Lessons in Entrepreneurship that I Learned from Kobe Bryant

The following article is a journal entry from January 27, 2020 that is included in 'The Introspective Entrepreneur,' my forthcoming first-hand, real-time account of my professional and personal life over the past four years starting Data Literacy.

January 27, 2020 - On Greatness and the Mixed Legacy We Leave Behind

The day before this entry, Kobe Bryant, his 13 year old daughter Gianna, and seven others died in a helicopter crash in Southern California. They were on their way to a youth club basketball tournament in Thousand Oaks, the town in which I grew up and went to high school.

This tragedy hit me hard for some reason. He and I were born a few weeks apart in 1978, we both graduated high school in 1996, and he played professional basketball for the Los Angeles Lakers, my hometown team. But of course I didn’t know him at all. I never once had the opportunity to meet him. It’s funny how we can become emotionally connected to people we have never met before, isn’t it?

This isn’t some “poor me, my hero died” entry, though. I’m not the victim here. Sadly, there are many actual victims, and my heart goes out to all of their loved ones in the aftermath of such a tragic loss.

I took some time as I was reading through the breaking news articles and social media posts this weekend to ask myself what Kobe’s life means to entrepreneurship. There are obvious lessons to glean:

• He was notorious for his unparalleled work ethic: always being the first to arrive for practices and workouts and always the last to leave.?
• He was a fierce competitor, and never backed down from any player or team.?
• He was never too afraid to take the crucial shot at the decisive moment, leaving behind a highlight reel of buzzer-beaters (as well as heartbreaking misses).?

These are all traits that are as effective in the boardroom as they are on the basketball court. It’s not that people who change the world have no doubts or fears, it’s that they process them very differently than the rest of us. They use them to fuel their fire within. Kobe was like this.?

The business world borrows motivational inspiration from the sports world all the time, but the reality is that entrepreneurs can learn almost as much from Kobe the Businessman as they can from Kobe the Athlete.?

That’s because his legacy stretches well beyond the sport he played, even though he died at the relatively young age of 41. His creativity and drive didn’t end along with his playing career. Instead, he wasted no time finding new ways to apply himself in retirement: books, movies, a venture capital firm, a sports drink company, a sports academy that he was on his way to visit when he died that bore his nickname “Mamba”. These pursuits along with many others were well on their way to rivaling his playing career in stature. He even won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 2018.

There is one other important lesson that entrepreneurs can learn from Kobe Bryant’s life, from Kobe the Human Being. Not everyone was excited about his successes. He had bitter rivals and haters; all champions can say that much. More significantly, though, he made a mistake in 2003 while rehabilitating an injured knee at a Colorado spa and had sex with a 19 year old woman who said she did not consent to the encounter. The resulting criminal sexual assault case was eventually dropped and the civil case was settled out of court, but damage had already been done.?

The lesson here is that the seeds of success and fame can grow into a mindset that causes pain and suffering. How many times have we seen talented and successful people cause trouble in their own lives and in the lives of others around them? How many times have we ourselves messed up on the heels of a major accomplishment? If we reflect on this, we’ll see that this is part of the human experience.

I’d like to think that Kobe learned an important lesson, and that the woman involved came to find healing and peace of mind. He publicly apologized for the incident and for the pain she had to endure. What changes took place internally? We don’t know for sure. We can certainly observe the fruits of his efforts to champion girls’ and womens’ athletics in what would be his final years, and we can see his dedication to his daughters.?

What we do know is that Kobe, like every other role model we can name, provides us with opportunities to learn what to do, as well as opportunities to learn what not to do. In that respect, he is a human being, just like us. It’s a tangled web that we weave. It can be difficult to sit with the complex legacy that our heroes leave behind. We often refuse to see it that way.

Instead, we have a tendency to deify our champions and our leaders, especially those who are taken from us tragically. And we also have a tendency to vilify those who make mistakes that become public knowledge, while we simultaneously breathe a sigh of relief that our own egregious errors and "pecadillos" remain out of sight.?

I’ve found that truth is always somewhere in between, and I think that it’s better to retain and appreciate the full spectrum of lessons our departed contemporaries leave behind for us as signposts to guide us on our own way.?

But no more talk of taking lessons from public figures. Simply, may those who died in yesterday’s tragic accident rest in peace, and may their families and loved ones find consolation in their unthinkable personal loss.