Kobe Bryant’s Secret Handbook
The elite obsess over fine margins.
That fraction between good and great. Often times that’s achieved not just through practice, but by adopting some other unconventional methods.
Whether it be in business, sport, or otherwise — studying the full terrain of your field has the potential to pay massive dividends. Why? Because you gain information assymetries, and that my friends, is where almost every competitive advantage exists — in knowing what others don’t.
Welcome back to Prolific, before we hop into today’s piece click that follow button if you haven’t already. Without giving away too much, today we’re going to dissect the process of gaining a fine margin. Enjoy.
Look where no else is looking
“The young man knows the rules, the old man knows the exceptions.” — Charlie Munger
The late, great Kobe Bryant needs no introduction. His competitive nature and tenacity were qualities very few could match.
On a daily basis, he trained for six hours. Dividing his sessions into 2 hour slots, starting at 6am. He would be in the gym for 2 hours of weight-lifting, followed by 2 hours of cardio (high-intensity training and sprints), and 2 hours of basketball drills. When he got walloped at table tennis in the Lakers locker room, he bought an Olympics-grade ping pong table to redeem himself. After rupturing his achilles with 3 minutes to go in the fourth quarter against Golden State, a 34 year old Kobe hobbled bank on to the court to sink his free throws. And then hobbled to the locker room to begin his 9 month road to recovery.
Kobe’s determination extended beyond his ability to meet the physical challenges of basketball. He did something very odd, that perhaps few or no NBA players had done before him. In an attempt to further imposed his will on the game — he began studying what was happening around him whilst he was playing, more specifically with the referees.
In his book Mamba Mentality, Kobe detailed how he studied the NBA referee’s handbook to find unseen advantages. He discovered that referees have specific, predetermined assignments on the court from where they should officiate, which he could exploit:
If the ball, for instance, is in place W, referees X, Y, and Z each have an area on the court assigned to them. When they do that, it creates dead zones, areas on the floor where they can’t see certain things.
I learned where those zones were, and I took advantage of them. I would get away with holds, travels, and all sorts of minor violations simply because I took the time to understand the officials’ limitations.
Kobe Bryant, Mamba Mentality
I want to take this opportunity to share a story of another obsessive. This time in a different sport, a manager, named Jose Mourinho.
When Jose Mourinho arrived to Chelsea Football Club, fresh off winning the biggest European Club Competition The Champions League with his former club Porto — much was expected, and he didn’t disappoint. In fact, in his first press conference as manager, he referred to himself as “The Special One.”
Across his two tenures as Head Coach, Jose led his Chelsea to three domestic league titles, one FA Cup, one Community shield, three football league cups, along with a flurry of missed opportunities at quarter-final, semi-final and final stage of competitions. Mourinho was clearly a winner. But what the players found visibly different from any manager they had before was Mourinho’s meticulous nature.
In an interview, John Terry, Chelsea’s club captain between 2004 and 2017 revealed the lengths to which Mourinho would go to secure a win and explained how the former Chelsea manager would find loopholes in the officials’ guidebook.
‘So last 10 or 15 minutes, he would sit me and Gary Cahill down and go: ‘when the ball comes in the box, make sure you both go down — bump into each other and both go down because you can’t both go off.’
‘We’d never heard of that rule ever. So ball comes over in the last 10 minutes, head it away, Gaz goes down and I think ‘I better go down’. So I dropped to the floor and the ref said ‘you two off the pitch’. I said ‘no that’s not the rule, ask the linesman and we were fine’.
Mourinho knew how to waste time without being penalised by the referee and told his players exactly how to utilise the loophole. Terry added: ‘Mourinho was so far ahead with those little bits and you’re talking small margins and the best managers find those little margins. Incredible.’
Lean into boring
“That might sound boring, but I think the boring stuff is the stuff I remember the most”— Russell, Up
The principle of learning the exceptions is not just limited to sports. It applies to business and the world of work too. How many businesses have we seen with strong finance departments? Countless! Because business leaders understand the negative impact poorly handled accounting practices can have on their bottom line. They also recognise the upside of being aware of accounting loopholes, what items can be itemised as an expense.
In Paul Graham’s essay “Do Things That Don’t Scale” he speaks to the importance of doing the parts of the business that you might later automate, manually. An example of this is DoorDash. DoorDash is an American company, operating online food ordering and food delivery. In its early years, before having sophisticated technology and a tonne of riders to execute deliveries —when an order was placed by a customer, the team founders would drop everything they were doing and deliver items themselves. Today, DoorDash is the largest food delivery platform in the United States. Obviously the founders don’t have to do this anymore, but I can guarantee you they learnt a lot about the business they were trying to build by rolling their sleeves up early on and doing it themselves.
Building an edge requires deep studying. If you’re a software engineer looking to code better — you might research the code bases of your five favourite websites and find the delta in approaches. If you’re a visual merchandiser — you might consider the different cultural ways of placing items in a store from country to country. Or let’s say you like me, you help early stage startups build a customer base, you might research which industries are leading in raising capital to better understand which startups to engage with.
I’ll keep it 100 with you here, it’s not fun and it’s not meant to be. There’s something called the “Eight Second Rule” in basketball, which basically requires teams to get the ball across the half-court line in under eight seconds. Let me read you a short excerpt of the eight second rule in basketball.
Section VIII — Eight-Second Rule
A team shall not be in continuous possession of a ball which is in its backcourt for more than 8 consecutive seconds.
EXCEPTION (1): A new 8 seconds is awarded if the defense: (1) kicks or punches the ball, (2) is assessed a personal or technical foul, or (3) is issued a delay of game warning.
EXCEPTION (2): A new 8 seconds is awarded: (1) if play is suspended to administer Comments on the Rules, (2) when a team gains control of a jump ball in the backcourt, or (3) … I don’t have to continue do I?
It’s boring, right? This is what Kobe read. An entire book of it. He transcended his need to engage with what was fun, with what will pay dividends. The boring stuff. This goes to show that whilst the game of basketball as a whole deeply attracted Kobe, even he couldn’t escape the parts of it which were a grind if he truly wanted to elevate his game.
Ironically, the real advantage lies in mastering the boring stuff. If you want to build an edge you will need to look where no one else is looking. By looking into the boring stuff you elevate your game to see between the cracks and crevasses where gold dust of fine margins exist — that the rest of your field just simply won’t be capable of identifying.
Whats the boring stuff in your work or life that could give you an edge if you choose to engage with it?
