Mamba Mentality: Translating Basketball to Business
If you’ve ever sent a paper ball flying from your fingertips toward the trash while yelling, “Kobe!” this article is for you.
Kobe was the Black Mamba of basketball, but it was his techniques more than his talents that made him great. It was his approach more than his athleticism. It was his mental drive more than his drive to the hoop.
None of us are Kobe on the court. But we can apply his techniques, approach, and mindset to anything we want to pursue. We can translate basketball to business. In fact, we’d be crazy not to.
Here are three stories from Kobe with lessons you can apply at the office, starting today.
Be unique
One summer, Kobe took tap dancing lessons.
After almost a dozen ankle injuries, he needed to make a change. So he did some research and found a solution: tap dancing.
Kobe hired an instructor and started going to the studio. In addition to strengthening his ankles, tap dancing improved his foot speed and rhythm. He took his tap dancing lessons for a full summer and enjoyed the benefits for his whole career.
What can you spend a summer learning to improve the rest of your career? What is an unusual skill that might pay multiple benefits?
If you’re a consultant, maybe you take improv classes. They would build your confidence and improve your impromptu responses to challenging client questions. If you own a landscaping business, maybe you take Spanish lessons to better communicate with your employees. If you’re a financial advisor, maybe you make a list of simple stories to answer common questions from your clients.
It doesn’t matter what your profession is. There are tons of unusual opportunities you can pursue to improve at your craft.
Like Kobe taking tap dancing lessons, you’ll probably be the only person doing it. You’ll be able to compare the benefits of your hard work to your peers who didn’t do anything unusual.
Be informed
Kobe wasn’t satisfied with simply knowing the rules of the game. He needed to know how the rules were enforced. So he read the referee’s handbook. The most important thing he learned? Each referee has a specific slice of the court to cover depending on the ball position.
When the referees are covering their slots, they have dead zones, or places where they can’t see certain things.
Kobe learned the dead zones and took advantage of them. He could get away with holds, travels, and other minor violations, as long as he was in the dead zones. This was an advantage others players didn’t have. They probably didn’t even know dead zones existed because they didn’t take the time to read the referee’s handbook.
What are the dead zones in your industry?
I’ll give you an example from my career.
When I was a full time employee in the consulting industry, there were plenty of hoops to jump through. One of those hoops was the annual goal setting process.
I’m all about goals in my personal life, but goals were different in the corporate world. Most of them were just box checking exercises that took up time and provided little benefit. After quickly realizing the annual goals didn’t matter as much as the quality of my work and how much people liked me, I changed my approach.
I made sure I had a performance manager who didn’t care about goals. The PM was the person a level or two above me responsible for making sure I submitted my goals on time.
Some PMs were total sticklers. Others didn’t want to be bothered. I looked for the latter. Then I submitted a single sentence for every mandatory goal and forgot about them until the next year.
In the meantime, I focused on the things that mattered for getting promoted. I focused on doing high quality work. I picked up slack when we were short staffed. If I was running a team, I made sure their work was high quality. And I always took the problem employees from other teams and helped to improve their work.
Basically, I built a reputation for being dependable. I was the guy who handled shit the boss didn’t want to deal with. I built a reputation as the person everyone wanted on their project because I wasn’t going to mail it in.
So the goals didn’t matter. The actions did. The goal setting process was essentially a dead zone on the court. I could do a shitty job and nobody would ever know. And this left me more room to do a great job on the things that did matter.
I’m certain there are dead zones in your industry. Find them, and exploit them.
Be selfless
In 2003, Shaq was out with a toe injury, so Phil Jackson came to Kobe and asked him to take over the offense.
No problem. This kicked off a streak where Kobe was scoring 40+ points per game.
Before long, Shaq was back, and Kobe was still dropping 40. He had nine straight games in a row before Jackson called him back to the office.
“We’re starting to lose the big fella,” Jackson said. “He’s not getting enough attention. This 40 point streak is taking away his fire. I need you to start dialing it back because we’re gonna lose him, and we need him in June.”
As you can imagine, Kobe was pissed.
The next game, they were playing the Clippers. Kobe had 38 points with an open shot and a chance to score 40. Instead he dumped it off to Shaq in the post.
“The 40 point streak ended that night,” Kobe told A-Rod in a 2018 interview. “That was it. And that’s the inside stuff that people don’t know.”
38 points instead of 40 seems like a meaningless distinction, but if Kobe buried that last bucket, he would’ve had ten games in a row with 40 points. It would’ve been a record. Instead he passed the ball to the big guy to coddle his ego and save him for the playoffs.
Kobe didn’t care about personal records. He cared about championships. Calling Kobe selfish isn’t quite right. He had a singular focus on winning. Often that looked like selfishness, but if winning meant being selfless, Kobe was all about it. Winning at all costs, his own ego be damned.
This story is my favorite because it’s the hardest for most people to do.
Tap dancing lessons? No problem.
Read the referee’s handbook? Easy money.
But give up the glory of setting a record just to keep your teammate engaged? That’s a challenge.
And that’s what’s so important to remember. If we want to accomplish amazing things, we need to sacrifice more than the average person. Sometimes that sacrifice means being selfless.
Maybe it means your co-founder gets the glory on the podcast circuit while you work behind the scenes to build out operations.
Maybe it means giving a co-worker your awesome assignment in exchange for his tedious tasks.
There’s a famous story about General Jim Mattis taking over a Christmas day shift for a junior officer. The young officer had a family, and Mattis thought it was better for him to spend Christmas with them, so Mattis took his shift.
After one simple gesture, I’m sure that young Marine would’ve jumped on a grenade for Mattis.
Ultimately, if you can keep your team engaged, it’s worth giving up some short term glory. Because a fully engaged team means more success, and long term success is what the greats are chasing, not short term praise.
Bring Kobe to work
It’s pretty simple. Kobe used these techniques to become one of the greatest basketball players of all time. And you can borrow his strategies to succeed in the office.
Nobody’s going to hang your Brooks Brothers shirt from the rafters, but you’ll beat the competition every time.
Just like Kobe.
Photo by Michael Oxendine on Unsplash
