The late great basketball legend Kobe Bryant signed a number of contracts. Player contracts — his two-year, $48.5 million extension in 2013 made him the highest-paid player at the time. Shoe deals. Endorsement deals. Investments. One, a $6 million investment in BodyArmor, grew to eventually be worth approximately $400 million.
But the most important contract he signed was when he was 15 years old.
Because it was a contract he made with himself.
“He wrote a contract to himself,” Robby Schwartz, a high school teammate, says in the new Max documentary series Kobe: The Making of a Legend. “‘I’m going to work out with weights in the morning. I’m going to do my basketball stuff in the afternoon.’”
First person to practice. Taking 1,000 jump shots a day. Doing suicides (running drills), even though he was the best player on the team, at full sprint.
“He had a contract with himself,” Schwartz says. “And he’s not going to break that contract.”
That contract set the stage for every future contract. And every future accomplishment.
The Hero’s Journey
While the documentary doesn’t make the connection explicit, Bryant’s contract stemmed from his desire for greatness.
“He was very much moved by the fact we spent a lot of time in sophomore year talking about Joseph Campbell and the hero’s journey,” his English teacher Jeanne Mastriano says in the series. In the classic narrative arc, the hero encounters a challenge, overcomes it, and is transformed. “The idea of determining what it is that you really love, and what it is that you really want, and going after that with every fiber, every part of your body, and heart, and soul and passion.”
To Bryant, becoming the greatest basketball player ever wasn’t just a dream. The dream informed the process. Greatness was his hero’s journey, one he would pour every ounce of himself into accomplishing.
As Kobe said in 2020 on Lewis Howes’s School of Greatness podcast:
It was the consistency of the work. Monday, get better. Tuesday, get better. Wednesday, get better. You do that over a period of time — three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 years — you get to where you want to go.
It’s simple. It’s simple math.
Kobe’s contract with himself? Do the work. Do what others were not willing to do. Do what others could not even imagine doing. Fulfill that contract, and everything else would follow.
Only then would everything else follow.
Want to land a huge contract? First, make a contract with yourself. Do the work. Do what others are not willing to do. Do what others can’t imagine doing. Fulfill that contract, and everything else will follow.
Because the most important contracts you will ever make are the ones you make with yourself.
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