#340 Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant

**David Senra** (0:00)
On the night that the Chicago Bulls were eliminated from the 1995 NBA Playoffs by the Orlando Magic, I sat with Michael in the darkened arena until 3 a.m.
He had just returned to basketball two months earlier, following his first retirement and brief baseball career.
So much had happened in the last year.
Dressed in a suit and tie, he looked around the brand new arena that had replaced the legendary Chicago Stadium earlier that season and said, I hate this fucking building.
You built this fucking building, I said.
During that series, some of the Orlando Magic players said that he didn't look like the old number 23, which he didn't. He was wearing number 45 and he wasn't ready. And I knew it better than anyone else.
His endurance, his shot, there just hadn't been enough time to get him back to the level of excellence that people had grown accustomed to. Predictably, there was plenty of talk about how his baseball career had failed. His basketball comeback had failed. He had failed.
Michael Jordan was done, they said. And as usual, they were wrong.
Michael Jordan is done when he says he's done, not when you say he's done. In fact, you saying it usually ensures the opposite. At the end of that game, he had a message for the Orlando Magic as all the players shook hands and left the court.
Enjoy this win, because it ain't going to happen again.
The following season, he led the Bulls to an NBA record 72 wins, swept the Orlando Magic in the playoffs, and won the first of three more championship rings to go with the three rings he already won before he had failed.
That was an excerpt from one of the two books I'm going to talk to you about today. Both were written by Tim Grover, who was Michael Jordan's trainer for 15 years, and he also trained Kobe Bryant. In fact, Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan both blurbed both of the books. So the first book is called Relentless, From Good to Great to Unstoppable, and the second one is called Winning, The Unforgiving Race to Greatness.
So what I want to do is a little different than I normally do. I've already done two episodes on Michael Jordan, two episodes on Kobe Bryant. This is just going to be stories that Tim Grover has about Michael and Kobe, and then insight into their mentality. For their life history, their biography. For Jordan, you can listen to episode 212 and 213 For Kobe, it's episode 272 and 273
So I'm going to jump right into Relentless. This is the updated version of the book. I read the audiobook, I listened to the audiobook many years ago, and I decided, hey, I'm going to buy the paperback version and do a podcast on it. And so the updated version, he's talking about all the feedback he got from the first version. And the most common criticism he 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. Obviously he's talking about Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, some other people he trained as well. But there was this story about back in Mozart's day.
And a young man was 21 years old and he asked Mozart, he's like, 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's like, yeah, but I didn't go around asking people how to do it. And so he talks about why he titled the book Relentless. And he says, the word relentless is used to describe the most intense competitors and achievers imaginable, those who stop at nothing to get the end result. And what popped to mind when I read that is, of course, Kobe and Michael are relentless. But when I hear the word relentless, the first person that comes to my mind is not Kobe or Michael Jordan. It's Jeff Bezos. In fact, to this day, you might already know this, but Jeff Bezos owns the domain relentless.com. If you go in your browser and you type relentless.com, it will forward to Amazon. For a brief moment, he loved the word so much, he was thinking about naming Amazon relentless.com. I've done, I don't know, eight podcasts, six podcasts, something like that on Jeff Bezos. And that's the one word I would choose to describe him. One of the reasons I would heavily recommend getting the audio book, if you like audio books, of Relentless is because it 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, 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 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 gonna 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, is something that Kobe and Michael repeat over and over again across decades. It's something that their teammates mention over and over again. It's something their competitors mention over and over again. I watched, or we watched The Last Dance over the last week. I kind of keep that documentary playing over and over again. Most of the times I'm not even listening to it. Like it's just on the background if I'm reading or working or whatever. But there was something that popped out this, you know, I don't know, the 10th time I've watched this documentary, something like that, maybe 8th, and he's talking about why he was so hard on his teammates. The fact that he came to Chicago, he's like, listen, we were a terrible franchise. I had to fail and fail and fail and fail year after year after year after year, I think it was seven or eight years before he won his first championship. And then you come in here, you know, now you're joining a world-class organization, yet you didn't do any of the work to build it into a world-class organization. So you're, I'm not coming down to your level, you're going to rise to mine. And he says something, he goes, we were shit when I got here. And we elevated to being a championship quality team. There are certain standards that you have to live by. You do not come pussyfooting around. You have to come in and ready to play. And so those are Michael Jordan's words. And then Tim Grover's words on that is your strategy is to make everyone else get on your level. You're not going down to theirs. You're not competing with anyone else ever again. They're going to have to compete with you. And then Tim Grover has a unique vantage point because he starts working out with Michael and training him way before Michael ever won his first championship. And so he says Michael was the best because he was relentless about winning. No matter how many times he won, he always wanted more. And he was always willing to do whatever it took.