Mamba Mentality - Kobe Bryant (Motivational Video)

Follow your passion first. When I retired from the game, I said they're asking kind of all the wrong questions. And what's the biggest industry I can get into? It's all the wrong stuff. And you got to sit there and ask yourself, okay, what am I truly passionate about? What do I enjoy doing? And when you feel that way, honestly, I mean, you feel like you have never worked a day in your life. It's the most fun thing in the world. You get up in the morning excited about what you're doing. And you got to be really honest with yourself about it. If you wake up in the morning and you're dreading going to work, do something else. Do something else. And those are hard decisions to make. But when you make those decisions, it's a very liberating experience. And you'll find out that the rewards will come. I think the best way to prove your value is to work, is to learn, is to absorb, to be a sponge. You always want to outwork your potential. As hard as you believe you can work, you can work harder than that. And that's what I tried to do when I first came in the league. But basketball is such a direct competition sport. And me coming in at 17, I hated when my teammates would say I get hit with an elbow. Shaq would hit me with an elbow in practice. Nick Van Exel would come up and say, are you okay? I'm like, what? Are you okay? What the hell is wrong with you? So I always had that extra chip on my shoulder. So every day in practice for me was really trying to annihilate everybody that I was playing against. Because I wanted to prove you don't need to babysit me. I'm fine. And so it's always that competitive nature, the work ethic, and curiosity. Because I asked a lot of questions. When playing with Byron Scott, I asked him a lot of questions. Eddie Jones, who was great at chasing guards off the screens, and I didn't understand how to do that. I would sit with him before practice, after practice. Magic. All the Laker greats, I would always sit down and just ask them questions about certain games that I studied growing up. What actually happened there? What did you feel there? And why? We were playing against the Lakers, Tom. And we were out here in L.A. So the game was at seven. I was like, you know what? I'm going to come to the Staples Center because we're playing against the Lakers at Kobe and Shaq, okay? This is like the championship Lakers. So I'm going to get there at three o'clock. I want to make sure I make 400 main shots before I go back into the room. And then I sit in the zone and I get ready for the game. So, you know, get in the car, get to the gym, get there. And as I'm walking onto the court, who do I see? I see Kobe Bryant already working out. So once I set my foot across that line, I started working out. And so I worked out for a good hour, hour and a half. And when I came off after I was done, I sat down and of course, I still hear the ball bouncing. I look down like this guy's still working out. He was working out for like, it looks like he was in a dead sweat when I got here and he's still going. And it's not like his moves are nonchalant or lazy. He's doing like game moves, you know? I sit there and I unlace my shoes. I'm like, I want to see how long this goes. 25 minutes. And he got done. I said, okay, I think I've seen enough. Go play, you know, come back, get in the sauna, get ready for the game. That game, he drops 40 on us. Okay. And after the game is over, I'm like, I have to ask this guy, I have to understand like why, why he works like that. So after the game is over, I'm like, hey, Kobe, like, why, why were you in the gym for so long? He's like, cause I saw you come in and I wanted you to know that it doesn't matter how hard you work, that I'm willing to work harder than you. If your job is to try to be the best basketball player you can be to do that, you have to practice. You have to train. You want to train as much as you can as often as you can. So if you get up at 10 in the morning, train at 11, 12, say 12, train at 12, train for two hours, 12 to two. Um, you have to let your body recover. So you eat, recover, get back out, you train, start training again at six, train from six to eight. And now you go home, shower, you eat dinner, you go to bed, you wake up and do it again, right? Those are two sessions right now. Imagine you wake up at three, you train at four, you go four to six, come home, breakfast, relax. So, so now you're back at it again, nine to 11, right? Relax. And now all of a sudden you're back at it again, two to four, and now you're back at it again, seven to nine. Look how much more training I have done by simply starting at four, right? And so now you do that. And as the years go on, the separation that you have with your competitors and your peers just grows larger and larger and larger and larger and larger. And by year five or six, it doesn't matter what kind of work they do in the summer. They're never going to catch up because you're five years behind. So it makes sense to get up and start your day early because you can get more work in. If I start earlier, I can train more hours and I know the other guys aren't doing it because I know what their training schedule is, right? So I know if I do this consistently over time, the gaps just going to widen and widen and widen and widen and they won't be able to get that back. So to me, it was just common sense. I'm like thinking, how can I get an advantage? Oh, start early. Yeah, let's do that. How do you, how do you develop that or what do you, what do you learn that from? Well, I think it's just, it's just a matter of what's important to you. What's important to you for whatever reason, you know, I felt like I didn't feel good about myself if I wasn't doing everything I could to be the best version of myself. If I felt like I left anything on the table, it would eat away at me. I wouldn't be able to look myself in the mirror. And so the reason why I can retire now and be completely comfortable about it because I know that I've done everything I could to be the best basketball player I could be. This has been absolutely beautiful. You guys can't believe it's come to an end. Um, you guys will always be in my heart and uh, what can I say? Mamba out.