The late Kobe Bryant was arguably one of the greatest basketball players to ever play the game. It's rare these days to see (at least) a male player of his caliber play for the same team during his entire career. Bryant played his entire 20 year career for the Los Angeles Lakers - rather than changing teams, he simply changed his jersey number (he wore #8 for the first half of his career and #24 for the second half). He was the 1996-1997 NBA Rookie of the Year, 2007-2008 League MVP, 18x NBA All-Star (including winnning the All-Star Game MVP four times), 5x NBA Champ (including NBA Finals MVP twice), and 2x NBA Scoring Champ. He also was one of those rare players who played both offense and defense equally well, being named to the NBA's All-Defensive Team 12x in his career. He was named to the 75th NBA Anniversary Team, and he was a two-time Olympic Gold medalist in basketball for Team USA. If all of that wasn't enough, he even won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 2018 for his film, Dear Basketball.
Bryant wasn't perfect. He was charged in 2003 for sexual assault, though the charges were later dropped by the prosecutors after his accuser decided not to testify at trial. His accuser did file a civil lawsuit against Bryant, which was settled out of court.
Bryant retired after the 2015-2016 NBA season. In the season finale on April 13th, he scored an NBA season-high 60 points, outscoring the opposing team's entire team (Utah Jazz) in the fourth and final period of the game, 23-21. Bryant and his 13 year-old daughter Gianna were tragically killed in a helicopter accident on January 26, 2020. He was post-humously inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2021.
Bryant was nicknamed "Black Mamba" after the deadly snake. He was known for his relentless work ethic, which was the subject of a 2018 book The Mamba Mentality. Bryant said, "Don’t copy the what. Copy the how." He would study the greats in all domains, not just basketball and not just sports. Music, business, politics, art. It didn't matter. Bryant explained, "No matter what discipline you are in, there’s a common denominator in how we approach our craft. The attention to detail. The level of commitment. Those things are the same across the board. That is my message: Don’t look at what I did but *how* I did it. The how. And then you can transfer that over to any profession and any discipline."
It's amazing to me how much you can learn from and apply some of the lessons other leaders learned, regardless of their industry. As I've mentioned several times, I am learning a lot about leadership by reading some of the biographies from the U.S. Presidents, in succession (I'm still working on a book about Warren G. Harding, by the way). Military leaders, industrial magnates, business tycoons, political leaders, and athletes. I guarantee that there are lessons to be learned from all of them (even if the lesson is "what not to do"). "Don't copy the what, copy the how..."
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