Kobe Bryant: From Scoring Zero Points to State Champion in Two Years

0:00I have a brand new book called Make Money Easy. and if you're looking to create more financial freedom in your life, you want abundance in your life and you want to stop making money hard in your life but you wanna make it easier, you wanna make it flow, you wanna feel abundant, then make sure to go to makemoneyeasybook.com right now and get yourself a copy. I really think this is gonna help you transform your relationship with money this moment moving forward. We have some big guests and content coming up. Make sure you're following and stay tuned to this episode of The Daily Motivation Show.

0:38Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to The Daily Motivation Show.

0:51Who was more influential for you, your father or mother? Both were influential at different points. Yeah. Right. My mom was there on a daily basis. My father was really influential at a really critical time where I had a summer where I played basketball when I was like 10 or 11 years old. And a very prominent summer league in Philadelphia called the Sunny Hill League. Where my father played, my uncle played, and they were like all-time greats and stuff. Will Chamberlain played in the league, you know, Earl of Pomeroy played in the league. And here I come playing, and I don't score one point the entire summer.

1:27Really? Not one. How old were you? 11, 10, 11. And you're playing against other 10, 11-year-olds? Uh-huh. And you didn't score once. Not one. Were you in the game? I was in the game. How did you not score? Because I was terrible. Really? Yeah. At 10, 11 years old, you were that terrible? Awful. I mean, you know, and I had these big knee pads on because I was growing really fast. I had socks all the way up here. And I had like the high top face. Skinny, yeah. Like skinny as hell. And I scored not a free throw, not a nothing. Not a lucky shot, not a breakaway layup. zero points and I remember crying about it being upset about it my father's gave me a hug and say listen whether you score zero or score 60 I'm gonna love you no matter what Wow that is the most important thing that you can say to the child because from there I was like okay it gives me all the confidence in the world to fail I have the security there but the hell with that I'm scoring 60 let's go right right right from there I just went to work I just stayed with it I kept practicing, kept practicing, kept practicing.

2:27Is that when you think the mentality of hard work started to come in for you at that age when you failed so miserably, I guess, that summer? I think that's when the idea of understanding a long-term view became important. Because I wasn't going to catch these kids in a week. I wasn't going to catch them in a year. So that's when I sat down and said, okay, this is going to take some thought. What I want to work on first. Shooting, let's knock this out. let's focus on this half a year six months do nothing but shoot all right after that all right creating your own shot and you focus so you start i started creating a menu of things when i came back the next summer i was a little bit better right i met you being like i've got my jump shot from 15 i've got yeah i got my jump shot from 15 i got my three-point shot like just open shots not miss open shots right be able to shoot it with speed because those kids are so much more athletic yeah and then the next time i came back it was a little better the summer came back I scored.

3:21It wasn't much, but I scored. This is 12, 13. 12, 13. Then 14 came around, back half of 13, 14 years old. And then I was just killing everyone. And it happened in two years. And I wasn't expecting it to happen in two years, but it did. Because what I had to do was work on the basics and the fundamentals. Well, they relied on their athleticism and their natural ability. And because I stick to the fundamentals, it just caught up to them. And then my body, you know, my knees stopped hurting. I grew into my frame. And then your athleticism, once you have the fundamentals, the hard work, the mindset, and you tack on the athleticism, it's game over.

4:00Then it was game over. Wow. So from 13, you're good average still? I was good. I was good. And then about like the end of my, like right when I was turning 14, I became the best player in the state. At 14? At 14. So from 12 to 14, you went from scoring zero to being the best in the state of all ages. Yep. But it's simple. Like, if you do the math on this, right? Like, if you're thinking about how often kids are playing, right? And I'll tell this to my daughter and my daughter's team as well that I coach. It's a simple thing of math. If you want to be a great player, if you play every single day, two, three hours, every single day, over the course of a year, how much better are you getting?

4:38Most kids will play maybe, you know, an hour and a half, two days a week. Right. Put the math on that. It's not going to get it done. It's not going to get it done. Right? So if you're obsessively training two, three hours every single day over a year, over two years, you're accelerating. You make quantum leaps, man. Just doing a summer camp for two weeks, you see a difference. I remember playing basketball. You see it. You get a lot better. You come back more confident, playing on the playground with guys who used to beat you. Yeah. And I tell the parents of my team, I said, it's when I say your kids are going to become great basketball players.

5:15And like, really? Yeah, it's not. There's no math. It's it.

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