10 Kobe Bryant Quotes to Help You Overcome Every Challenge

Kobe Bryant: 10 Lessons from the Mamba

Kishan Sonar ✅
ILLUMINATION
8 min readMar 14, 2021

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Photo by Olivier Collet on Unsplash

Kobe Bean Bryant(1996–2016) was an American basketball player who played his entire 20-year career with the Los Angeles Lakers of the National Basketball Association (NBA).

He was born on August 23, 1978 in Philadelphia. At the age of six, Kobe moved to Italy and spent his next fourteen years there. His height earned him nicknames such as “The Great Gazoo” and “Mr. Skies”. When he was seven, his father Joe Bryant (former Philadelphia 76ers player) took him to an NBA game and Kobe instantly fell in love with the sport of basketball. As he entered high school as a talented player, Kobe enjoyed

One of the big reasons why Kobe Bryant is so admired and respected by NBA fans is his dedication to becoming a better player. Year after year, the retired great continues to train in order to stay in top form.

Here are 10 Kobe Bryant quotes to help you overcome every challenge:

“It’s the one thing you can control. You are responsible for how people remember you — or don’t. So don’t take it lightly.“

Think about it this way: if you knew that in one hour someone were going to ask you what you want to be remembered for, what would you say? Think of the most important characteristics of your life, and then write down how you want them to be reflected in your obituary. Those are the things that make a great legacy.

‘You’re remembered for the rules you break. You’re remembered for the risks you take. You’re remembered for being there at the times when it was hardest, and for getting the job done. You’re remembered for being humble. And that, in the end, is what brings success.’

“Haters are a good problem to have. Nobody hates the good ones. They hate the great ones.”

Given enough time, every successful project will be hated by someone. People hate things they’re unsuccessful with.

Those that hate ‘successful’ people, or the ‘haves’, or the ‘winners,’ are considered unreliable and unhappy. They remind us of petulant children who want to complicate their image of a world by hating on others for being happy, talented, decent and good.

People tend to hate in direct proportion to their envy. If you want to know what’s important and valuable, look at what people complain about. If they complain about your product, that means it has value.

“We can always kind of be average and do what’s normal. I’m not in this to do what’s normal.”

I guess my ideal is to do something that has impact. And, you know, have kind of a dent in the universe.

The alternative to thinking small is thinking big. But the most powerful way to do that, it turns out, is not by trying to think really big thoughts by yourself. It’s by talking about really small things with other people you trust.

“I create my own path. It was straight and narrow. I looked at it this way: you were either in my way, or out of it.”

I had to be a winner, and I had known since I was a child that winners do things differently. I still remember the first day I consciously realized it. It was seventh grade, on the basketball court at D.C.’s Cardozo High. We were playing Dunbar. They were bigger and stronger — but I wouldn’t quit driving to the hoop. So they fouled me — hard — twice in a row. I missed both free throws, but I kept getting fouled

“Trust me, setting things up right from the beginning will avoid a ton of tears and heartache…”

The order in which you decide things doesn’t matter geographically. It does matter temporally. Your first hundred decisions set up the context for your next hundred decisions. At the beginning, you have no data to make good decisions, so you need to resolve the important, high-risk, high-reward decisions immediately.

A good way to grow slowly is to start small, perfect your product, do a lot of research, raise some capital, hire more people, and then scale. Boy do I wish that were true! Unfortunately, very few startups can afford to wait 3 or 4 years before raising venture funding. Maybe some social media startups can avoid VCs for a little while but how many others actually can?

“The most important thing is you must put everybody on notice that you’re here and you are for real.”

At the beginning you have to let everyone know that you’re not some kid. And that you are for real. And that you have something here. When someone knows something that everybody else doesn’t know, there’s nobody who can put them down for it.

What do I mean by everybody? I mean the people it is most important for you to reach, which is everyone. If they don’t know who you are and what you’re about, you don’t exist.

You want everyone to talk about you. That includes executives, investors, and the entrepreneurs who will be your competitors. To get attention you have to do things that people will want to notice. You need to give people something they can spread — gossip about.

“My brain . . . it cannot process failure. It will not process failure. Because if I sit there and have to face myself and tell myself, ‘You’re a failure’ . . . I think that’s almost worse than death.”

Failure is just a failure, that’s all. It doesn’t have to do with who you are. I’ve often said, and don’t get me wrong — I am proud of all my work. I think they were all ambitious and original and different. I think people see it as this grand career of success after success, but it wasn’t like that at all. One failure after another after another.

It’s painful. And it wouldn’t be pain that I could get rid of if I just go out and get a new computer or whatever. Pain is pain, it doesn’t matter where it comes from. . . . failure hurts. When you feel like you can’t do anything . . . it is depression to me.

“We all have self-doubt. You don’t deny it, but you also don’t capitulate to it. You embrace it.”

Self-doubt is a funny thing: we all feel it, but we often don’t realize just how much other people are feeling it too. One of my favorite quotes comes from Julian Edelman, the New England Patriots star wide receiver: “Confidence is being comfortable in your own skin.” Confidence is an antidote to self-doubt, and the most successful entrepreneurs have plenty of it.

You don’t shy away from the hard problems. You dive right into them, grapple with them, and come out the other side wiser than you were before.

Here’s some advice: Don’t try to eliminate your self-doubt. As you get more ambitious, it will actually increase. Sometimes it’ll be crippling. Acknowledge that feeling, but don’t let it stop you from making progress on something important.

When people ask me who is the best entrepreneur I’ve ever heard of, I surprised myself by replying, “Me.” Not in a delusional way. In a hopeful one.

“If you want to be great at something, there’s a choice you have to make. What I mean by that is, there are inherent sacrifices that come along with that. Family time, hanging out with friends, being a great friend, being a great son, nephew, whatever the case may be.”

If you want to be the best at something, be it playing basketball or making videos, then you have to give up some time that you could have spent with your family. Your friends are going to think you’re weird and they’re not going to understand why you’re doing the things that you do.

I think that in order to be the greatest of all time you have to give up a lot of things. Not only from an individual standpoint but from a societal standpoint as well. The greats, in my mind, you can’t be a great father and be the greatest of all time in whatever particular your talking about because those two things just don’t co-exist.” — LeBron James

You can’t sacrifice your schedule. You can’t sacrifice your health, your relationships, and still be the best in the world. Because here’s the deal: In order for you to be great at something — whether it’s for one day or two days or whatever — you have to immerse yourself into it, and that means immersing yourself into a lifestyle where you have very little distractions.

To be a professional you have to be willing to not do those things as much. You have to be willing to sacrifice that in order to practice, you have to be willing to sacrifice other activities and it’s not going to be easy. Practice isn’t an easy thing, but when you put your mind to it you can get better at a lot of different things, especially at things that are sort of new for you.

“Use your success, wealth and influence to put them in the best position to realize their own dreams and find their true purpose.”

If you are successful, you owe it to others to help them. Your success is a gift that you must share with others. You have a duty to put your success, wealth and influence in the service of others — especially those who are less fortunate than you are.

When you’ve had success, it’s very important to align your interests and goals with others. Otherwise, you’re far too likely to run out of people to help.

Money is nice, but it’s not the point of this. Nor are you or your loved ones. Your purpose is to be part of something bigger than yourself. It’s to serve a role in letting humanity realize its potential. Your true mission in life is to create positive change.

That’s it. That’s your purpose in life. Note that “making yourself happy” or “making others happy” isn’t on the list — having a higher purpose makes you happier and healthier and allows you to accomplish anything.

Kobe Bryant Quotes Recap:

  1. It’s the one thing you can control. You are responsible for how people remember you — or don’t. So don’t take it lightly.
  2. Haters are a good problem to have. Nobody hates the good ones. They hate the great ones.
  3. We can always kind of be average and do what’s normal. I’m not in this to do what’s normal.
  4. I create my own path. It was straight and narrow. I looked at it this way: you were either in my way, or out of it.
  5. Trust me, setting things up right from the beginning will avoid a ton of tears and heartache…
  6. The most important thing is you must put everybody on notice that you’re here and you are for real.
  7. My brain . . . it cannot process failure. It will not process failure. Because if I sit there and have to face myself and tell myself, ‘You’re a failure’ . . . I think that’s almost worse than death.
  8. We all have self-doubt. You don’t deny it, but you also don’t capitulate to it. You embrace it.
  9. If you want to be great at something, there’s a choice you have to make. What I mean by that is, there are inherent sacrifices that come along with that. Family time, hanging out with friends, being a great friend, being a great son, nephew, whatever the case may be.
  10. Use your success, wealth and influence to put them in the best position to realize their own dreams and find their true purpose.

Thank You for reading :)

Cheers.

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Kishan Sonar ✅
ILLUMINATION

Tech, Design, Business and Personal Development Writer