Kobe Bryant

Mike Rapoli was an entrepreneur who built Vitamin Water, Pirate's Boot and some other companies and started learning from them.

uh over your life that's been a constant theme that you go back to is there something you heard as a kid that you that really resonates with you or a book or a movie that just feels like this is me yeah that's funny um movies there are plenty but there's a quote from one of my english teachers at lord marion named uh mr fisk he had a great quote that said rest at the end not in the middle i'm not gonna rest i'm gonna keep on pushing now there are a lot of answers

that i don't have or even questions that i don't have but i'm just going to keep going i'm just going to keep going and i'll figure these things out as you go right and you just continue to build that way rest at the end rest at the end what's the question that eats you alive the most that you haven't answered yet the question that eats me alive that i haven't answered yet because you're still looking for the answer i'm still looking for the answer uh how to tell a good story

I don't think anybody has that answer. When I sat down to write Dear Basketball, I was like, okay, what do I wanna say? And you have certain acts and how you can structure certain things, right? The ebbs and flows of story, certain formulas that have been there since the beginning of time. But it's such an exact.

Right. And so that one question is really interesting. Why do you want to tell a great story? I think stories is what moves the world. Whether it's an inspirational story, it's an informational one. Nothing in this world moves without story.

And when you grow up as a kid, thinking that the world is your oyster, all things are possible if you put in the work to do it, you know, you grew up having that fundamental belief.

Both were influential at different points. My mom was there on a daily basis. My father was really influential at a really critical time where I had a summer where I played basketball when I was like 10 or 11 years old in a very prominent summer league in Philadelphia called the Sunny Hill League. Where my father played, my uncle played, and they were like all-time greats and stuff.

11, 10, 11.

Really? Yeah. At 10 or 11 years old, you were that terrible. Awful. I mean, you know, and I had these big knee pads on because I was growing really fast. I have socks all the way up here. And I had like the high top face. Skinny. Like skinny. And I scored not a free throw, not a nothing, not a lucky shot, not a breakaway layup, zero points. And I remember crying about it and being upset about it.

And my father just gave me a hug and said, listen, Whether you score zero or score 60, I'm going to love you no matter what. Wow. That is the most important thing that you can say to a child. Because from there, I was like, OK, it gives me all the confidence in the world to fail. I have the security there. But with that, I'm scoring 60. Let's go. Right, right, right.

And from there, I just went to work. I just stayed with it. I kept practicing, kept practicing, kept practicing.

I think that's when the idea of understanding a long term view became important because I wasn't going to catch these kids in a week. I wasn't going to catch them in a year. Right. So that's when I sat down and said, OK, this is going to take some thought. All right. What I want to work on first. All right. Shooting. All right. Let's knock this out. Let's focus on this half a year, six months.

Do nothing but shoot. All right. After that. All right. Creating your own shot. You focus. So you start. I started creating a menu of things. When I came back the next summer, I was a little bit better. Right?

And then 14 came around, back half of 13, 14 years old. And then I was just killing everyone. And it happened in two years. And I wasn't expecting it to happen in two years, but it did because what I had to do was work on the basics and the fundamentals. Well, they relied on their athleticism and their natural ability. And because I stick to the fundamentals, it just caught up to them.

And then my body, my knees stopped hurting. I grew into my frame.

Then it was game over.

All of them.

Every game.

The whole game. No way. Yeah. So it started with me when I was a, when Phil Jackson's, His first year here with the Lakers, one of the assistant coaches, his name was Tex Winter, and I call him Yoda. I mean, he was like 82 when he got here. Wow. And he was responsible for teaching me the triangle offense. How old were you then? I was 21. So three years, four years in the league?

Yeah, so about my fourth year in the league. Okay. And so I go up to his room, and this is when there were no – iPads, anything like that, right? So when you're on the road, you have to call down to the front desk and have to bring up the TV with the whole, you know, the rolly thing and the VHS and the cassette tape and pop it in. And I thought we were going to watch what we call touches.

So watch all your touches when you have the ball, all the decisions you make, good ones and bad. No, we're watching the start of the game to the end of the game. And not like the TV feed. We're watching the in-arena feed, the layup line, the timeouts. Oh, my gosh. Yeah.

Rewinding, stopping, fast forward, rewinding, slow motion, every little thing, every game of that season with the 82-year-old Yoda. Oh, my gosh. Who is as brutally honest as you can get. What did that teach you that season? It taught me to look at detail. Look at things that they're smallest. Look at body language. Look at the energy between players, our team and the other team. Right.

Look at the tactics, look at the overall strategy and look at how tactically things are manifesting themselves. And because I watched so much film, then it gave me the ability to see game in real time as if I was watching film. Wow. I can see because a lot of times the game starts moving really fast.

But if you train yourself to watch hours and hours of film, the game's not moving that fast anymore. You can really recognize who's doing what and why you can position guys in the right places in real time.

You gotta, you gotta go. I don't know.

I mean, Beyonce is the same thing. Really? After a performance, she's immediately on her laptop re-watching the performance. No way. Yes. Seeing how to do things better. What could we have done differently? Right? I mean, it's just an obsessiveness, right? that comes along with it. You want things to be as perfect as they can be.

Understanding that nothing is ever perfect, but the challenge is trying to get them as perfect as they can be. And what can you do? It's in your control. So control what you can. I can watch film all day long. It's going to help me get better. Yes. Yes.

No, you can't push somebody to do that. Right. But what you can do is is alter behavior and also change the vernacular of how they speak about the game. So on team buses, team planes and a locker room after practice, I would look at the film, I'd pull Powell, Lamar, D. Fish, pull them aside and say, let's look at this. We probably should have done this, that, and the other.

Yeah, and then you speak to them in executional terms. It's never, come on, guys, we can do better. Come on, guys, we can do better. That's rah-rah stuff. A leader must give very tactical things that we can do, adjustments. Okay, the defense is doing this, that, and the other. That means we should probably do this, this, this, that, and the other.

By midway through the season, through that behavior, you start seeing them communicating the same way back to you. Right? And it's like, okay, Colb, they're doing this, that, and the other to you. Maybe we should do this and that. Okay, yeah. Awesome. Great.

Not now, no. Well, when I was playing. When you were playing. Yeah. So when I was playing, what I would do is study the film, but study our younger players.

and see what areas do they need to develop in and how can I help them develop? I mean, that was the big challenge is you move from, you know, being the single dominant player to understanding, okay, I have to help these other guys.

The challenge for me was always... compassion and empathy. Cause you're like, guys, let's go get results. Shut up. Don't complain. Right. I want to hear your whining. I don't want to hear it. Don't tell me how rough the water is. Just bring the boat in. You know, I don't, I don't want to hear it, you know? And it's, it's understanding like, okay, these guys have lives outside of here.

They have other things happening to them that may be affecting the way that they're practicing or the way that they're performing. And it was hard for me to understand that because nothing bothered me. Anything personal, you know, never fazed me when I played. You compartmentalized it. Very well. So I couldn't understand how my teammates couldn't do that either.

So I had to really work on that aspect of it. That's hard. Yeah, it is.

Yeah, so I think about 2009, things started changing for me. I started... really making a conscious effort to better understand. And that doesn't mean you have compassion and empathy, so you go soft on them. It's more like you put yourself to the side and you put yourself in their shoes and understand what they're feeling.

And then you have to make certain decisions of, okay, what buttons do I need to push for this player to get them to the next level? So it's never, it's not sit around and it's all happy-go-lucky type of thing. Your leader, your job is to get the best out of them. even if they may not like it at that time.

Honestly, it sounds... May sound a little shallow, but I got to say beating the Celtics in game seven. That's what I'm most proud of. Why? Because it was the hardest. You know, you're playing with Rajon Rondo, Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett, Ray Allen. And, you know, there's myself, Powell, and players that other teams didn't want. And, you know, how do we figure out as a group what to do?

And the reason why I love that series so much is that we went down three games to two against Boston. And now you got two games coming home. I remember sitting in the locker room and they beat the crap out of us to that game. So we're sitting in the locker room and it's really, really quiet. I'm sitting there looking around and we just lost the Celtics in 08. So this is like revenge. Right.

And they're kicking our butt again. Right. So I sit around. I just started laughing. I started laughing and then I remember Derrick Fisher looked at me like, and Lamar looked at me and goes, what is funny? I said, dude, they beat the crap out of us. They just beat the crap out. I said, I'm missing the part where that's funny.

I said, man, listen, if you start this season and they say, you know, all you have to do is win two games at home and you're NBA champ, would you take that? Yeah. Right. That's all we got to do. Yeah. Go home, win two. We're NBA champions. All we got to do is win two games in a row. That's it. We'll take care of the first game. And I promise you, they're not winning game seven on our home floor.

It's not happening. So we all just laughed about it. And then we went out and we figured it out. But that game seven was we're down 15 points in the fourth quarter. Right. And that's when you have to collectively look at each other and say, you know, the spirit of your team must be good. because at that moment is when teams fracture.

If the energy amongst each other isn't there, that trust isn't there, you're done. And we were able to collectively dig deep together and say, all right, we're gonna figure this thing out. And I wasn't playing well and I wasn't shooting the ball well at all. And so my teammates picked you up and, They delivered. Yes.

I think it's the fear of starting anew. And that was certainly present for me as well. Really? Yeah. Like an identity, you mean? Well, it's starting from scratch, right? Because when you play for 20 years, I played for 20 years, you reach a certain level. You're like, okay, wait a minute. I have to start again at the base of a mountain. and try to climb the top of this mountain.

First of all, what mountain am I climbing? I don't even know like what the am I going to be doing? It's very scary. It's very scary. Even for you? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And the thing that helped me actually was hurting my Achilles because that forced me to sit there and say, okay, the day could be today that your career is over.

Now what do you do? You have these ideas about doing something with your life after basketball. But what if today is the day that you, that's it, now what do you do? So I had all this time sitting there with my Achilles injury and contemplating and thinking, and I said, I better get to work.

I struggle with it at first because the first question I asked, which is the wrong question, is what's the biggest industry I can get into?

That's funny. I had a lot of them. My parents were great. Growing up, they instilled in me the importance of imagination, of curiosity, and understanding that, okay, if you want to accomplish something, I'm not just going to sit here and say, yes, you can do whatever you want. Yes, you can. But you have to also put in the work to get there, right? So they taught me that at a really early age, man.

Yes, money thinking, saying, okay, athletes are saying you can't make more revenue when you retire. This is your source of your income is here. I said, okay, that's a challenge. What can I do?

I did, I did. And so I started, I went for a ride and I said, okay, stop thinking of it that way. You're thinking of it the wrong way. Why'd you start playing basketball? Because I loved it. All right, what do you love to do? Oh, I love to tell stories. All right, let's do that. And then that's where it started for me.

And then on top of that, it became things like we started learning more about the financial industry and about players going broke once they retire and saying, okay, how can I... How can I minimize the chances of that happening? What are things that I can do to invest my money smartly? Also help control some of that outcome to a certain extent. And that's what I called Mike Rapoli.