š¤ I've watched every Kobe interview...
Here's what I learned about growing a winner's mindset
Hey there! Iām Robert. Welcome to a free edition of my newsletter. Every week, I share 1 piece of advice š, 1 breakthrough recommendation š, and 1 challenge š„ to help leaders in tech achieve a growth mindset, transform their communication & influence, and master their emotions. Subscribe today to become the person and leader that people love, respect, and follow.
Circa 2006, High School
The names on the listā¦ Mine wasn't there.
Walking home, my chest felt hollow, like someone had scooped out everything inside.
I didn't make the basketball team.
But that night, something changed. It lit a fire inside me. I started trying to learn from winners.
That night, I stayed up late pouring over interviews of Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, absorbing their mindset like a sponge desperate for water.
You are who you surround yourself with.
Age old wisdom and truth.
I couldn't be around them physically, but I could steal their mentality. I could listen to how they talked about their craft. I could see their fire.
And that fire gave fuel to my own.
Welcome to Better Person Training part 3.
Today weāre looking at winnerās mindset.
This Weekās ABC
Advice: You always have a choice.
Breakthrough: 3 questions to get Kobeās mindset.
Challenge: 2 mins that might change your life.
š Advice: Are you a victim or a fighter?
āThere are athletes who turn up.
Then there are athletes who turn up to compete. They try.
Then there are athletes who train to win. They train every session to win on match night.
Then there are those few athletes who train to dominate. They train so hard, that winning is inevitable.ā
āBill Beswick
Iāve met a lot of people in life.
And I find that people live on a spectrum.
That spectrum depends on who they are, how much work theyāve done on themselves, and how much stress they have at a given time:
Are you a victim?
Or are you a fighter?
Do things happen TO you, and you just complain?
Or do you accept that life IS change, and you own what you can and focus whatās in YOUR control?
Every day, we have a choice.
Thatās one of the lessons Iāve learned in life:
Nobody will save you. The better you is on the other side of hard things.
And procrastination and avoidance are blocking your path to achieving your goals.
Itās you vs. you at the end of the day.
Thatās mental game.
The best winners Iāve seen, pick themselves up when theyāre down and go practice their craft anyway. They train themselves to always pick fighter mode.
Because what is totally in your control is your own response and execution.
āYou are what you do, not what you say you'll do.ā
āCarl Jung
I know my answerāIām a goddamn fighter.
I made the basketball team and started the next year because of that mentality.
I love this quote so much I hung it up in my office. Anytime Iām feeling low, I think about it and I get going again.
2024 was a difficult year for many reasons:
I went through a breakup
My brother went missing and had a relapse with schizophrenia
Getting death threats and personal harassment weekly from my first startup (seriously, I share a bit about it here)
I dealt with 4 injuries from rock climbing
Through all the hardship:
I got promoted
I founded a new venture
I grew stronger from the hardships, and my capacity for stress increased
My rock climbing is back on track, and Iām near peak performance again
Iām honestly happy, grateful for my life, and more resilient than ever
As I reflect on 2024 and grow optimism for 2025, I'm weirdly thankful for the hard lessons learned.
22 year old Robert would not understand this perspective.
And that shows me how much Iāve grown.
I had a therapy session yesterday, and my therapist was concerned about my mental game because of losing Nibbler recently.
He had been my rock for 8 years. I got him at 8 weeks old.
In the past, I've faced depression, suicidal thoughts, self-harm, and a low mental state.
I lacked a solid foundation of self-love.
Years ago, I feared that Nibbler's death would plunge me into depression and despair, leaving me feeling lost. I knew that if all went well, I would outlive him.
I expected to be a disaster when that day came.
However, I've navigated this loss with resilience and have leaned into the pain to grieve healthily.
Looking back, I see how much I've grown from our time together since I got him as a little pup.
In the past, I dealt with hard times by escaping negative feelings through drugs, alcohol, and partyingāshort-term distractions that did not address the issues that inundate the soul.
This time, I managed to embrace my grief healthily, so now I can think of him and smile 99.999% of the time.
Instead of letting it paralyze me, I used it as motivation. Nibbler would want his dad to keep being a fighter, not a victim.
So I fight.
In 10 years, I will succeed enough to build a nonprofit in honor of him and his sister Poppy. I want their legacy to be saving other dogs and giving them good homes. Excited to come back to this newsletter (:
Pain, I've learned, can become purpose if you know how to transform it.
With that, hereās my schedule this year:
3 AM - 6 AM: epistemicme.ai startup work (Solving AI Alignment with an open source project)
6 AM - 2 PM: Chief Product Architect at Dayforce (Transforming how we do software development at scale across 1600 engineers)
2 PM - 4 PM: Climbing/gym/friends (Combining fitness with social time)
4 PM - 7 PM: More startup work (Because dreams don't build themselves)
8 PM: Sleep (Recovery is non-negotiable to be at my best)
This might sound heinous. Thatās because it kind of is.
I know exactly what I want out of life, and I am going to work for it.
Nibbler, PoppyāYou were there for me. I gotchu.
Your dad is going to continue to train to be a better person, every day, every moment of the day.
And that leads us into the Breakthrough recommendation of the weekā¦
š Breakthrough: 3 Questions To Get Kobeās Mindset
āThereās a 1000 excuses, but not a single reasonāāBill Beswick
What do you want?
How badly do you want it?
How much are you willing to suffer?
3 simple questions.
Most people surf through life without fully answering number 1: clarity on what they want, who they want to connect with, where to live, or what to do with life.
My take: We have ONE life, so I spend a LOT of time contemplating how to make the most of it. We are all evolving our understandings of ourselves.
If you donāt know what you want, you donāt know your why.
And if you donāt have that, you will procrastinate and procrastinate.
Hereās a quote on Kobeās view on work ethic and work schedule:
If your job is to try to be the best basketball player you can beā¦ to do that you have to train as much as you can as often as you can.
If you get up at 10 in the morning, train at 12. Train 12 to 2. You have to let your body recover. You eat, you recover. You get back out, you start training again at 6. You train from 6 to 8.
And now you go home, you shower, you eat dinner, you go to bed, you wake up, and you did it again.
Those are two sessions.
Now imagine you wake up at 3, you train at 4. You come home, eat breakfast, relax, then youāre back at it again 9 to 11.
Then youāre back at it again 2 to 4. Then youāre back at it again 7 to 9.
Look at how much more training I have done by simply starting at 4.
If I start earlier, I can do more hours. I know the other guys arenāt doing it.
So I know if I keep doing it over time, the gap widens over time.
āKobe Bryant
For Kobeā¦
What did he want?
Clearly, Kobe wanted to be the best basketball player.
How badly did he want it?
He wanted it more than anything. He knew it from a young age. He came to terms with his chosen purpose.
How much was he willing to suffer?
He was very clearly willing to suffer and sacrifice for his dreams. He didnāt care about partying. He didnāt care about distractions. He didnāt care about anything other than the game (for the most part, from what I can tell).
For meā¦
What do I want?
I want to leave a positive impact on over 1 billion people and the earth that lasts after I'm dead. And I want Nibbler and Poppyās legacy to be helping other dogs find good homes and create lasting memories.
I want to be the best version of myself I can possibly be (leader, entrepreneur, dog dad, partner, son, brother, etc.), and I believe the journey of these pursuits will get me to him.
How badly do I want it?
More than anything in the world.
How much am I willing to suffer?
I mean, look at the schedule aboveāit speaks for itself.
When you know what you want in life, sacrifice and suffering arenāt in your vocabulary.
Others may view 3 AM wake-ups as sacrifices, but I see it differently.
I gain energy from the challenges I tackle and from knowing that each moment of effort brings me closer to my goal: establishing a Nibbler and Poppy nonprofit someday that helps others, and building something with outsized humanity level impact.
Check out the video, itās a shorter cut of an amazing full podcast with deep insights. I go back to this in my āMotivational Swipe Fileā often to get more fuel for the fire.
What I Did This Week
I started challenging myself by meditating at least 30 minutes everyday.
I calculated that if I do this, Iāll hit 10,000 hours meditated around the time Iām in my 60s.
Iām at 35 days. I hope to never lose this streak, and will work hard to get to 365.
So good for the mindāespecially with a large workload with lots of things happening all the time.
Join me for a fun ABC fam challengeāIāll post a screenshot of my daily meditation streak every week, and I may even do it on socials (:
Post yours or share what meditation you did this week. Iād love to see!
š„ Challenge: Fuel Your Fire In 2 Mins
My challenge this week is simple.
Watch this video.
Answer these questions:
What do you want?
How badly do you want it?
How much are you willing to suffer?
Write it down.
Fuel your fire.
Liked this article?
š Click the like button.
Feedback or addition?
š¬ Add a comment.
Know someone that would find this helpful?
š Share this post.
P.S. If you havenāt already checked out my other newsletter, ABCs for Building The Future with a companion podcastāthatās where I have reflections on my entrepreneurial journey building an open source venture in public, and documenting my learnings along the way to solve for AI Alignment.
P.S.S. Want reminders on entrepreneurship, growth, leadership, empathy, and product?
Follow me on..