 This is a visit that Kobe Bryant made to the University of Alabama and Coach Seben. They have a little chat. Here he's actually talking to the football players for the University of Alabama. I think this is after the University of Alabama has won the national championship. Now this is, I don't know, a couple of years before he died. Maybe more. I'm not sure exactly what date this is. Maybe somebody else knows when this was. Kobe was one of the greatest players ever. Certainly top five players of all time. But he had, and you can see this, what I love about Kobe, I used to hate him. Because we hate the players of the opposition. He played against the Celtics. Celtics won one title and Kobe won the other and beat the Celtics. But he's smart. He's articulate. And as you'll see, he's got some, I think, really good things to say about sports and about athletics and about life more broadly. So this is definitely worth listening to. It's about seven minutes long. We'll see. I'm hoping we'll get through most of it because there's a lot of good stuff here. Oh, let me get my headphones. So I can follow along as well. Oops, why can't I hear anything? Let's see. Oh yeah, because I got it muted. All right, here we go. These are the football players. How you guys doing? Good. You doing good? You know, you guys start kicking things off again. There's a lot coming in different directions. Starting the new year. You guys obviously trying to defend something. And what I always found helpful, particularly when the season starts, is to edit your life. What's most important to you? When you do that, you do that exercise with yourself. Things become clear rather quickly. Edit your life. What are Iran's rules for life? We should edit your life. It is part of Iran's rules. If you go back to Iran's rules, prioritize. Create a hierarchy of values. And that's what he's talking about. What he means by edit your life is figure out what is important to you. Figure out what you have to invest in making what's important to you achievable. And get rid of the rest. Everything else, you don't want it cluttering. You don't want it interfering. You don't want it a distraction. Focus, focus, focus. This is fantastic advice. It's advice everybody should take, no matter what you do. Prioritize your values. Go for the top ones. And the lower ones, they might still be values. It's not bad stuff necessarily. They might still be positives. But they're just less important. And you don't have time. You have to focus on the things most important to you. And if some other things don't make it, then they don't make it. And for example here, it's football season. Football season lasts so many weeks. If you want to be a world champion, if you want to be the best in the world, for those weeks you better be doing football. Now these are college students. So they also have to do some exams and some classroom or whatever. Right? I assume they still do that in Alabama. But beyond that, beyond the must do's, it's football. No party, no romance, football. Because that right now is your top value and it requires, and this is the thing that they get in sports and we in the rest of the world and the rest of reality don't really get, is that to be the best that you can be is something that requires, if it's an ambitious goal, requires your full attention, requires your full focus. You know, it's not something that you can just dabble with. So I like this, edit your life. Beautiful sentiment. Say I want to be the best. So I want to do this, so I want to do that. And if things in your life don't line up with that, get rid of that. It's not important. Yep, that's exactly right. How do you improve? What do you study? When I watch film, I'm always looking at not just what's happening, but what could happen. Right? Good and bad. If we did this, that would be successful. Yeah, but what if the defense counted with that? Think about the thinking that goes on there when they watch film, right? Not only am I watching to see what they do, but what could they do if I behave differently? And the contingencies, the different situations that what is possible, right? You know, this is real thinking. Real thinking, strategic, tactical. Real thinking about all the different possibilities. So I am ready, not just physically, but I'm ready mentally for the game because during the game, you're going to have very little time to actually think. You're going to have to be able to respond fast. How do you get to the point where you can respond fast? The way you get to that point is by doing a lot of thinking in advance, a lot of thinking in advance, and by getting to the point where it's automatized. You play a lot, you think a lot, you train a lot, you practice a lot. You get it to the point where it is automatized. And what if we counted with this and what if we counted with that? It would take me four and a half hours to watch one game just because I was curious and trying to figure new things out. That's another thing, curiosity. Trying to figure things out. From a competitive standpoint, it's just really simple. I'm there to just absolutely demoralize and dominate the person that I'm playing against in the team. Imagine in any other field somebody said, I'm there to demoralize or to win or whatever in any other field, people would look at you like you're insane. But in sports, we accept it. Think of the pride that is involved here. I want to be the best. I want to dominate. I'm playing against. When I play against somebody, and we line up, you guard me, my whole purpose was to get you to reconsider your life choice to play basketball. At the end of the day, you're like, you know what? Maybe this isn't for me. That was my mentality going into every single game is just to absolutely obliterate this guy. The fact of the matter is I'm still trying to get better. If I'm playing against a weaker opponent and I start coasting, I'm building nothing but bad habits myself. If you want to play at an excellent level, if you want to do something excellent, you have to be excellent all the time. It's a way of life. This is the thing about coasting. When you coast, you pick up bad habits, the habit of coasting. You undermine the optimization. You undermine the hard work that you put in. If you're going to really be excellent, you've got to put in the hard work regularly, constantly. You have to be always on the premise of I want to be the best that I can be. And that's true in sport and true in every aspect of your life. You've got to be on the top of your game. That means you've got to be thinking and you've got to be executing and executing. Life is not just I show up on Monday and be excellent. No, it don't work that way. You've got to be excellent across the board. That's how you build habits. When excellence becomes a habit, that's who you are. Habit is automatization. You automatize this idea of excellence. You automatize your dedication. You automatize it as your value and you're focused on it. And then it just becomes part of you. It becomes part of you. It's such a beautiful sentiment, such an amazing sentiment that you're not going to hear from anybody else other than athletes. Athletes help goers say stuff like this. But here the guy's done it. This guy was the best basketball player, again, of his generation. Right, so it doesn't matter if I was playing a game in Memphis or Sacramento and you're playing against, you know, it doesn't matter to me. You're going to get the same result. But it was interesting, you know, hearing you speak today about, you know, your mentality as a player and how your work ethic, your perseverance gave you the confidence to be the kind of player that you were. And, you know, my comment about that is every great player that I've ever met, they all have that. Yeah, I mean, this is what it takes to be great. It's not even just in sport. This is what it takes to be great. What it takes to be great is that you work perseverance, thinking, commitment, focus, focus, focus. They all have talent, but they all have that. Yeah, talent is never enough. And it's not even clear what talent is. But it's not even enough that you've worked the previous 18 years. If you don't continue on it, if you don't continue the focus, continue the commitment, it'll go away. It won't last. It won't sustain itself. The process, loving the process, loving the daily grind of it and putting the puzzle together, it seems like this generation seems to be really concerned with the end result of things versus understanding, appreciating the journey to get there, which is the most important. The trials and tribulations that come along with it. You have successes, you have failures, but it's all part of the end game. What I see a lot of time from young players is they'll try, they'll push, and all of a sudden they get hit with some adversity. Nah, let me do something else. Yeah, it's a difference between instant gratification, the need for instant gratification, the resistance to any kind of effort or pain or investment in a more distant future, thinking long-term versus a real commitment to values which requires thinking long-term, which requires the understanding that sometimes you're not going to get the instant gratification. You're not going to get satisfied now. You're investing for a future. You're putting in the work for something that's going to come later. And that requires maturity. That's what it means to be an adult. Children have a lot of difficulty with resisting instant gratification. Part of what adulthood means, part of what being rational means, of reasoning means the ability to project into the future, the ability to understand that you're investing in something that has greater value in the future than just whatever feels good in the moment. Instead of staying with it, you just stay with it. A lot of guys just kind of give up on it because it's not happening now. That's exactly right. Everybody wants to be the beast, but not everybody wants to do what the beast do. You've heard that before. Oh, yeah. And that's the challenge. But that's what I love about the process of being a coach. With my kids, we talk a lot about just teaching excellence. Because it translates, right? Whether it's football, basketball, or baseball, whatever it is, once you learn what excellence looks like, you can translate that into any field. That's beautiful, right? Once you learn what excellence looks like, you can translate that into any field. You know, excellence is possible in any field. Excellence is also not a... It's the best that you can be. It's the best that you can achieve. And it's right in the life in general. That's important to write it. Whatever the case may be. Once you have what that excellence looks like, and what that detail, the attention to detail looks like, you have a foundation that you can build anything on top of. We are sort of oriented toward helping people be successful and making the choices and decisions to be successful. And they say, well, if you go there, you won't have any fun. I got to laugh. That's funny. That's so funny. That's such a... That's a great answer. An average thing to say. What the hell does that even mean? Have fun. The fun of it is knowing you did your best to do something very well. Exactly, exactly. I mean, it's again the difference between real fun, the happiness that comes from achieving your values, the happiness that comes from knowing you did your best from really making an effort, from really achieving, for really striving the joy and the happiness that comes from that, versus again the instant gratification, the feeling good right in the moment which is superficial and dull and Kobe said immediately, that's just mediocre. Average, that's nothing. To be excellent, you have to appreciate that the process, if you are good, if you rise to the occasion, that's the real fun. It's the achievement you get from exerting yourself, from really putting the effort in. That's the fun of it. Being excellent is fun. Being excellent is fun. I love that. That's a great line. I asked her just out of the blue because I kept hearing people say this about her. She missed her childhood and all that stuff. How do you feel about that? She goes, I don't know what the hell they're talking about. I learned how to be the best in the world and I traveled the world and saw some amazing places. Most of my friends were being children doing what, hanging out at the mall, shopping? Well, they weren't hanging out at the mall shopping because they went communist Romania. They were no malls and they weren't shopping. But the reality is that she got to be the best in the world. She got to do things no other human being has ever done, not a combination. She got to travel around the world, see the world. She got to experience the thrill of victory, the thrill of being the best that you can be, the thrill of being the best in the world, the thrill of doing things just physically that nobody else had ever done before. And people say, you lost your childhood? Well, but I gained so much more. So that's a great answer by an idea called an ancient. And absolutely true. And again, this is the kind of culture mediocrity that we have. We want everybody to have a childhood and have this and have that and all these middle of the road things. But to excel, to be great and to dedicate their lives and dedicate time and efforts and really strive towards something, eh, that's too bad they missed out their childhood. What's fun about that? Yeah, what's fun about that? I'm the best in the world. But I think we live in a little bit more of, uh, where do I get my self-patification from? And do you really love the game and do you love doing the things you need to do to be the best? Or do you just want to get some feedback over here on Twitter? About what you did or how somebody else thinks about you. And I think that's not really good for developing self. That's great. Developing self, he's criticizing second-handedness. This is called Saban, right? And again, there's something in sport that is very selfish, that is very focused on self, that is very focused on self-achievement, that is not as concerned about what others think of you, but is concerned about you and your ability to achieve. You're not. You're going to fake it. You're going to fake it until you want to go up against somebody that is not faking it. And they're going to call you bluff. And then you're going to be in trouble. And you're going to get exposed. You're absolutely going to be in trouble. I thought it was great that you said with patience, you have to be impatient. But you can't get frustrated. For me, it was, why am I not playing? What can I do differently? I have to be better. That's not good enough, then I have to be twice as good. Notice how objective he is here. I'm not playing. I'm on the bench. There's a reason for that. I'm not playing well enough. I have to get better. And the rest of this answer is really, really good. For me it was a challenge of getting to a place where it's undeniable. You have to play me because I'm that efficient. I'm strong at both ends of the floor. So it actually helped me. Because I was coming off the bench for the first two years. It was like, okay, I have to figure this out. I have to be... I have to get frustrated and complain and whine about it. But you were being responsible for your own self-determination. Being responsible for your own self-determination. I mean, these are sports guys talking. It's also the strength, too, to be able to tell your family members and your friends to shut up. He is the second-handed to shut up. Right? It's not about you. Because they'll be like, oh, you should be starting. Shut up. If I'm not playing, I need to get better at this. I need to get better at that. There's things I can control. But unfortunately, there's a lot of noise. A lot of outside noise. From friends and former coaches and all sorts of stuff. Filling your head with nonsense. You have to be able to have the strength to edit that and say, no. I don't want to hear it. This is on me. That becomes tough for young players. All right. So yeah, I think that's a... An example of... If you look for other videos of Kobe, you'll find other examples of this. You know, and other athletes. I think the way Michael Jordan talks about working hard and achieving excellence. If you've ever seen a documentary on Manute Ball, the 100-meter dash, greatest sprinter of all time, if you see anything, Wayne Gretzky, any great athlete, it always boils down to the same thing. Personal responsibility, taking responsibility for your own life, focus... Michael Phelps and his swimming career. Now, it is true, somebody's mentioned they burn out, bad things happen to them. Yes, because it is true that almost nobody teaches them and they don't internalize it and they don't know how to do it. They don't know how to extrapolate this to the rest of their lives. I mean, imagine... imagine people living this, living like this, taking it responsibly, imagine living in a rational culture in which, well, yeah, of course, this is how people live. And the athletes just apply it to their sport, but we all apply it to whatever it is that we're doing. I mean, as a consequence of kind of the ideas that they've expressed here, they have a certain swagger, a self-confidence, a self-esteem, at least when it comes to their chosen central purpose, which is their sport. And it's beautiful to watch. It's what I think people admire about, let's say, Muhammad Ali, even though I'm not a big fan of boxing. He had this confidence. He could take on anybody. He could beat anybody. He was ready. And we love that kind of confidence in athletes. It's sad. We don't love that kind of confidence in other people. Imagine a world in which that's the kind of confidence we aspire to, all of us. And the culture aspire to achieving. 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