The late Kobe Bryant was a fierce competitor on the court and an equally skilled businessman off it.
According to Forbes, He amassed a $600 million fortune before his tragic death. However, Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither was Bryant's empire. During an interview before his passing, Bryant credited an investment he made in himself as a teenager with setting him up for the success he enjoyed on and off the court.
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Bryant's competitive streak and unflinching confidence were the signature traits of his career. Those character traits may have felt natural when Bryant burst onto the stage in 1996, but nothing could be further from the truth. Bryant's path to the NBA was full of unorthodox turns and uncomfortable situations. It started with his return to the U.S. at age 13.
Bryant's father, Joe, was a professional basketball player who finished his career playing in Italy. That necessitated taking the then five-year-old Bryant along for the ride, and America felt like a foreign country when he returned eight years later. Bryant's 2015 Documentary, "Kobe Bryant's Muse" shed light on this difficult time of his young life.
During the documentary, Bryant recounts, "I didn't understand the slang. I was a little Italian boy. I didn't understand the fashion. I couldn't spell, and the teacher told my mother I was probably dyslexic. I didn't know anybody. Sitting at a lunch table all by myself, no friends. I was upset that I had moved. I had all this resentment and anger inside of me that I hadn't really let out."
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This kind of experience makes some people turn inward or lose their self-confidence during their formative years, but Bryant learned to embrace being an outsider. He came to see it as a strength and not a weakness. Bryant also found a place to channel his anger: basketball.
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"It was never viewed as, ‘I'm going to control [my anger],'” Bryant said in "Muse". "I'm just going to push it to the side and then use it to my benefit for what it is that I love doing, which is playing the game. Once I discovered that, everything about the game changed." It may not have felt like it at the time, but this was the beginning of Bryant developing his now-infamous "mamba mentality."
Not all investments are monetary. Taking the time to figure out how to handle adversity and function in uncomfortable situations is one of the best investments anyone can make in themselves. The same can be said for embracing the fact that you are an outsider. Bryant would go on to be an outsider in many situations, and his early investment in mental toughness paid off almost every time.
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He entered the Los Angeles Lakers locker room as an 18-year-old who never attended college. Both of these things made him very different from his teammates, who were older and all attended college before playing professional basketball. Bryant was so young that he couldn't even go to bars with his teammates until he'd been in the league for three years.
He didn't sulk or wait around for greatness to come. Bryant used the solitude to invest in himself and hone his skills. It's the same discipline he approached in his career outside of basketball. That's how Bryant won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film with his movie, "Dear Basketball." There is a valuable lesson for investors to learn from this story.
Get comfortable with being uncomfortable because learning to fight through that adversity will help you grow by leaps and bounds. Bryant's initial unease around his NBA peers eventually faded, and he became one of the game's all-time greats. Keep this in mind when you find yourself feeling apprehensive about talking to investment advisors or wealth-building.
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