Chapter 64 - The Mamba Mentality: How I Play
Today’s Chapter is based on the book “The Mamba Mentality: How I Play” by Kobe Bryant.
Kobe Bryant, also known as the Black Mamba, is widely considered as one of the greatest basketball players in the history of the NBA with over five championships under his belt as a Los Angeles Lakers.
Here’s what I have learned from the book:
Mamba Mentality
“From the beginning, I wanted to become the best.”
— Kobe Bryant
Kobe Bryant is known for initiating the phrase “Mamba Mentality”. Although Bryant first started it as a catchy hashtag, it became a symbol of his work ethic and his way of life. As Kobe once said, “The mindset isn’t about seeking a result—it’s more about the process of getting to that result. It’s about the journey and the approach. It’s a way of life. I do think that it’s important, in all endeavors, to have that [Mamba] mentality.”
As we have seen from others, obsession to one’s craft is primordial to reach success. In fact, Kobe believes that one must be willing to make sacrifices to obtain the level of success he had. He explains that “If you really want to be great at something, you have to truly care about it. If you want to be great in a particular area, you have to obsess over it. A lot of people say they want to be great, but they’re not willing to make the sacrifices necessary to achieve greatness.”
“What I’m saying is greatness isn’t easy to achieve. It requires a lot of time, a lot of sacrifices. It requires a lot of tough choices. It requires your loved ones to sacrifice, too, so you have to have an understanding circle of family and friends. People don’t always understand just how much effort from how many people goes into one person chasing a dream to be great.”
— Kobe Bryant
In Kobe’s case, he was obsessed in becoming the best and he “had a constant craving, a yearning, to improve and be the best.” As he once said, “If you want to be a better player, you have to prepare, prepare, and prepare some more.”
One way he did this was by watching game tapes of other players in order to figure out their weakness. His mentality was to dominate his opponents. He reiterates that “Whether it was AI, Tracy, Vince—or, if I were coming up today, LeBron, Russ, Steph—my goal was to figure you out. And to do that, to figure those puzzles out, I was willing to do way more than anyone else.”
Furthermore, Kobe understood that if he wanted to be the best, he had to take a contrarian approach compared to everyone else. As Albert Einstein once said, “The one who follows the crowd will usually get no further than the crowd. The one who walks alone is likely to find themselves in places no one has ever been before.”
Therefore, Kobe had a particular workout routines compared to his peers. Here’s how he describes it:
“I always felt like if I started my day early, I could train more each day. If I started at 11, I’d get in a few hours, rest for four hours, and then get back to the gym around 5 to 7. But if I started at 5 AM and went until 7, I could go again from 11 until 2 and 6 until 8. By starting earlier, I set myself up for an extra workout each day. Over the course of a summer, that’s a lot of extra hours in the gym.”
— Kobe Bryant
Furthermore, Kobe believes that part of the reason to his success is due to the fact that he was never satisfied even when he reached the top. He always had that desire to be better even when he was winning championships. As he once said, “I’m at the gym at the same time after losing 50 games as I am after winning a championship. It doesn’t change for me.”
In fact, this continuous obsession to improve and to become better cannot change if one is to reach the top. Kobe reiterates that “The only aspect that can’t change, though, is that obsession. You have to enter every activity, every single time, with a want and need to do it to the best of your ability.”
This reminds me of what we have learned from another basketball legend in Michael Jordan. Jordan believed that the most challenging thing about keeping a good work ethic is to do it for a long period of time. As he would often say, “commitment cannot be compromised by rewards.” In fact, while it is challenging to not give up and to persist with our good habits and efforts when things go wrong, it is even more mentally difficult to be consistent once we have a taste of success.
“Excellence isn't a one-week or one-year ideal. It's a constant. There will be days when you don't feel on top of your game, meetings in which you aren't at your best, but your commitment remains constant. No compromises.”
— Michael Jordan
In Jordan's opinion, this sense of commitment can be seen with just about anyone achieving at a high level; he gives the example of Tiger Woods who was back in the gym by 6:30 to work out the morning after he beat Phil Mickelson at the Ford Championship in 2005.
Similarly, businesses must also stay focus and committed to what worked for it to continue to grow. Too many businesses have failed by resting on their laurels or by diversifying into worse businesses.
“The Jordan brand has continued to grow because we have remained uncompromised. It's easy to go the other way, though. It's easy to rest on your laurels, or to get fat on success. I don't ever want to get fat that way.”
— Michael Jordan
Learn From The Bests
“I believe in the discipline of mastering the best that other people have ever figured out. I don’t believe in just sitting down and trying to dream it all up yourself. Nobody’s that smart.”
— Charlie Munger
In order to achieve greatness, what better way than to learn from what other people have already figured out. As Isaac Newton once said, “If I have seen further it is by standing on shoulders of Giants.” Similarly, Kobe is a believer of learning from the all-time greats in basketball. As he once said, “If something has worked for other greats before you, and if something is working for you, why change it up and embrace some new fad? Stick with what works, even if it’s unpopular.”
As such, when Kobe was younger, he had a habit of ordering game tapes of Michael Jordan in order to watch and study how Michael Jordan played the game. And more importantly, he would always “why?” at every single decisions or plays made by Jordan. Kobe explained that watching game tapes wasn’t only to learn what happened but also what could of and should of happened:
“Film study eventually became imagining alternatives, counters, options, in addition to the finite details of why some actions work and others don’t work.”
— Kobe Bryant
Outside of watching game tapes from the greats, Kobe figured that another great way of learning from them is to simply build a great relationships with them. As Kobe once said, “Just as important as reading was cultivating relationships with the greats who’d come before me.”
As such, no matter who he was with, whether it was a coach, a hall of famer or a teammate, Kobe would always ask them question after question in order to learn and improve. Notably, Kobe learned a lot from all-time greats such as Muhammad Ali and Bill Russell. As Kobe once said, “After all, why reinvent the wheel when you can just talk to the wheels that were created before?”
In Muhammad Ali, Kobe learned that one must work hard in the dark in order to shine in the light. He explains that Ali taught him that “It takes a lot of work to be successful, and people will celebrate that success, will celebrate that flash and hype. Behind that hype, though, is dedication, focus, and seriousness—all of which outsiders will never see. If you stop being dedicated to the craft, the commercials and contracts will all fade away.”
As Michael Jordan once said, people rarely pay attention to the effort that it takes in order to be successful. In fact, success comes from all the little efforts that were made to improve one step at the time, and people tend to forget that. When he moved to the world of business, he realised that great companies have a lot in common with basketball teams. Through reverse engineering, he figured out that players who practice hard when no one is paying attention are the ones that will play well when everyone is watching. Jordan explains that “No one saw all the work we were doing away from the game.“
Furthermore, Kobe explains that there is a reason why Bill Russell has won so many championships in the NBA. He shared this great anecdote from Bill Russell:
“There’s one anecdote Bill shared that stuck with me. He recounts how people always said he wasn’t a good ball handler, just didn’t know how to handle and shoot the ball. He said sure, he could do all of those things, but why would he lead the fastbreak when Bob Cousy was playing with him? Why would he shoot jumpers when Sam Jones was on his wing? The message was that if you want to win championships, you have to let people focus on what they do best while you focus on what you do best. For him, that was rebounding, running the floor, and blocking shots.”
— Kobe Bryant
This concept of learning from the greats remind me of how Warren Buffett built his fortune as an investor. In fact, Buffett’s investment philosophy was carved by the influence of three mentors: Benjamin Graham, Philip Fisher and Charlie Munger. As Buffett once said, “I am 15 percent Fisher and 85 percent Benjamin Graham.”
Firstly, as we have learned previously, Benjamin Graham was a great teacher and role model to Buffett and is an important of Buffett’s success as an investor. Often known as the father of value investing, Graham had three main principles:
A stock is the right to own a little piece of a business. A stock is worth a certain fraction of what you would be willing to pay for the whole business.
Use a margin of safety . Investing is built on estimates and uncertainty. A wide margin of safety ensures that the effects of good decisions are not wiped out by errors. The way to advance, above all, is by not retreating.
Mr. Market is your servant, not your master . Graham postulated a moody character called Mr. Market, who offers to buy and sell stocks every day, often at prices that don’t make sense. Mr. Market’s moods should not influence your view of price. However, from time to time he does offer the chance to buy low and sell high.
Due to Graham’s teaching, Buffett recognises that stocks should be seen as a piece of business rather than a bunch of numbers on a screen. While the majority of people are speculators who are trading stocks as if they were chips in a casino, value investors such as Buffett try to identify the total value of the chips.
There are many ways to value the worth of a business, but in Benjamin Graham’s case, he would often seek companies that were trading below their net assets’ value. Similarly, Buffett, in his early career as an investor, “went through the Moody’s Manuals page by page. Ten thousand pages in the Moody’s Industrial, Transportation, Banks and Finance Manuals—twice.” in the hope of finding companies trading under their intrinsic value.
However, after knowing Charlie Munger, Buffett noticed that there was a flaw in Graham’s investment philosophy. By following Graham’s investment strategy, Buffett would have to be constantly seeking for stocks selling at bargain prices in order to maintain a high return on investment considering that he would have to sell the stock once it reached its fair value. However, Munger figured that if one was to purchase a great company, then the holding period could be forever and this reduces the amount of decisions and therefore mistakes one can make. As Charlie Munger once said, “A great business at a fair price is superior to a fair business at a great price.”
This method of investing is definitely inspired by Philip Fisher. Fisher was a believer that superior profits can be made by investing in companies with above-average potential and aligning oneself with the most capable management. However, in order to identify these type of companies, Fisher explains that only looking at financial reports of the company is not sufficient. One would have to use what he called “scuttlebutt” technique in order to learn more about the qualitative of a company. Fisher encouraged investors to talk to managers, employees, clients, suppliers of the company in order to gain sufficient information to determine a company’s ability to grow sales and profits over the years.
If you read Berkshire Hathaway’s shareholder letters over the years, you will notice that the criteria Buffett has in order to make acquisition of companies are eerily similar to Fisher’s investing philosophy. For example, in his Berkshire Hathaway Letter to Shareholders of 1977, Buffett mentions the following:
“We select our marketable equity securities in much the same way we would evaluate a business for acquisition in its entirety. We want the business to be (1) one that we can understand, (2) with favorable long-term prospects, (3) operated by honest and competent people, and (4) available at a very attractive price.”
— Warren Buffett
Improve Your Weaknesses
“Don’t over-improve your weaknesses. If you’re not good at something, work on it until it no longer prevents your progress, but the bulk of your time is better spent maximizing your strengths.”
— James Clear
One thing that Kobe always insisted on from a young age was to improve on his weaknesses. As he once said, “What separates great players from all-time great players is their ability to self-assess, diagnose weaknesses, and turn those flaws into strengths.”
For example, when Kobe was six years old, it always bothered him that he had a weak left hand. Therefore, in order to strengthen it, he would practice brushing his teeth with his left hand and writing his name with his left hand.
Another example from Kobe was when he had his worst ankle sprain injury in his career; he realized that he needed to strengthen his ankles in order to avoid getting more injuries. As such, after doing some researches, Kobe decided to take on tap dancing as it was “the best way to build up his ankle strength while simultaneously improving my [his] foot speed and rhythm.”
Similarly, it is primordial to improve in your weaknesses in order to avoid getting it exploited by opponents in the game of basketball. Kobe tells the story of Kevin Durant to illustrate this:
“During his first few years in the NBA, KD had certain deficiencies in his game that I would exploit. At the time, he struggled shooting pull-up jumpers while going to his right side and he didn’t know how to operate in the post. Those holes, despite his immense height, made him guardable. Fairly quickly though—within a year or two—he became proficient at pulling up on his right side. A few years after that, he added a few left-shoulder post moves. Before I knew it, he was a 7-foot handful on the court. (…) And that’s Kevin Durant’s story. For almost a decade, he did nothing but address weaknesses and add to his game. Now, his skill set is completely fleshed out. His offensive game has no weaknesses. He’s a nightmare to go up against, and he’s worked to achieve that status.”
— Kobe Bryant
Similarly, I believe that another way of improving one’s weakness is by avoiding situations where we have to play by our weaknesses. As Charlie once said, “I want to think about things where I have an advantage over other people. I don’t want to play a game where people have an advantage over me. I don’t play in a game where other people are wise and I am stupid. I look for a game where I am wise and they are stupid. And believe me it works better. God bless our stupid competitors. They make us rich.”
Buffett has a similar story where he was asked by John Train on how he could beat Bobby Fisher. The answer: “Get him to play you any game except chess.” As such, if one wants to succeed, it is important to stay in one’s own circle of competence.
“I don't try to jump over 7-foot hurdles; I look for 1-foot hurdles I can step over.”
— Warren Buffett
Shane Parrish, the founder of Farnam Street blog, mentions this perfectly when he says, “If you put Warren Buffett in a bad position where all of his options are bad, it doesn’t matter how smart he is, it doesn’t matter how Warren Buffett he is. Everybody looks like an idiot when they’re in a bad position and everybody looks like a genius when they’re in a good position.”
While everyone has weaknesses and will not be able to succeed if placed in a bad position, your odds are a lot better when you put yourself in a position where your weaknesses become strengths or where they are better hidden in order to avoid them from being exploited.
Beyond the Book
Read "The Pursuit of Worldly Wisdom" by Farnam Street
Read "Standing on the Shoulders of Giants" by Farnam Street
Read Berkshire Hathaway's 1977 Letter to Shareholders
Read "Mastering Success: Navigating Within Your Circle of Competence" by Farnam Street