3 Life Lessons I Learned From Kobe Bryant’s Personal Trainer

He coached Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, and Dwayne Wade

How do champions become champions?

There are many theories. A lot of people have tried to collect data on champions, such as how many hours they worked (the 10,000 hours rule) or how young they were when they first started (younger people learn faster).

Kobe Bryant may be one of the greatest champions who ever played the game of Basketball. During his career with the Los Angeles Lakers, Kobe won five NBA championships, was an 18-time All-Star, and two-time NBA Finals MVP winner. It’s been famously said that Kobe would make sure he got in at least 400 shots a day, had a strict diet, and a hardcore training regimen that lasted 4 hours a day.

Lucky for us, we get to learn from the guy who trained him.

Tim Grover is the most revered personal trainer in the NBA. He’s trained the best of the best: Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, Kobe Bryant, and Dwayne Wade. Those four men have two things in common: they’re all champions, and Tim was their trainer.

Tim broke down how it all works in his book Relentless: From Good to Great to Unstoppable. In the book, he details the essential traits shared by the most intense competitors and achievers in sports, business, and all walks of life. Having been so close to these champions, he’s seen what it really takes to become one.

After reading the book, I’ve broken down its 3 core life lessons. These lessons lay the foundation for everything else that supports the success of champions.

Ownership

A champion takes ownership of everything in their life. Their work, their health, and their achievements. They don’t make excuses for why they lost or why they didn’t achieve their goal. They fully understand that they have the power to achieve everything that they want, and if they’re not achieving it yet then they need to improve in some way.

On December 6, 2002, the LA Lakers were facing off against the Dallas Mavericks. Although the lakers were coming off of a three-peat, by the 4th quarter, they were down 27 points. Every player on the Lakers, including Kobe, wasn’t pulling their weight.

But Kobe’s not the type of player to just sit by and let it all happen. He doesn’t wait for his team to step up. He just steps up himself and carries the whole thing to the win. He’s going for the win; whether he does it with his teammates or alone is irrelevant to him.

Kobe would lead the Lakers on 44–15 run in the 4th quarter. He scored 21 points on his way to the greatest comeback in NBA history.

Understand, achieving any goal starts first with taking ownership of every action and every outcome that has to do with the goal. If you’re working for a promotion and don’t seem to be getting it, don’t blame your boss or office politics. There’s always something more you can be doing, always. If you put in some extra work, or learned the game of office politics, or found another way around your boss, you’d get where you wanted to be.

Don’t ever blame anyone but yourself for your shortcomings. Once you establish that mindset of ownership, you’ll be in a position to take real, positive action towards your goals, since you know it’s all in your control.

Don’t think — take action

At the end of the day, the results are all that matter. And those results only come from taking action.

Fans look at Kobe’s 400 shots per day practice regimen and think it’s crazy. They see it as some impossible feat only achievable by the greats. It seems impossible because they’re thinking.

But when Kobe goes into practice he’s not thinking “oh man I have to make 400 shots today again.” He’s just walking in at 4 AM and making 400 shots. There’s no thinking about how hard it is. There’s no thinking at all, he’s just taking action.

When you focus on taking action everything changes. You don’t have time to think about how hard something is or how much it sucks. You’re already moving and making progress. Thinking doesn’t actually help you make any progress. It might be fun or pleasurable to think about success, but the only thing that actually moves you closer towards your goal is doing the work, taking action.

Such a mindset is something you can incorporate into your routine.

For me, I chose to always do my writing in the morning, starting at 7AM. I have my topic already picked out from the night before. As soon as I wake up, I sit down at my computer and start typing. There’s no thinking about how tired or hungry I am or toiling over the minute details of the article. I’m already typing.

With taking action it also helps to simplify things. Kobe took 400 shots — that’s a fairly arbitrary number. He could have done 401 or 399 — but he simplified things. He picked a number that was challenging enough and went for it without putting too much pressure on the exact number — the details are less important.

With my writing, I aim to fully finish the article draft in 2 hours, by 9 AM. Later on, I’ll edit for clarity, grammar, and spelling. But the first draft must be done in 2 hours. This makes things incredibly simple, so I can take action right away and start writing.

You can do the same. Simplify, then just GO.

Practice and preparation are the only way

There is a reason why you always hear champions talk about hard work. It may not be exactly 10,000 hours, it could be more or less, but the main point is that you’ll need to put in the work.

To get good at something, anything, you need to practice. The more hours you put in, the better you get. It’s simple math really. If you put in 2 hours a day instead of 1, you have the potential to be twice as good. Now imagine that same concept as it scales. You practice an extra 1 hour a day for 1 year, and now you have a total of 365 hours of practice more than the other guy.

There’s a saying that when under pressure, you fall to the level of your training. That’s because when under pressure, your mind and body aren’t able to slow things down anymore. Instead, you’re acting mechanically and automatically. And those automated responses will always be the simplest things, the easiest actions that the brain can recall from memory, but not the most optimal ones.

For my writing, I made a commitment to write at least 1000 words every day. That will add up over time and pay huge dividends. By the end of the year, I’ll have written 365,000 words.

Also as a part of the brain falling to the level of training is that you should practice deliberately. If you’re going to fall to a lower point then you want that point to be as high up as possible. So you keep looking for ways to improve. You record your performance so you can review it, see what can be better, and then work on it. Over time, your worst performance will be great, since you’ve constantly worked on raising up that lowest level.

“I’m not telling you to love it. I’m telling you to crave the result so intensely that the work is irrelevant.”

— Tim S. Grover

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