#340 Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant | Founders

On the night that the Chicago Bulls were eliminated from the 1995 NBA playoffs by the Orlando

Magic, I sat with Michael in the dark in Dorena until 3am.

He had just returned to basketball two 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 their 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.

Predictedly, 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.

Now 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 going to 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 three more championship rings to go with the three

rings he already won before he had failed.

That was an excerpt from one of the two books that I'm going to talk to 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 want to do is a little different than I normally do.

I've already done two episodes on Michael Jordan, two episodes in 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 going to jump right into Relentless.

This is the updated version of the book.

I read the audiobook.

I listened to the audiobook many years ago and I decided, hey, I'm going to 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 was it doesn't, the book doesn't tell you what to

do.

And this is what Tim Grover said about that.

That is 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.

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's out of 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 a brief moment.

He loved the word so much. He was thinking about naming Amazon relentless.com.

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

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

One of the reasons I would heavily recommend getting the audiobook, if you like audiobooks

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 that 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 going to 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.

It's something that Kobe and Michael repeat over and over again across decades.

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

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

I watched, I've watched the last dance over the last week.

I kind of keep that documentary playing over and over again.

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

It's just on the background if I'm reading 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 of that, maybe 8th.

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

It's 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.

I think it was seven or eight years before he won his first championship.

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

Yeah, 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 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 pussy footing 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 strategies 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 going to 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 merely 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.

And 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 going to see repeated over again.

They're the most driven, the most competitive.

There is no one in their industry like them.

Another trait they share, 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 two books, I collect, I think I'm very sad.

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 have a bunch of these stories saved in my

phone and there's a 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 four or five times.

In fact, I'm supposed to meet A-Rod soon, which is kind of 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 going to 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 going to be saying looking at you a player on this team saying you knew

when a championship, no, they're going to 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 you can actually see it with your eyes when you're watching

the last dance.

The first time is when Michael Jordan wins his first NBA title ever, you know, seven, eight

years of struggle, really entire lifetime of struggle.

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

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

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

What was fascinating about that is his teammates said that he had never up until that point.

I 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 make the point of the argument.

I 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 thing about this is like they

never stop 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 second title or excuse me, it was his fourth title, but it's 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 on the last dance too, but he's on the flow and locker room and he is just heaving

and sobbing.

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

you just see his entire, it's like it's 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 will

give you too much time to think about what they've had to endure and sacrifice 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 there just how strong their mentality is.

The fact that they had control over their minds, I'm going to read you something that's

in Michael's autobiography, which I covered a lot of it back on episode two, thirteen

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 it 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 going to 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.

I think it was doing it on a tour in China.

And he says 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 going to 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.

People 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 sixth 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 asks 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.

Here's another example.

People like Kobe and Michael, they feel the same excitement and anxiety and nerves before

a big event just like you do.

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

Michael used to say they 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 and to 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 the 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

mother fuckers out.

That is it.

Simple.

You don't mess with it.

You don't alter it.

He said 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 him what they do, it's like, I'm win championships.

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

So we're going to come back to this.

I'm going to 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

away too much and not focused and they're wondering why they're not successful.

So he says, there's a lot of people that are dabbling and a lot of things 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 want to 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 one, anyone.

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

It's called The Almanac of Nepal Rava Khan 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 four 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 going to become even more and more important.

And the ball says in that book, being at the extreme of your craft is very important

in the age of infinite leverage, or just what we live in.

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

And I've been taking the balls ideas that are in a book and trying to apply them with

a vengeance where it's like, I'm just going to focus like I want to 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 visit an FBI training facility.

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, four football fields.

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

standing.

He gets his gun with the scope, take same 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, obviously, it's one of the greatest

if not the greatest basketball player of all time.

But if you look at what he's done and his, it'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, the fact that he made, I guess like a billion or two billion dollar 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 going to make something like $300 million 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 want to go back to this page where it's like, hey, you have to keep it simple.

At some point you made something simple to 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 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, he's 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 out 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 kind of,

like what was that?

What techniques were I learning to play basketball 12 years old?

Because I think these kids 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 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 overtraining 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 700 or 700 page biography

of Kobe.

I did the same thing on Michael too.

It's actually the same author.

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

But 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 tapes of all of the closet full of Michael's games.

And they would just watch him or whenever again.

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

dating Kobe and high school?

It's like, well, I would just come over to his house on Friday night and we'd watch Michael

Jordan games.

So this idea that he's 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 their 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 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.

Steve Jobs talked about this too in his biography in my Walter Isaacson.

And 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 Grovers interpretation of, you know, Michael's a legend at trash talk.

I got a bunch of stories about that that I'm going to that collected from the internet

that are great.

I'll read to and tell you about 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 tighten the pressure that he put on himself because once

you've told others how bad you're about to fuck them up, you're going to 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 two 12.

I remember this paragraph because I came online when I was reading this book and it's

describing Michael.

Mostly he tested himself.

It seemed that he discovered the secret quite early in his competitive life, the more

pressure that he heaped on himself, the greater his ability to rise to that occasion.

And I think one of the benefits is if you're holding yourself to a higher standard or putting

more pressure on yourself than the external world ever could, it makes dealing with expectations

of the external world easier.

If you're even paying attention to them, this is great.

Another video I talk about over and over again is Kobe was interviewed by a mod or shot.

And he was asked like, you know, when you're struggling, you win three championships, then

you have this drought.

You're trying to win more, you know, at that point, you didn't know you're going to win

two more like where you are.

You ever worried about fans expectations and a mod that like Kobe doesn't even let a

mod finish the question.

He has this like what I call the stanky face.

It's like, oh, like if you just disgusted at even that thought and he just shakes his

head, no, and he goes, um, their expectations will never be higher than my own.

And I think that is the exact right way to approach your craft.

And it's something that's repeated over and over again.

If you have that, then you know, you're indifferent to the opinions of other people.

It says over and over again, you know, Michael does not care what you think.

Kobe does not care what you think.

They're holding that there's nobody that can hold themselves to a higher standard than

them themselves.

And when you do that, you don't have any fear of holding yourself accountable because

everybody's going to fail.

Everybody's going to make mistakes.

And they say like, when Kobe or Michael made a mistake, they would just own up to it.

They said they would look you in it.

I and they would say, I fucked up.

That's it.

Confident, simple, factual, no explanation.

You made a mistake.

Fine.

Don't explain it to me in an hour.

The truth is one sentence.

And that relentless pressure that they put on themselves.

I mean, there's going to be a million stories.

They're going to put it on.

If you have a founder, you have a leader that has relentless pressure that's from an internal

source that they're applying to themselves.

Chances are they are also going to apply a relentlessly to their team.

And so there's a bunch of stories about about Michael doing that, about Kobe doing that.

This is an example of Michael doing it.

For all his countless gifts as a player, sensitivity to others was not among them.

He was driven to attack, to dominate, and to conquer in every way.

Whatever he had to do, he did it.

And he expected the same from every individual around him.

And every day, those teammates had to show up to face him in practice, completely dreading

what was ahead.

Not because practices were hard, but because they knew they had to deal with him and that

legendary mouth, every fucking day.

Just absolutely going after each other and every guy, pushing and demanding, challenging,

abusing and finding every possible way to make them go harder.

Once during the playoffs, on the day after a grueling overtime game, the team was ready

to start practice until Michael looked around and noticed that the guy was missing.

This is later in his career.

So the second to repeat that they're on.

Because I think his name is Scott Borrell.

I think he only played for the Bulls from like 96 to 98 and 97 to 98.

And so it says Michael looked around and noticed that one guy was missing.

Where the hell is Borrell?

He barked.

Scott Borrell was in the training room.

I don't even think he started.

He said he was a port time player.

So it sounds like he didn't play that much.

Michael stormed in there where poor Scott was on the table getting treatment for an

alleged hamstring issue.

Michael grabbed the table with Scott still on it and completely flipped it over.

I just played 48 fucking minutes last night, Michael Ward.

Everything's killing me and you have a fucking hamstring.

Get your fucking ass in the fucking practice now.

Get on my level or get the hell out of my way.

When you're the guy at the top, it's on you to pull everyone else up there with you.

For everything you've built comes crashing down.

Jordan demands excellence of himself and he has no tolerance for those who can't or won't

rise to that level.

Think about Kobe talking to A-Rod.

He's like, listen, the people that don't demand excellence for themselves.

The reason I said and recommend getting the audiobook version of relentless because

I really do feel it's very motivational for me because I have a fairly negative intermonologue.

I abuse myself in the way that Michael abuses himself and his teammates.

What I liked about the book is it didn't really hide the fact that a lot of these extreme

people seeking extreme achievement, these extreme winners do have this dark side to them.

I don't think it's a prerequisite for extreme success.

You think about John D. Rockefeller, but one of the most successful companies in the world.

The world has ever seen rather.

People worked for him and said he would never raise his voice.

He was never in polite.

His competitors would say he's gang is con the way he would dominate.

He wasn't throwing things and yelling at people like this.

It's not a prerequisite, but it is something that appears over and over and over again.

I do think it is definitely linked.

This book does a good job of just showing that dark side.

Usually people like Michael or Kobe or even Steve Jobs, I think the worst thing that you

could do is because they're so dominating personalities is back down from them.

It is the worst thing because they're just going to keep abusing you.

They're just going to realize this person's soft.

This person's weak.

I can basically have my way with them.

Even somebody that's not as talented, they do respect strength.

There's a story demonstrating this in the book.

It's also in the last dance where Steve Kerr is like, I don't know, half a foot shorter

than Michael much smaller.

That Michael would love Steve because Steve actually would stand up to him.

They're having this scrimmage in practice and Kerr didn't appreciate something that Michael

said and snapped back at him.

I think I heard that he had pushed him or heard pushed him or something like that.

Michael hauls off and punches him in the face.

Then Michael gets kicked out of practice.

Surprisingly, Steve Kerr said it was one of the best things that ever happened to me.

I needed to stand up and go back at him because as soon as the practice ended, Michael called

him apologized.

From that point on, Michael trusted Kerr.

This is something that Jordan's teammates talked about a lot.

I have more examples of Jordan's teammates talking like that than I do with Cobies, but

I think it still applies to them.

They knew that this was an unusual talent.

Even early in his career, I saved screenshots and I look into my phone.

Larry Bird and Magic Johnson had dominated the NBA in the 1980s.

Now we're getting to the early 90s, late 80s and they're realizing they're playing against

the young Michael Jordan.

Larry Bird said, there's nobody like him.

Point blank.

I've never seen nobody plays like he plays.

This is before he won a championship.

Before he won a championship, Magic Johnson said, Jordan is the most talented player in

the NBA by far.

What was fascinating is people knew that years, years before he would be considered successful,

who's an individual, successful individual player from the get go.

But you know, it's all, if you don't win championships, nothing else matters.

And Bobby Knight is a legendary coach and he's coaching Michael Jordan in the 1984 Olympics.

This is before, this is before Jordan ever plays a game in the NBA.

And so the Portland Trailblazers who have the second pick in the draft of the year, they're

going to call Bobby Knight.

And so before the 1984 NBA draft, the Portland Trailblazers called Bobby Knight, who was

coaching the US Olympic basketball team that summer, which included Michael and asked

him his opinion on whom they should take with the second pick in the draft.

Everyone knew that Houston Rockets are going to take Okima, Lajuan with the first pick.

But no one, including Portland, was sure whether Portland would take Sam Bowie or Michael

Jordan.

Remember Sam Bowie for later?

There's a hilarious Michael Jordan story with him.

So you know, it should Portland take Sam or Michael Jordan with the second pick.

Take Jordan said Bobby Knight, right?

Said Portland, but we need a center.

Then play him at center.

Knight said.

And so Tim's interpretation of this was you have to look at your teammates and your employees

and see what they can do, not what they can't.

This reminded me of a story from one of the Rockefeller biographies I read, the fact that

they said he would hire talented people as found, not as needed.

He's like, listen, talent is the best asset class.

It doesn't matter if I don't have a job opening or I don't have a position.

This guy is so talented, if I can get him now, I'll figure out what to do with him later.

That's the equivalent of Bobby Knight saying, who cares if you need a center?

Play him at center.

This guy's gifted.

Take him.

And usually people like this are so talented.

They don't even know how talented they are.

And so you run into a problem.

When you're so extraordinary at your craft, when your talent is so natural and your skill

is so elevated, it's hard to understand that not everyone like you, that not everyone

is like you and can do what you do.

It's not a matter of their trying more or working harder.

They really just can't do it.

And if it's not handled right, it will destroy your entire team or office or wherever you

have elite performers surrounded by less gifted colleagues.

That is exactly why Steve Jobs said that you cannot indulge B players.

He's like, A player is only one worker they play.

If you indulge B players, you keep around, you're going to lose your A players.

You cannot indulge B players.

You're going to have a problem when you have elite performers surrounded by less gifted

colleagues.

One of my all time favorite maxims I learned from the history of entrepreneurship comes

from the founder of four seasons that excellence is the capacity to take pain.

Tim writes, one of the hardest decisions is to determine how much pain you can endure

and how far you can push yourself.

Everyone plays with pain.

There's always something going on.

Kobe has a finger that moves in all kinds of ways.

A finger isn't supposed to move, a normal person would have it surgically repaired, but

that surgery would cost him nine months of basketball.

People like Kobe and Michael have a high tolerance for physical and mental pain.

This is great quote in driven from within the Michael Jordan has and he's talking about

talking about himself, but he's using Tiger Woods as another example and he says, look

around and just about any person or entity achieving at a high level has the same kind

of focus.

Morning after Tiger Woods rallied to beat Phil Milkelson at the four championship in 2005,

he was in the gym by 6.30 a.m. to work out.

No lights, no cameras, no glitz or glamour uncompromise.

So this idea of you have to be uncompromised as something that Jordan repeated over and over

again in that book.

The best way to summarize his mentality and as you have to be uncompromised in your let

this is him speaking, you have to be uncompromised in your level of commitment to whatever you

are doing or it can disappear just as fast as it appeared.

So Tim Grover observed this when Michael still playing in the NBA and Tim was training

him.

He says that after every game, I used to ask Michael one question, five, six or seven,

as in what time are we hitting the gym tomorrow morning and he'd snap back a time and that

was it.

No matter what had happened the night before, good game, bad game, soreness fatigue, he

was up working out every morning while the other guys slept.

Interesting how the guy with the most talent and success spent more time working out than

anyone else.

Kobe was the same way, Kobe had an insatiable desire to work and Kobe had that from day

one.

It says, most guys on the day that they're drafted go out and celebrate.

Kobe went to the gym.

There's a great quote that I have saved of Kobe Bryant.

I don't remember where it's from.

I think it might be a camera.

It might be from mom mentality, but Kobe, this is Kobe Bryant on how he knew he was

going to win a lot of championships.

It was easy to set this is Kobe speaking now.

It was easy to size other players up in the NBA.

I found that a lot of guys played for financial stability.

Once they got that financial stability, the passion, the work ethic and the obsessiveness

was gone.

Once I saw that I thought, this is going to be like taking candy from a baby.

No wonder Michael Jordan wins all these fucking championships.

And so in the same chapter they talk about a lot of the workouts are doing.

This is fascinating.

This is this may be my favorite idea in the entire book.

I'm going to read it to you and then I'm going to read the summary.

Now I have this note on myself on my desk to myself now for all of Michael's amazing moves

and unforgettable moments.

He knew that none of that could happen without the fundamentals.

Those basic moves that he practiced over and over and over again.

He worked on being consistent and he worked on it relentlessly.

Michael Jordan worked on consistency relentlessly.

And that's something I believe and I learned that from just reading all of these biographies.

You see it over and over again.

I really believe that assuming that you're in a business that's working that time carries

most of the weight.

And if that's the case and the best thing you could do is work on consistency relentlessly

over a long period of time.

So I mentioned that quote earlier that Michael Jordan said in the last answer that my

game was my biggest endorsement and my dedication to the game led to all this other stuff.

And the way I think about this is a season of no.

My friend, Jeremy Gaffon said that one of the most valuable things I could do is just

say no to everything else.

It's not making the podcast or growing the podcast and he's right about that.

It's very similar to what Michael Jordan would do every year on Labor Day.

So every year on Labor Day, Michael would shut or by Labor Day, Michael would shut down

everything outside of basketball and just train three workouts a day workout, golf, workout,

lunch, golf break, workout, dinner, bed, every day, no commercial suits, no promotional

tours, no events, just work because he knew better than anyone else that all the outside

stuff was the result of hard work on the inside, not the other way around.

Two deals and commercials don't make you an icon being unstoppable makes you an icon

and being unstoppable only comes with hard work.

My game was my biggest endorsement, my dedication to the game led to all the other stuff.

Another trait that Tim observed in both Kobe and Michael is the fact that they have a hard

time trusting other people or maybe not maybe we put this as like they trust themselves

more than anybody else.

There's a great line in Michael's biography on episode two 12 where it says Jordan mostly

believed in himself in Mike.

He trusted all others were open to question and so Tim has some ideas on why this is maybe

the case trusting others is the same as giving up control and they usually have a painfully

hard time with that.

They have this in common at some point they learned that they can only trust themselves.

Maybe it was a lesson they learned in childhood or something that happened later in life,

but it forced them to rely on the sheer power of their gut instinct and they realized that

to survive and succeed they could never take their hands off the wheel.

Finally, the last story from this book I want to share with you is this story about Kobe.

It's really on just having one focus.

In fact, my home screen on my phone has been just as quote from the last dance and it's

been this way for a long time and it says a guy that was totally focused on one thing

and one thing only.

That was obviously reference to Michael.

This is Kobe.

Everything Kobe does is all about excellence.

Everything.

You hear people say that all the time.

I'll do whatever it takes, but Kobe truly lives it.

Every detail of his life, every hour of his day, the lonely time he spends in the gym,

the people he seeks out to help him maintain that excellence, everything, everything revolves

around being on top and staying there.

That's why we work so well together.

He has one focus and I have one focus are shared addiction to winning and everything we do

is about that one objective.

Okay, so before I jump into the other book, the other book is the winning or is winning,

the unforgiving race to greatness.

I have time to just share a couple of, I have a ton of these stories, mostly other Michael

stories.

I have some Kobe stories in here too, but I'm just addicted to like reading.

I don't even know why.

I just, so think about it.

Michael's unapologetic extreme mindset just makes me laugh.

I don't even know what it does.

It fuels me in very bizarre ways.

What's great is, you know, these stories happen way before the internet and so the only

time they would like tumble out was they'd be like a documentary or maybe a book or something

like that, right?

But now you have all these like athletes and former athletes and people that play with

Michael that go on podcasts and they tell all these crazy Michael Jordan stories.

And so I collect these crazy Michael Jordan stories, usually from podcasts, sometimes

they're, you know, written somewhere, but I just want to give you, because he's just

not normal.

And so Steven Jackson played for the Charlotte Hornets.

He played for Michael Jordan's team when Michael owned it, right?

And he told this hilarious story on the podcast.

So I'm going to read a somebody else's summary about this story because I thought the summer

was hilarious.

And it just talks about the fact that, you know, this is not an oral, we're not dealing

with the outlier of an outlier.

And so Steven Jackson tells the story, this is the summary because he's playing for Michael

Jordan, right?

And he goes, and this is the summary of Steven Jackson's story.

So this is not Steven Jackson speaking.

This is the summary, okay?

I completely understand why so many people think that Michael's the greatest normal human

beings don't do shit like this.

While on a podcast, Steven Jackson told a story about Michael Jordan, and Jay was angry

with the bobcats for being so bad, right?

There's losing games.

He owns the team.

He is super competitive.

He says like, there's a, there's a scene in the book and in the last dance where, you

know, he, they, they, they ask him why he's so playing in the NBA.

Like, do you have a gambling problem?

And you laugh.

He's like, I'm a gambling problem.

He's a competition problem and, you know, super competitive back then.

He is still competitive to this day.

And Kobe tells a hilarious story because he's like, you know, I, he, there's like, is

Michael Jordan the most competitive person ever met?

He's like, listen, I'm just as competitive with him at basketball.

The difference between me and Michael's, he's competitive with everything, which shit

that doesn't matter, I think is the way Kobe put it.

And so he's, he's like, you know, with basketball, yeah, we go back and forth, but he's like,

I was having dinner with Michael one night.

And Michael's like, oh, what about my 91, you know, team versus your 2003?

I would have whipped your ass and, and, and Kobe's like, Michael, just enjoy your salad.

I'm like, calm down.

We're not going to have this debate.

And so he's just competitive with everything.

And so let's go back to this.

I completely understand why so many people think he's the greatest normal human beings.

Don't do shit like this.

While on a podcast, Stephen Jackson told a story about Michael Jordan.

He, MJ was angry with the Bobcats with his team for being so bad.

So he came to their practice, took away all their Jordan gear.

So keep in mind, Jordan brand, right?

Then the brand underneath his entire team, every in the NBA has that, I think has this

stuff.

So you have like the shoes, you have all the work, the warm up gear, everything, right?

So he came to the practice, took away all their Jordan gear and beat the starters with

the second unit.

Keep in mind, MJ was in his 50s and he came and waxed NBA starters with the bench.

Think about the inner competitive drive that you have to have.

So you may have the lead for a decade and a half for however long it's been.

You make them take off the clothes, they're clothes because you don't think they're worthy

of your brand name.

Then you take the, the bench and say, Hey, come with me and you play scrimmage five and

five and you beat them.

Stephen Jackson was telling that story.

Stephen Jackson was one of the starters and he is telling the stories that Michael and his

50s came back and waxed NBA starters with the bench.

That is one of the crazy stories I've ever heard.

So I talk about, you know, that was probably let's say a decade ago, maybe eight years

ago that happened.

Michael's still like this.

There's this young player, John Morant.

I think is how you pronounce his name and he was, you know, talking a lot of trash and

he was like, Oh, Michael's not that good.

I would cook MJ.

That was a quote from John Morant.

This is MJ's response in my third season, which is how the season that John Morant was

in when he said that about Michael, right?

It's like, Oh, I'm better than him.

I would beat him whatever the case is.

Michael goes.

Michael's like, damn, you're 60 when he's is saying this in my third season, I averaged

37 points and the next season, I won my first MVP out of five.

Show me what you can do, little boy and stop tweeting.

I just love this idea of what's 60 year old MJ.

Sit calling and saying show, show where you could do little boy and stop tweeting.

And so this like, you know, super competitive drive, you know, it fueled him when he was

younger, still has to say this day, it's something that Kobe, you know, I've told the story

before.

It's one of my favorite Kobe stories because he's being interviewed by a moderate shot.

And this is really the foundation of Kobe.

And this is the very beginning of Kobe and Michael Jordan's relationship, you know, that

they had that, you know, I watched a ulaji recently to prep for this podcast that Michael

Jordan had at Kobe's memorial.

He's like, he was my little brother.

Kobe would say the same thing.

In fact, one of the last interviews he did was for the last dance.

And in that episode, I think it's episode five or maybe four.

And you know, Kobe's talking about, he's like, listen, when I came into the league, Michael

provided a lot of guidance for me.

I had questions about shooting his turn around.

Sarah, he gave me a detailed answer.

And on top of that, he said, if you ever need anything, give me a call.

And so Tim talks about the fact that that gets how Kobe to give you a call because he'll

call you like two, three in the morning over and over again.

Michael talked about that in his ulaji too.

But what was fascinating is the respect they had for one another and where it originated

from where Kobe is now retired and he's like, listen, I truly hate having discussions about

who would win one on one or fans saying, Hey, you would be Michael.

You're better than Michael.

And Kobe says something that I love.

He's like, listen, I feel like, Hey, what you get from me is from him.

I don't get five championships without him because he guided me so much and gave me

so much great advice.

And part of that is tied to what I said earlier is like my study of these extreme individuals

is like the worst thing you could do is back down from them.

And so Phil Jackson coached both Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant.

Michael's retired at this time.

Phil invites Michael to a Lakers practice and it's Phil Jackson.

Michael Jordan, Ahmad Rashad and Kobe Bryant and all sitting in the room.

And Ahmad is talking about in his areas like, listen, I read this piece that said you didn't

challenge him or that he didn't challenge you and that didn't that it never happened.

And he goes, it did happen because I was sitting right there at the table with you guys.

And so one of the first things that Kobe says to him is like, you got your shoes.

Let me just read the transcript here.

And so Phil Jackson asked Michael if he wasn't doing anything, just come by practice and maybe

he'd want to play.

And Michael said to Kobe, a young Kobe, hey, maybe we can figure out what you got.

And then you said back, no, maybe I'll figure out what you got.

And then Michael said, you can't guard me.

And then you said to Michael, you can't guard me.

And then Ahmad asked Kobe, how old were you?

Kobe's response, 21 years old.

And so Michael and Ahmad wound up believing there was a silent moment.

And as they're walking out in the hallway, he goes, man, I love that dude.

He's a warrior.

And he loved you because you didn't back down.

And Michael would do that on purpose.

He says in the last dance, like if you're trying to maintain dominance over people, you

don't want to give them a chance to gain any kind of confidence.

And Kobe had that same exact mentality.

He says, Mike and I both know there are certain players who that we can intimidate.

There are certain players that are afraid.

But every now and then you run into a player that has the same DNA that you do, the same

competitive, competitive spirit that you do, and you quickly realize that the bullying

and the trash talking is not going to work with this person.

And as you read about Kobe or you read about Michael, you hear all these stories.

You realize that there's this constant search for them internally to find other things

that keep their motivation up to keep them like fully engaged.

And they would compete even in like meaningless exhibition games.

So there's this former NBA player named Eddie Johnson.

And he tells two hilarious stories.

And he tells a Michael Jordan story and then he tells I'm going to share one that he

tells about Larry Bird.

I'm a huge Larry Bird fan.

In fact, I have Larry Bird's autobiography on my desk.

I'll eventually make an episode on it.

But Eddie Johnson goes on a podcast and tells a story about Michael Jordan.

And they're playing the bulls in an exhibition game and Michael comes up to him before the

game and he to Eddie and this other guy named Tom and he goes, Hey, I'm going to give

your boy 40.

And they're like, who you talking about?

Like, damn, the guy you have covering me.

Like, I'm going to give him for I'm going to put 40 points on him.

And they're like, yeah, whatever.

And MJ didn't like that they doubt it on me.

He goes bet $200.

And Eddie says I took the bet and Tom took the bet.

So you know, if Michael doesn't score 40, he's going to have to give up 400 bucks.

If he does score 40, he gets $400.

And so Eddie and Tom are on the bench and they're watching the game and you're like, Oh,

this guy just starts going nuts.

And it says Tom and I are looking at him like this dude is just insane.

And so a short while later, he has like 38 points and he walks over to the bench.

He looks at Tom and I and he says get that money ready.

He then catches the ball, reverse pivots on him and he just tries to tear the rim up tongue

wagging and all.

He dunked on him for the 40th point.

And then he held up four hand four fingers in each hand for 400.

Nobody else knew what the four meant, right?

So I was like, what is Michael doing with each hand as for him, right?

Then he runs past us and says I want my money and he checks himself out of the game.

And so that was later in Eddie's career, right?

But when Eddie is a rookie, he's playing against I got to tell you this Larry bird.

Sorry, because I there's so many just like a collect Michael Jordan stories.

I call it Larry bird stories.

He's like a legendary trash talker.

I just think it's hilarious.

And so Eddie Johnson is now telling another story.

And this time it's on Larry bird.

He goes, listen, I remember playing against Larry bird.

It was my second game of my career and I am scared to death.

Larry bird walks over to me, stands next to me and he leans over and he looks at me and

he says, do you honestly think that you can guard me?

I didn't say anything in response.

So he goes over to our bench and says, you made this rookie guard me.

I'm going to bust him up and he says that right in my ear.

He says, I'm going to wear your ass out.

The game starts and he is wearing me out.

Later he comes up to me and he says, I bet you can't do this.

He raises up and shoots a long three point shot.

It's an air ball.

I just look at him.

And he says that don't matter.

It's the fact that I can do that and stay in the game.

I bet you can't.

And so there's just a million of these like psychological warfare, psychological games

that Kobe's engaging in that Michael's engaging in.

Dominique Wilkins told another great story.

They're about to play the bulls says Michael Jordan walks into the locker room.

He's got a suit and tie on and they're like, what the hell is going on here?

Like, why are you in my or our locker room?

And so he walks up to me and says, lace him up.

It's going to be a long night.

And then he leaves.

And Dominique's like, what the hell did he just come in our locker room?

He's like, I didn't even know what to say.

I was completely shocked.

And then the punchline of the story was he had 60 that night.

He had 60 points that night.

And then this Michael Jordan story is the most recent one I came across.

And it's Julian Ellingman who played on the Patriots.

And he's talking about this.

He's about to play in the Super Bowl, right?

It's a few days before he plays in the Super Bowl.

He sees Michael Jordan and Derek Geter having dinner together.

And so he goes up and introduces himself and says, hey, I'm playing in the Super Bowl.

And he says they couldn't have been more different.

Like Geter was welcoming and charming.

And Jordan was really standoffish.

And so the conversation only lasts a few minutes.

But as the conversation is about to end, Jordan says, hey, kid, I got a bunch of money on

you.

Don't fuck it up.

And Edelman says that was the only thing that he had said to me.

And I responded, yes, sir, Mr. Jordan.

And I think all these stories, besides the Edelman one, where because he wasn't competing

on anything, which was literally betting on something, I think he understood what he

was doing himself because you can go back and watch these interviews with them.

And there's another Jordan interview on the link it down below.

And he says something that's interesting.

And he's relatively young.

I think he's still in playing in the NBA when he says this.

And he says a good competitor always evaluates his opponent.

And you understand him for what he really is.

You never try to give him confidence.

You try to take it at all times.

Mentally, I've got to find a way.

And sometimes you have to, what you have to do is you have to trick yourself.

You have to look inside yourself and find different types of challenges from game to

game.

That's how I got myself motivated.

And it wasn't the same every game I had to find a focus to go out and play at a certain

level.

In that same interview, he says, I just feel my competitive drive is far greater than

anyone else that I've ever met.

I thrive on that.

I think that is my biggest motivation in life.

I find certain competitions in life and I try to overcome them.

I feel confident about my competitive drive.

And so I'm going to pick up the book, Winning.

And he tells you exactly what he's trying to do while he's writing the book.

There's a bunch of obviously Kobe stories in here, a bunch of Michael Jordan stories

in here.

And he's trying to take you into the world of elite, cutthroat competition.

And so I was very fast.

And he would ask all of his clients and people that wanted to be his clients, the same

question.

And he would describe Winning in one word.

And he says you'd be surprised how many people would describe it in very similar ways.

And they say it's glorious.

It's awesome, amazing.

It's euphoric, et cetera, et cetera.

And he's like, but the weird thing is why are the same description of being applied

over and over again?

And he thought that Kobe was the only one that ever answered in one word this way.

Kobe's answer was everything.

And Tim thought that was the best one word answer.

He also thinks that Michael had the best description of Winning that he ever heard.

So he says I never asked MJ, but he answered it anyways.

In the last dance, in this one moment, he summed up everything he knew about his life long

partnership with Winning.

His answer is more than a word, but it's worth every one.

And so this is the quote from Michael Jordan that Tim loved from the last dance.

This is what Michael said.

I pulled people along when they didn't want to be pulled.

I challenged people when they didn't want to be challenged.

And I earned the right because my teammates who came after me didn't endure all the things

that I endured.

Once you joined the team, you lived at a certain standard that I played the game and I wasn't

going to take anything less.

Now if that meant I had to go in there and get in your ass a little bit, then I did that.

You ask all my teammates.

The one thing about Michael Jordan was that he never asked me to do something that he didn't

fucking do.

When people see this, they're going to say, well, he wasn't really a nice guy.

He may have been a tyrant.

Well, that's you because you never won anything.

I wanted to win, but I wanted them to win and be part of that as well.

Look, I don't have to do this.

I'm only doing it because it's who I am.

That is how I played the game.

That was my mentality.

If you want to play that way, then don't play that way.

And then Tim's interpretation of this is again, why I think it's so valuable to read

biographies because you don't just see the, oh, the book doesn't start out like, oh,

this first is rich and successful.

It's like most of it, most of what you and I are.

It's like the struggle.

How did they get there?

And so Tim says, yes, winning is glorious and amazing and powerful and awesome and all

those things.

But if you think that's all it is, then as MJ said, you've never won anything.

It's the punishment he took from the other teams before becoming the greatest ever

played again.

The years of relentless pressure and scrutiny of everything that he did, the single-minded

focus on one thing, winning championships, not just for himself, but for everyone around

him.

Winning can be glorious, but it can also fuck you up.

This is why I said, I think the relentless audiobook, you know, because it talks about

like the dark side, the struggles, you know, the just the extreme traits and extreme things

that happened to them in sacrifice.

They said something, you know, something that line in the book was like, they'll alter

their real range or alter their entire life just to win.

I probably have 30 highlights from this book, but this is my favorite line in the book.

Everyone wanted to be like Mike.

Mike did not want to be like anyone else.

Every great creation and invention started with people who knew how to think and didn't

allow themselves to be told what to think.

Remember that Kobe quote, I said that, you know, what you get from me, you know, I got

from him.

I don't get five championships without him.

He guided me so much and gave me so much great advice.

Tim saw that because Tim is training Kobe after he trained Mike, right?

And so I said, Kobe would call or text Mike in the middle of the night asking how he played

against a certain guy, how he handled the situation, what he thought about this or that.

And Michael would always answer his questions and help him learn.

That is a major trait of the greats, by the way.

They want to pass along their knowledge so the next generation can keep learning.

Going back to everyone wanted to be like Mike, Mike only wanted to be like himself.

The greats figure out what works for them, regardless of what everyone else does.

This is something that you'll see if you watch the last dance because they show a bunch

of examples where Michael is before game.

He's sort of lacing up his shoes.

And I didn't know this until I read the book that Tim said that he had that that Jordan

had the most disciplined game day routine that he's ever seen.

So it says and really when you read this, this happens over several pages, but routine

reduces the number of decisions, right?

So if you outsource, you just you make routine things that you just have to do all the time,

then you can actually focus on the important things.

Michael planned and organized every detail of his day from the time of his workout to the

car he drove to the arena.

I knew what time and how long we were working all for his automobile manager knew which car

he'd be driving and what time to have it ready.

The chef, his chef knew exactly what he'd be eating and what time he needed it served.

Here his routine was to laces shoes before every game, fresh out of the box.

This ritual had a special meaning to him.

One day the team bus was delayed, so I went ahead and laces shoes exactly the way he did

just to save him some time.

He refused to wear them.

I had interfered with his routine.

He had the equipment manager get him a new pair unlaced so he could lace them himself.

Every time he warmed up in practice, he started with a chest pass.

The greatest player in the world working on a basic chest pass, why?

Routine, basics, fundamentals.

If you can't master the fundamentals, you can't master anything.

Why was routine so important to him?

Because the game themselves were so unpredictable.

His routine allowed him the mental freedom to focus on one thing, the complexity of the game.

And then one of the most fascinating parts of the book was that he compared and contrasted

like talent, MJ, first hard work, where Michael worked hard, but was more naturally talented

and Kobe, worked harder, but was less naturally talented.

And so it says he starts working with Kobe in 2007, because Kobe's having problems with

the knees, he calls Michael's like, what the hell should I do?

Michael's like, go work with Grover.

And so they start working out together and it says Kobe wanted to learn everything he

could about MJ, the program, the schedule, the workouts, the whole routine.

He wanted to know about Michael's lifestyle, how he reacted in certain situations, how he

handled teammates and coaches.

And anything else Kobe could add to his arsenal of weapons, he wanted knowledge, not so

he could become MJ, so he could become a better Kobe.

Kobe never stopped.

He was insatiable for game film.

He also never slept.

So he said, you know, Kobe would text him work, and he'd want to work out from like two

in the morning, four in the morning, three a.m., all different times.

And so Tim says, I never slept during those years.

I just napped because you never know when he'd be ready to go back to work.

MJ knew when to stop Kobe didn't.

You would never find MJ on a court at 4 a.m., he slept at night because he knew sleep

was part of his training.

But above all, they had this in common.

They each possessed an unshakable confidence in themselves that never wavered.

And you see this in this recruiting call, the bulls asked Michael Jordan to be a part of

remember, I said, remember that phone call between the Portland Trailblazers in Bobby

night, hey, should we draft Sam Bowie?

Should we draft Michael Jordan?

He's like playing at center.

The bulls management asked Michael to be part of a conference call with Sam Bowie, who

was a free agent at the time.

Everyone made their pitch to Sam about why he should join the bulls and et cetera, et

cetera.

And then it was MJ's turn.

And he just said, Sam, you come in or not were winning with or without you.

His belief in himself was so powerful that he never doubted the outcome.

And that's something that they share with a lot of greats inside and outside of sports.

In fact, Sam Walton talked about having that same exact mentality when he was building

Walmart.

He said in his autobiography shortly before he died, he says, it never occurred to me

that I might lose.

To me, it was almost as if I had a right to win.

Thinking like that often seems to turn into some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.

And I think that relentless self belief is important in avoiding the following.

Very, very few people are willing or able to bet on themselves.

They become the assistant manager of their own lives, waiting for direction and approval

from some higher authority because they don't feel confident enough to make decisions and

take action on their own.

Kobe and Michael were the opposite of that.

And everybody around him knew this.

This is one of my favorite Michael stories from early in his career.

The earliest Michael's career, a reporter asked his coach Doug Collins about his strategy

for coaching the greatest player in the game.

It's pretty simple said Collins, give him the ball and get the fuck out of the way.

Michael elaborated on this mindset in the last dance.

My mentality was to go out and win at any cost.

If you don't want to live that regimented mentality, then you just don't need to be alongside

of me because I'm going to ridicule you until you get on the same level with me.

And if you don't get on the same level, then it's going to be hell for you.

And this is a great explanation of that.

When you're giving everything you have, making every sacrifice and devoting every part

of your life to winning, it's hard to tolerate anyone in your circle who isn't doing the

same.

And so that's the key.

It's not going around and then being dictators or being jerks or assholes to everybody

around them.

Now most people were describing this app.

They're never asking somebody to do something that they're not doing themselves, that they're

not first asking of themselves.

And so this idea, this is very, I mean, I have a million notes, like post-it notes in

this book because there's so many times where I'm reading both of them.

And I'm like, oh, this is like the Steve Jobs Vane story.

And it's one of my favorite stories because it really illustrates Steve's job mentality

more than anything else.

And it was told after he passed away.

And Johnny Ive is giving an interview.

I think it was Vanity Fair for a member correctly.

And he says one time, they're having this design meeting.

This is like maybe a year or two before Steve passes away.

And to be on the design team, you have to be like, you know, the best of the best already.

And Steve just lit into them.

He was not happy about their performance.

He did not think it was excellent enough.

And everybody leaves and Steve and Johnny are by themselves.

And he's like, hey, you know, we, like, you know, just tone it down a little bit, think

about the delivery of the message.

I'm paraphrasing now.

And Steve goes, oh, I'm disappointed in you.

I didn't like your vein.

And Johnny is like, whoa, whoa, whoa.

That's like why you insulting me like why you calling me vein?

He's like, I thought the work was the most important that the quality of the work was

more important than anyone else.

The fact that you're worried about the delivery or other people's feelings mean that that

in Steve's opinion, Steve Jobs' opinion that now other people's opinions, other people's

feelings are more important than the work.

And you just want people to like you.

And so therefore you're vain.

And Johnny was taken back for a while, you know, kind of insulted or maybe hurt by this.

And then he realized he's right.

Like we say the work is more important.

So therefore that has to come or that has to be a higher priority than anybody's feelings.

And there's a line in this book that one line that made me think of that story.

And it says he's Tim is talking about Kobe and Michael.

He says their minds were stronger than their feelings.

And so this extreme dedication to excellence was not only for the teammates, but everybody

around them too.

And so one thing about Michael Jordan, I'm going to read a story from, uh, driven from

within which I'll pick up in one minute.

And so there's two main things that jump out of me that are related to things that you

and I have talked about in the past.

One that you can't ride the fence, uh, when you're with Michael Jordan, that's going to

be a story from driven from within.

And then there's a great quote by Bill Wall, sure wrote that excellent book, The Score

Takes Herev itself.

And he says champions behave like champions before their champions.

And so Tim is telling the story at the very first time that he meets Michael.

He gets to the house rings the bell.

Michael Jordan opens the door.

He's in head to toe and full Nike gear.

Remember, this is probably 88 89 hasn't won any championships.

He has this deal with Nike has no idea, no idea what's in the future, right?

The fact that this, this deal alone is going to make him hundreds of millions of dollars

in income every year.

You know, we worth billions and billions of dollars if you ever wanted to sell back to

them.

But he's already in full Nike gear looks down at Tim shoes and sees Tim is wearing commerce.

This stares at them shakes his head.

They have the meeting at the end as Tim walks out.

He takes another look at his commerce and he says never again.

And then he shuts the door on Tim.

Okay, so I'm going to put down the winning book.

I'm going to pick up driven from within, which is the the autobiography, the closest thing

that Michael has an autobiography, which I did all the way back on episode two, 13.

I'm going to tell a very similar story.

And this guy is telling the story.

His name is Fred White Whitfield.

And he's like, listen, Michael's whole being is all about loyalty and winning.

And he really feels that you can't ride the fence.

And so Fred is close with Michael and this guy named Ralph.

Ralph was a player who had a Puma contract and not a Nike contract.

And since they were friends, Puma would send him a bunch of, you know, clothes and also

and shoes and Michael would do the Nike would send the same thing.

So half of his closet is Puma, half of it is Nike.

So Michael comes to Fred's apartment and we're getting ready to go out and he says, hey,

it's kind of cold.

Can I borrow one of your jackets?

And I said, sure, go on my closet.

He went in there and he saw everything separated out.

He's in there a little longer than necessary.

And he comes out of my room.

He's taken all of my Puma stuff out, brought it into the living room and laid it on the

floor.

He goes into the kitchen, gets a butcher knife and literally cuts up everything.

This was like his second or third year in the league.

He literally took a butcher knife to my shoes, ripping and cutting.

And he's all done. He picks up every little scrap and walks it down to the dumpster.

He says, hey, dude, call Howard from Nike tomorrow and tell him to replace all this.

But don't ever let me see you in anything other than Nike.

You can't ride the fence.

That is how Michael thinks.

And so in this story, I'm about to read from the winning book to you.

It says like he pursued victory in everything.

He pursued victory in everything.

Like that's the way I think about him.

So you know, he sees Tim.

He's like, okay, you're going to be my trainer now.

But don't ever come around here and converse.

Like you're on my team, then I'll be loyal to you.

And if not, like it's very black or white with him, right?

You also said that you have to keep up with him.

Remember this whole thing, like how many we've been talking for a very long time now.

And every time Kobe and Michael are saying the same thing, I'm not coming down to your

level.

That's not happening.

You will rise to mine, right?

And so he says, keeping up was essential if you're a part of MJ's world.

That was non-negotiable.

And the very first time I ever traveled with him, he was taking his entire personal team.

So he's got, you know, a chef.

All these people that are, in fact, they make this point later on that this is not luxury.

These are business partners, which is a great line, but I'll get there in a minute.

So he's got a, you know, he's got security.

He's got his chef.

He's got his trainer.

They're all coming.

And he's like, listen, meet it, meet it my house.

And then we'll travel to the airport from there, but everybody's driving their own car.

And so MJ jumps into his Ferrari and he says to everyone, you better keep up.

Now Tim is driving his father's 1987 sterling.

And he's like, this is not the fastest car we've ever made.

But I somehow managed to pull up at the same time he did.

And there was no way it was going to fall behind.

I drove on the shoulder.

I ran red lights.

I drove on and off exit ramps.

Anything I good to keep him in my sights.

I do not recommend this.

I'm just telling you what happened.

Everyone else was five minutes late.

And of course, Michael let them hear about it.

Keep up.

That was his directive for everyone around him and everything he did.

We all knew we do not compromise.

We do not take shortcuts.

We do not make excuses.

Keep up with me and my standards are your out.

He pursued victory in everything.

He was unapologetically extreme.

A lot of, you know, he's relentless.

You can call him that.

People call him ruthless.

They would have in Chicago.

They during the summer they'd run these pickup games at Tim's gym.

Right?

And you'd have people, you know, some NBA players coming over, some college players,

all these other people and they'd just play pickup.

And it's a very hot day.

Some new guy who was trying extremely hard to impress Michael.

He got overheated and he collapsed right in front, like in the middle of the game.

And so we call 911.

Tim is giving him CPR while we lay away for an ambulance and he feels like a presence

over him and it's MJ like hovering over him.

And the guy opens his eyes, slowly sits up, looks around and sees Michael Jordan standing

over him.

Michael looks down and asks him, is he okay?

And I go, he's alive.

Michael says, are you good?

The kid looks up and smiles weekly.

He says, yes, sir, I'm good.

Michael's response, good, go get a sub.

I got a game to win.

And the point of that story to me is like, oh, this like,

ruthlessness, this or relentlessness, this addiction to competition, it doesn't matter

if there's no stakes, right?

It's a playup.

It's a pickup game during the summer.

It is practice.

But it's, isn't that just like the story of the A. Johnson's hole where he's like, I'm

going to put 40 points on this guy in an exhibition game.

Most starters aren't even playing in the game.

I don't see an off switch with when I'm reading about Michael and Kobe.

When I'm studying Michael and Kobe, I just don't see an off switch.

And I don't think that's very different from Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari.

Mentor Steve Jobs hired Steve Jobs when he was 19.

He's like, listen, Steve Jobs has one speed and that speed is go.

And what's interesting between Michael and Kobe and Steve Jobs is they were about like

mastering the fundamentals and trying to get like, they were addicted to like simplicity.

And I think one of that reasons, so there's a great line in this book that is just talking

about Michael and Kobe's approach.

But I think it's really Steve Jobs's approach.

And maybe the best book that ever taught this was this book called Creative Selection.

It's written by the kind of Ken Koseyenda.

I've read the book three times.

It's episode 281 if you haven't listened to it.

I'm going to read the book and do another podcast on it over and over again.

I love that book.

But because it goes into the Ken was a programmer who worked directly under Steve Jobs and

he demoed to him on multiple occasions.

So you get a real insight into how he was like thought about building products and building

his whole organization.

There's something that is very similar to I see now is like their approaches where it

says, stop adding, start deleting, winning demands total focus.

Delete.

Is it easier to climb a mountain with a weighted vest and a full pack are just with the

essentials?

And I think this like relentless dedication to focus, relentless dedication to simplicity,

relentless dedication to the fundamentals.

It just helps them get to where they're going faster because they have one focus.

And there's a huge theme.

I don't know if I've hit on it enough.

Because they're never going to be there.

They're just not they're never complacent.

There's this interview that Michael Jordan gave where he says, I never feel that I'm at

my best.

I feel I still have room to improve.

I still set goals for myself to strive for.

I've never complacent with what I've achieved.

Even though it's been very successful for me, I still feel I have a lot to prove.

I still feel I have a lot to prove.

So I'm never really too complacent myself for what I've achieved.

Kobe mentions this Kobe Michael, both incapable of complacency, right?

And so Kobe mentions this in that interview with Alex Rodriguez where he says, you know,

when he tells people that if the next 20 years of his life isn't better and he doesn't

achieve more than the last 20 years, he would consider that a failure.

And people would tell Kobe, like, you know, when you say that, it's crazy.

You know, it's disrespectful to what you accomplish in basketball.

And Kobe's response to this was perfect.

And Kobe's point was like, I wouldn't have achieved those things without that mindset.

That idea is like, okay, you achieve something?

Great.

Then you move on and you do it again and you move on to the next thing and you achieve

something and then you move on and you do it again and again forever.

And then one thing that appears over and over again is that the commitment to reinvestment

that Michael and Kobe would make reinvestment in education and constantly training and learning

from people that came before them, for people that anybody that can help them, right?

But also in like, what is getting you to the pinnacle of your profession anyways?

And in their case, it's physical. So this is what I mentioned earlier, we're like, oh,

these aren't luxuries.

These are business partners.

I love that framing.

I'm always amazed when the media report on a superstar athlete who spend hundreds of

thousands of dollars or even more on their training and health as if that's a luxury.

Look, they have a chef.

They have a masseuse.

He's got a whole gym and a basketball court in his house.

These are not luxuries.

Those are business partners.

And then related to that is why they spent so much time learning and honing their craft.

They can take everything away from you, your house, your money, your clothes, your car.

But one thing they can't take is your education and what you've learned.

And the one thing you can count on if you do indeed lose everything is that education.

And I mentioned earlier that Michael and Tim would talk about the self-doubt, the butterflies,

you know, the nervousness that would happen before a game.

Those people are performing will not be in absence of fear, but in spite of it.

And so there's another example of Kobe saying the same thing.

Kobe says, I have self-doubt.

I have self-doubt.

I have insecurity.

I have fear of failure.

I have nights where I show up to the arena.

I'm like my back hurts, my feet hurt, my knees hurt.

I don't have it tonight.

I just want to chill.

We all have self-doubt.

You don't deny it, but you also don't capitulate to it.

I love that.

You do not capitulate to yourself doubt.

You embrace it.

And towards the end of this book, Tim is reflecting on his real issue with Kobe.

It was written after Kobe died.

And I think this is a very important lesson.

He says, Kobe's impatience was legendary.

The biggest mistake we make in life is thinking that we have time.

The longer it takes time to capture your wins, the less time you have to enjoy them.

And that's the biggest thing.

We don't know how much time we have.

The biggest mistake we have in life is thinking we have time.

You can see this in one of the last interviews Kobe did.

He's talking about the next 20 years of his life.

He had no idea.

And I hate even saying those words.

I hate the fact that this is even real.

Because I spent so much time studying him and learning from him, and he spent so much

time inspiring me.

But I think that takeaway that Tim has is dead on.

The biggest mistake we have in life is thinking that we have time.

And so I think the perfect place to end this is exactly how Michael ended the last episode

of the last dance he was talking about his entire journey.

He says it started with hope.

It started with hope.

We went from a shitty team to one of the all-time greatest dynasties.

All you needed was one little match to start the whole fire.

And that little match that helps ignite my inner fire is exactly what spending time,

reading, learning, and watching.

Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant have done for me.

That is where I'll leave it for the full stories.

I highly recommend buying both the books.

I will leave the links for both books in the show notes.

If you buy the books using that link, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time.

That is 300 and 40 books down 1,000 ago.

And I'll talk to you again soon.

Just a few quick things before you go.

You can now get Founders merch.

If you go to shop.founderspodcast.com or you go to FoundersPodcast.com and just click

through there.

You can actually order sweatshirts and hats with the Founders logo on it if you're interested

in that.

I'd highly recommend getting a few sweatshirts.

I own four of them.

They're ridiculously comfortable.

Get yourself a comfortable sweatshirt and you'll be supporting the podcast at the same

time.

Also, I started posting some of the older episodes to you too.

I will leave that link down below if you can do me a favor.

Just go over there and subscribe.

And what I'm doing is eventually a few weeks, I'm actually building out a studio in a library

right now.

And there'll be video for all the episodes, the new episodes of Founders.

But for the old episodes, what I did is actually matched up the audio with the transcript.

So if you're interested in listening to the episode, as the same time as you're reading

the transcript, you can do that on YouTube.

I will leave the link down below.

And the last thing I was thinking about was a line that was in the episode that you just

listened to that they were describing Kobe and Michael and they're like the great

snacker stop learning.

All the hours of work that they do have created this unstoppable internal resource.

That you can draw on in any situation.

They were referencing the fact that Kobe and Michael were constantly watching Game

Tape.

I think of listening to Founders Podcasts and I've said this multiple times before.

I think listening to Founders Podcasts is like watching Game Tape of history greatest

founders.

And I think reading Founders Notes is an even deeper version of that since the majority

of my notes and highlights don't make it into the podcast.

And so a bunch of people that have signed up for Founders Notes have sent me.

They're like, there's a ton of notes and highlights in here that aren't even on the podcast.

And so since I work in Founders Notes every day and I've been using and adding to this

database, the searchable database of all my highlights and notes since 2018, that was

obvious to me, but I'm like a fish and water.

And so I was like, realize it's like, oh, I should probably tell people that Founders Notes

is even deeper than Founders Podcasts.

I consider Founders Podcasts like the free trial to Founders Notes.

It's if you want to sign up for Founders Notes, you go to Founders Notes dot com.

That's Founders with the Nass Founders Notes dot com.

But it is a deeper version of the podcast since the majority of my notes and highlights don't

actually make it into the podcast.

Actually, majority is probably not the right word, but you get what I mean.

A bunch of notes and highlights are in Founders Notes that never appear on the actual podcast.

And so this was on my mind when I was listening back to the Jordan and Kobe episode because

I was like, oh, if there was an NBA equivalent of Founders Notes, it's obvious that Jordan

and Kobe would have signed up for it and used it as a tool.

In that 600 page biography of Kobe, I referenced this fact in that episode.

And in this episode too, that he used to subscribe to this service that would send you VHS tapes

of NBA games.

And then he did this so much that he had a closet full of Michaels games.

And then when you listen to their interviews and you read their words, Michael and Kobe

would talk about over and over again that they they sought advice from the great players

that came before them.

And I really do believe that reading Founders Notes gives you the ability to do that exact

same thing, but you're doing it for history's greatest founders.

And I can say that because I've been doing this for myself.

This was a tool, you know, up until the last few months, you couldn't even access it.

This is a tool I was building internally for myself.

If you listen to the Jay Z episode that I republished last a couple of days ago, actually,

there's a reference I had listened back to that episode too, right?

Because I make Founders podcasts for it's a tool for me as well as for you where it's

like, okay, I may not be able to reread these books in the future, but I can go back and

listen to like I haven't read Jay Z's autobiography since I made that episode two years ago, but

I listened to that to that episode.

And I was like, oh, I all these ideas came back to the forefront of my mind.

And in there, in that episode, I referenced the fact that I have this daily practice because

Jay Z's talking about the importance of practice.

And the importance of practice comes up over in Irvagan, Jordan would talk about it, Kobe

would talk about it.

And in that Jay Z episode, I was like, well, my daily practice is actually reading and

rereading my notes and highlights that I put in this gigantic searchable database in

this app called a read wise.

And because I talked about read wise so much, I went on other people's podcasts, talked

about it, I talked about my own podcast, a bunch of people over the years have asked to

get access.

They're like, I want access to your read wise.

I want to read your notes.

I want to read your highlights.

And so a few months ago, I actually contacted the founders of read wise because they listened

to the podcast.

It's like, hey, why don't we partner?

I want to build my own version, right?

Like I'm not building a new version of read wise.

I want to build a version where if you sign up at foundersnotes.com, you see exactly what

I see, which means you see my notes and my highlights.

And then you have all the features that I have, which is the ability to search through

this.

And so founders notes exist because so many people that listen to founders podcasts asked

for a way to go deeper.

And so that's exactly what it is.

Now, there's another thing that I'm doing right now for a limited time only that came

because people ask over and over again.

It's like, oh, David, Michael Jordan has this great thing that successful people listen,

the people that don't listen don't last long.

He is, I love that line.

And you know, I've thought about that line a lot since I read it for the first time, you

know, two and a half years ago.

I was like, David, maybe you should take one Michael's advice and listen because a bunch

of people would send me messages and they're like, hey, can you build a version of founders

and first of all, they told me, hey, you should build, you know, your own version of

read wise, which I did for foundersnotes.

The second thing they asked is like, hey, is there a way you could do this where there's

no ongoing subscription?

Like, can I just pay once and have access forever?

And so I've been testing that over the last, I don't know, like two weeks or something

like that.

The response has been incredible.

And when I realize is why they ask that is one, that means that if you sign up now,

you get access to every single highlight and note that I've ever done and ever will

do.

That makes it even more powerful.

So that then foundersnotes becomes a tool that you can actually use your entire career

to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs.

And so Michael Jordan's version of that for his craft would be watching NBA games on TV,

right?

Kobe Bryant's version of that at the beginning of his career was he actually got tapes.

But as technology keeps improving, it gets easier and easier to tap into the collective

knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs.

And I don't think there's another tool in the world that can help you achieve that better

than foundersnotes does.

And right now it has all the features that I've been using forever, but because I'm working

so closely with the team we read wise and we have dedicated engineers in this, now I'm developing

features that no one else has anywhere.

So there's going to be a lot of updates that are coming to foundersnotes soon.

I will go into more detail on this as they become live.

I'm testing them myself.

But I want to just give you a sneak peek because I've become obsessed with a bunch of these

new features that have been testing that aren't live yet, but will be.

And the good news is that if you sign up now, you get access to all these features because

I'm just going to keep adding them, all the new features and all the new improvements

for free.

So right now this minute, you can access all my notes and highlights.

You can search by keyword by person, by subject, by idea.

Any keyword you can possibly think of, you can search.

That's available right now, right?

You can also read all my highlights and notes by book.

It's amazing how much you can learn by rereading my highlights and notes of a particular book.

Usually takes you know, five, ten minutes.

The third way that you can browse my highlights too, and don't worry about remembering this.

If you sign up, you'll get all of in the welcome email, I go into detail how I use it.

But I do want to give you an overview here.

So the third way that you can browse my highlights is that you can have the notes presented

to you in a random order on this thing called the highlights feed.

Those three ways, that's how I've used this tool for years.

And I couldn't make the podcast without it, but I'm not going to stop there because I,

again, I'm building the tool for myself.

And so as I keep doing this, I'm eight years into this project.

You know what we just say?

We just hit with 340 books.

I'm going to constantly need to develop more and more tools so I can remember all of the

lessons that you and I are learning on this giant mission to condense and clarify the

collective knowledge of history's greatest founders.

So soon you'll also be able to search every single transcript from every single episode,

I already have this feature.

Another feature that I have that'll be live for everybody soon.

It's the founders GPT like chatbot AI interface.

That's not what it's going to be called.

I got to figure out what it's going to be called.

I call it super search because I really do feel like this is search on steroids.

So you can search it semantically and it has actually been making connections that I have

even missed.

So I've been asking them to essentially like, I want to build like mental models and I

already do this to reading, but it's our way to do it.

It's like, okay, tell me all the important things that you know about angiocardi's career

or tell me what are the most important ideas Edmund Land had or what are the similarities

between Kobe and Michael as an example.

And so what this AI chatbot does is it goes through all my notes, my highlights and all

my transcripts and it'll show you what it fetches.

That's the term it uses where it's like, okay, I read these 50 highlights.

And then I summarize it in these six bullet points.

And so if you want the long indebt version, you can read all the 50 highlights and all

the notes or you can just go to, here's the, you know, TLDR version of that.

Another feature that I'm working on as well, I want bullet point summaries for all the

key ideas on every episode.

We are all busy.

I want to get right to the point.

And then another idea, this is going to take a long time, but another idea is I want a

collection of ideas organized by theme across every book and episodes.

Instead of learning by person, right, as what we do on each individual episode, we're

learning like today, which is learned about Michael and Kobe.

There might be some stuff in there about Rockefeller and jobs, but the main focus on Robert is

on Kobe, you know, almost said Robert instead of Rockefeller.

The main focus is on Kobe and Michael, but instead of learning by person, I want all on

one page.

And again, this is what I want.

I'm very selfish.

I want this for me because not just good enough for me to learn it once.

I want this in my memory for the very idea and reason that they covered in one of these

books, the great, never stop learning and all the hours of work that you do have created

this unstoppable internal resource that you can draw on in any situation.

That was a description of Kobe and Michael, but I want that in my life.

And so what I would love to see is like, okay, I want a collection of ideas organized

by theme right across every book and episode all on one page.

And so for example, I was like, I want to know how all of history's greatest founders

that we've covered up until this point, how did they think about topics, different topics,

you know, marketing, recruiting, distribution, managing, how to fire people, how to think

about product development on and on and on and on.

And so my very, very long term vision of this, again, I'm going to be doing founders.

This is my life's work.

I think it's obvious.

I feel it's on the podcast.

I want to do founders for as long as I have a voice.

And founders notes is the tool that I'm building right alongside that to fulfill my life's

work.

And so over time, what I really want it to be is not just my notes and highlights, which

there by itself, it's a crazy value, right?

But over time, I want it to become this ever increasing giant, valuable curriculum that

condenses and clarifies the collective knowledge of history's greatest founders.

And so that is the long term plan right now for a limited time only if you are interested.

If you're one of these people that are interested in not having an ongoing description that you

want to pay once that you're in forever, which would mean that founders notes becomes a tool

that you use your entire career to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest

entrepreneurs.

Do not daily time is limited.

This offer can end at any time.

Sign up now at founders notes dot com.

That's founders notes dot com.

There's notes just like everything else study talked about as always.

If you can't remember the URL or if you don't want to go through the show notes, whatever,

you just go to founders podcast dot com.

Everything I do is at founders podcast dot com.

As always, thank you very much for the support.

Thank you very much for listening.

I'm going to go read a book.

I'll give you a hint.

You'll probably you probably already figured out who this is.

But there may never have been an American that was wealthier if you figure out their wealth

in relation to the money supply.

So that is the hint on the book that I'm reading right now.

Hopefully the podcast will be done four or five days.

I will put it out as soon as it's done.

In any case, thank you very much for listening.

I hope you sign up at founders notes dot com and I will talk to you again soon.

[The Relentless Mentality: Insights into the Mastery of Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant]-[#340 Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant]

📋 Summary

The Relentless Mentality: Lessons from Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant

The Philosophy of Relentlessness

The "Dark Side" of Excellence

Core Traits of the Greats

Keeping It Simple: The Power of Fundamentals

The Unforgiving Race to Greatness

Conclusion: The Importance of Routine

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[The Relentless Mentality: Insights into the Mastery of Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant]-[#340 Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant]

📋 Summary

The Relentless Mentality: Lessons from Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant

The Philosophy of Relentlessness

The "Dark Side" of Excellence

Core Traits of the Greats

Keeping It Simple: The Power of Fundamentals

The Unforgiving Race to Greatness

Conclusion: The Importance of Routine

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🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

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