How Michael Jordan's Biography Changed My Life.
This past week I was a guest on Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy, CFA . Below is one of the most shared parts of my conversation with Patrick.
[00:42:20] David: Not only is Michael Jordan probably the greatest basketball player who ever lived, you could make the argument that he was better at his job than anybody else has been as good at their job in history. Reading his biography changed my life. I was a Michael Jordan fan when I was a kid. I don't have time to watch basketball now, I'm busy, but I'm actually standing on it right now. I record on my podcast standing up because I try to bring energy every day, but my foot is on Michael Jordan: The Life. It's a 694-page biography of Michael Jordan.
What blew my mind about that is every single person, way before he even made his college team till the time he was a professional basketball, they all said the same thing. This dude was like a sponge. There's a great quote that Nick Saban said. He said that average players want to be left alone. Good players want to be coached, and great players want to be told the truth. Michael had a giant ego and a giant drive, but he would run up to the coach and tell me what I need to get better at.
The reason I say that book changed my life is this idea of practice. How many people want to get to the NBA? A ton, millions. How many get? 400 maybe. How many people get to the Dream Team in Barcelona in '92, which might be the greatest basketball team of all time? 15 people. A subset of a subset of a subset. Michael's tired. He'd been playing nonstop, back-to-back. He's like, "Man, I really want to take some time off. I don't want to spend my summer for the Olympics, but I'm going to go." He goes, "I want to see their practice habits. We're all the best of the best, what am I doing that's different than what they're doing?"
What happened was he goes, he watched the way they practiced compared to the way he practiced. The main theme of Jordan's book is I believe in practice. I would rather miss a game than miss practice. That's insane. He said something that gives me chills to this day. He goes, "I watched their practice habits," and he goes, "they're deceiving themself about what the game requires." Best of the best, ton of people on there, but when he was done, no one had more championships than he did.
I was like, damn, that's crazy. This guy's at the top of the top winning championships, MVP, scoring awards, All-Star game, and he's still working harder than anybody else. That line, "Successful people listen. Those who don't listen don't survive long," is from that biography. He's like, "Listen, I don't have that big of an ego that I can't learn from other people."
If you'd like to listen to my Founders episode on Michael Jordan, listen here.