Tim Grover was Michael Jordan’s trainer for 15 years, and he also trained Kobe Bryant. His book is a collection of stories designed to give a glimpse of the mindset these athletes carried with them.
Link to full Founders episode: https://www.joincolossus.com/episodes/78531762/senra-340-michael-jordan-and-kobe-bryant
Stop waiting to be told
The most common criticism Grover got was 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.
A young man was 21 years old, and he asked Mozart, he said, “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 is like “Yes, but I didn’t go around asking people how to do it.”
There is a price
One of the reasons I would heavily recommend getting the audio book, if you like audio books of Relentless is because he talks about a lot of things in this book that most people kind of omit. You’ll see them in biographies. But this idea, 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 it 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.
Control over their minds
“You can’t excel at anything before you train your mind. Mental dominance is what ultimately makes you unstoppable.” Michael talked about this in the book Driven from Within. He 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.
Kobe: “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.”
Jordan’s ability to be present and block everything including the past out
Later in the book it says, if one thing separate 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. Michael 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. Michael’s 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 asked 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 the emotions blur judgment and staying in the present moment is repeated throughout both books.
Mastery and its byproducts
In The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, Naval said something genius in that book because really talking about like the effect of like the modern age, the effect 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 most frequently. In fact, I bought 4 more copies like last week or a week before. But when I get to this point, he’s like, I want somebody to be excellent in one thing. And I think this is going to become even more and more important. And Naval says in that book, “Being at the extreme of your craft is very important in the age of infinite leverage, which is what we live in. The person that is the best in the world gets to do that for everyone.”
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 sharp shooters 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, 4 football fields. He has to get in his truck, drive to the target, set it up and drive back to where we’re standing. He gets his gun with the scope, takes aim, one shot. Then we get in the truck with him and drive back to the target. He hit it dead f****** 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, he was one of the greatest if not the greatest basketball player of all time. But if you look at what he’s done in his — he’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. The fact that he made I guess, like $1 billion or $2 billion 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.