My friend Alan Stein, Jr. is considered one of the top performance coaches in the nation. For years he has worked with some of the best basketball players in the world. In fact, when I was a basketball coach, I used many of his conditioning drills for my teams.
He once told me about his first encounter with Kobe Bryant back in 2007 when he was in his prime and considered the best player in the world. Nike flew Alan out to the Kobe Bryant Skills Camp.
He was so intrigued by all of the talk of how insane Kobe’s individual workouts were and wanted to see for himself. Alan was granted permission to watch one of Kobe’s workouts. He arrived to the 4am workout early and Kobe was already drenched in sweat from his warmup.
Once the actual workout started, Alan recalled how he was bored to death because for the first 45 minutes, Kobe was practicing basics that any middle schooler would do. Later that day Alan asked Kobe why the best player in the world was spending so much time on the basics.
Kobe replied, “Why do you think I’m the best player in the world? Because I never ever get bored with the basics.” You see, even though he was focusing on the basics, he was attacking those basics with an unmatched attention to detail and ferocious competitiveness.
He didn’t just practice until he got it right. He was practicing until he couldn’t do it wrong.
Chuck Noll, the Hall of Fame Pittsburgh Steelers coach once said that “Champions are Champions not because they do anything extraordinary but because they do ordinary things better than anybody else”.
Our work ethic, attention to detail, and dogged desire to be the best that we can be can help drive us to make ourselves better. Part of being successful in life is just showing up. But what if we came early, stayed late and did a little bit extra.
Most of us are ordinary people. But ordinary people can do great things if we just keep plugging away. Being obsessed about the basics and being determined to be the best possible version of ourselves can pay huge dividends for us and our teams.