The Mindset Of A Winner & How To Succeed | Kobe Bryant EP 722

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation show. today's episode is all about unlocking the power of your mind having a growth mindset is one of the most crucial decisions you can make in your life mental toughness can allow you to respond instead of react to be in control instead of out of control and give you the endurance you need to follow your dreams.

0:32What does losing feel like to you? It's exciting because it means you have different ways to get better. There are 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.

1:08It's exciting when you lose because the process should be exactly the same whether you win or you lose. 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. You figure out how did they work, why did they work, and how can you make them work again. But the hardest thing is to face that stuff. So Katie Lou Samuelson is one of the best college basketball players in the country. She plays at UConn. She's going to be a senior. 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.

1:40And 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 going to play Notre Dame this year, yeah? Yeah. There's a chance that you see them again in the final. I said, well, you'll probably see them again. I 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.

2:22So she came down to the office. So I brought it down to the office and we sat down and we watched that game together. You got to deal with it. Face it. You got to deal with it. Face it, learn from it. You look 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, but you don't want to have that feeling again, do you? Right? So you got to 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. So it started with me when I was a, when Phil Jackson's, his first year here with the Lakers, one of the assistant coaches, his name was Tex Winter, and I call him Yoda, when he was like 82 when he got here.

3:01And he was responsible for teaching me the triangle offense. 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, yeah, you have to call down to the front desk and have to bring up the TV with the whole, The rolly thing and the VHS and the cassette tape and pop it in. And I thought we were going to 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 to the end of the game. And not like the TV feed. We're watching the in-arena feed.

3:36The 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. He 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.

4:20Wow. Where I can see bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop. Because 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. You've got to learn, man. I mean, Beyonce's 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? It's an obsessiveness that comes along with it.

4:49You 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 going to help me get better. Yes, yes. 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 him aside and say, let's look at this. We probably should have done this, that, and the other. So you'll show them the game from a little bit here and there. Yeah, and then you speak to them in executional terms.

5:25It's never, come on, guys, we can do better. Come on, guys, we can do better. That's rah-rah stuff, right? The leader must give very tactical 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, that, and the other. But by midway through the season, through that behavior, you start seeing them communicating the same way back to you. Right. And it's like, OK, Cole, they're doing this, that and the other to you. Maybe we should do this. OK, yeah. Awesome. Great. Let's do it. That was the big challenge is you move from being the single dominant player to understanding, OK, I have to help these other guys.

5:58The challenge for me was always compassion and empathy. I want to hear your whining. I don't want to hear it. No excuses. Don't tell me how rough the water is. Just bring the boat in. You know, I don't I don't want to, you know, and it's funny his understanding like, okay, you guys have lives Right out of here. They have other things have other things happening to them that may be Affecting the way that they're practicing or the way that they're performing and it was hard for me to understand that because nothing nothing Bothered me, you know anything personally that never fazed me when I'm compartmentalized it very well So I couldn't understand how my teammates couldn't do that either.

6:36So I had to really work on that aspect of it. That's hard. Yeah. So do you feel like you never really had the compassion you wish you would have had? I think about 2009, 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 soft on it. 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 it's all happy-go-lucky type of thing.

7:15Your leader, your job is to get the best out of them, even if they may not like it at that time. They were playing with Rajon Rondo, Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett, Ray Allen, myself, Powell, and players that other teams didn't want. And 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've 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.

7:55So this is like revenge, right? And they're kicking our butt again, right? So I sit around and I just started laughing. I started laughing. And then I remember Derek Fisher looked at me like, and Lamar looked at me. He goes, what is funny? I said, dude, they beat the crap out of us. They just beat the crap out. I said, I'm missing the part where that's funny. I said, man, listen, if we start this season and they say, you know, all you have to do is win two games at home and you're an NBA champ, would you take that? And they're like, right. That's all we got to do. Go home, win two, we're NBA champions.

8:28All we got to do is win two games in a row. That's it. We'll take care of the first game, and 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.

9:02Wow. 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.

9:15I am so excited for you to finish the rest of your day strong. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description and it'll take you to the full episode of my other show, The School of Greatness. Make sure to come back tomorrow for another episode of The Daily Motivation Show.

9:40Thank you.