a gift, you know, most frequently.

In fact, I bought 4 more copies, like, last week or week before.

But when I get to this point, he's like, you know, I want somebody to be to be excellent at one thing.

And I think this is gonna become even more and more important.

And Naval says in that book, being at the extreme of your craft is very important in the age of infinite leverage, which is what we live in.

The person that is the best in the world gets to do that for everyone.

And I've been taking Duvall's ideas are in the book and trying to apply them with a vengeance where like, I'm just gonna focus.

Like, I wanna be the best in the world in studying, condensing, and clarifying how history's greatest founders thought, and therefore, I get to do that for everyone in the world.

And so to illustrate this point, Tim Grover tells a story where him and Michael Jordan went to they go and they they visit an FBI training facility.

And And this is an excellent story because the idea behind it can be applied to everything.

Right?

So they show up and it's a practice range for the most elite sharpshooters in the world, so snipers.

There's one guy out there alone practicing his craft over and over and over again.

The target is 400 yards away, 4 football fields.

He has to get in his truck, drive to the target, set it up, and drive back to where we're standing.

He gets his gun with the scope, takes aim, one shot.

Then we get in the truck with him and drive back to the target.

He hit it dead fucking center.

Michael asked him how many people use that target range, and he said, just me.

He was alone working on this one shot over and over again.

So when people in the military need someone who can hit that kind of target, they call him.

No one knows what this guy does every day to be this good.

People just know that he can deliver results.

Figure out what you do, then do it, and do it better than anyone else, And then let everything else you do build around that.

And that's something Michael talks about because now, you know, not obviously, he was one of the greatest, if not the greatest basketball player of all time.

But if you look at what he's done in his he's one of the best entrepreneurs too.

And his whole point was, like, his game was his best endorsement.

He said my dedication to the game led to all this other stuff.

You know, fact that he made, I guess, like, a 1,000,000,000 or $2,000,000,000 selling his NBA team.

The fact that he's got this crazy deal with Nike that he's been getting 5% royalty.

I think he's gonna make something like $300,000,000 this year.

And that only happens because he figured out what he did, then did it better than anyone else, and he let everything else that he did build around that.

And so now I wanna go back to this page where it's like, hey.

You have to keep it simple.

At some point, you made something simple into something complicated that Kobe and, Michael would talk over and over again about the importance of fundamentals.

And so there's this great story in that interview with a rod and Kobe, And Kobe's talking about this, you know, this, I think, a year before the the helicopter crash.

And he's like, you know, I'm I called Michael Jordan, and he was talking about the fact that his 12 year old daughter was playing basketball.

And he feels that they were being taught, like, just too much.

Like, too much fancy stuff.

Like, this is this is just crazy.

And so what he wanted to do is, like, I just try to teach my kids, you know, the most basic stuff.

And when we just do the basics and we do it over and over and over and over again.

And so he calls up Michael Jordan and he's like, listen, man, I'm having a hard time remembering, like what I was learning when I was 12 years old.

You know, what, what kind of what, like, what was I, what techniques were I learning to play basketball at 12 years old?

Because I think these kids nowadays are just nowadays are just doing too much.

And so Kobe asked him, he's like, what were you doing?

You know, what were you learning about basketball at 12?

And he goes and Michael goes, dude, I was playing baseball.

And Kobe's response to this was excellent.

He goes, let that sink in for a second.

For all the people who are out there over training their kids at 12 and doing all this fancy stuff, just let that sink in for a second.

Okay.

So back to traits that Michael and Kobe shared.

They both never stopped learning.

They put in all these hours of work to create an unstoppable internal resource that you can draw on in any situation.

And so one of my favorite examples of this is I read this, like, 7 600 or 700 page biography of Kobe.

I did the same thing on of Michael too.

It's actually the same author.

But co in in that, it's episode 272 if you haven't heard it yet.

But in that in that book, one of Kobe's high school friends comes over and Kobe opens up this closet and it's a closet full of VHS VHS tapes of all of, you know, closet full of Michael's games.

And they would just watch him over and over again.

In fact, also in that book, Kobe's high school girlfriend was asked, like, how what was it like dating Kobe in high school?

He's like, well, I would just come over his house on Friday night and we'd watch Michael Jordan games.

So this idea that he just never stopped learning, all those hours of work have created an unstoppable internal resource that you can draw on any situation.

Kobe and Michael both talk a lot about trusting your intuition.

In fact, they quote Oprah.

I just did an Oprah episode a few weeks ago, and she talked about this.

And the quote in those in this book is Oprah once said, every right decision I've ever made has come from my gut, and every wrong decision I've ever made was as a result of me not listening to that gut, to that intuition.

You know, Steve Jobs talked about this too in, his biography written by Walter Isaacson.

He says intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion, that has had a big impact on my work.

And so in addition to that, they both seek out difficulty.

They want pressure.

And this is Tim Grover's interpretation of, you know, Michael's legend at trash talk.

I got a bunch of stories about that that I'm gonna that collected from the Internet that are great.

I'll read to you and tell you about in a minute, but I love this.

Tim says, I always felt Michael's legendary trash talking wasn't meant for the other guy.

It was another way for him to heighten the pressure that he put on himself.

Because once you've told others how bad you're about to fuck them up, you're gonna have to deliver on that promise.

Pressure.

Pressure.

Pressure.

Most people run from that.

Most people run from stress.

Stress keeps you sharp.

It challenges you in ways you've never imagined and forces you to solve issues and manage situations that tend that send weaker people running for cover.

So in that biography, this giant biography of Michael Jordan I read for episode 212, I I remember this paragraph because I it came to my mind when I was reading, this book, and it's describing Michael.

Mostly, he tested himself.