What I learned from reading Michael Jordan: The Life by Roland Lazenby.

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It took the fewest of words to set him off, sometimes nothing more than the faintest trace of

He was also capable of making things up, conjuring up an affront out of thin air.

That's what they would all realize afterward.

He would seize on apparently meaningless cracks or gestures and plunge them deep into his heart until they glowed radioactively, the nuclear fuel rods of his great fire.

Only much later would the public come to understand just how incapable he was of letting go of even the tiniest details.

Many observers mistakenly thought that these affronts were laughable things of Michael's own manufacture,

little devices to spur his competitive juices, and that he would jokingly toss them aside when he was done with them, after he had rung another sweaty victory from the evening.

But he could not let them go any more than he could shed his right arm.

They were as organic to his being as his famous tongue.

Many of the things that deeply offended Michael Jordan were hardly the stuff of stinging rebuke, except perhaps the very first 1, which, as it later turned out, was the most important of all.

Of the millions of sentences that James Jordan uttered to his youngest son, this 1 was the 1 that glowed neon bright across the decades.

His father's mean words had activated deep within him some errant strain of DNA, a mutation of competitive nature so strong as to almost seem titanium.

Years later, during the early days of his NBA career, he confessed that it was his father's early treatment of him and his dad's declaration of his worthlessness that became the driving force that motivated him.

Each accomplishment that he achieved was his battle cry for defeating his father's negative opinions of him.

Michael paid him back again and again by achieving so much in a life that his father could never hope to grasp.

That is what offspring of disapproving fathers often do.

Without even realizing it, they lock in on an answer and deliver it over and over, confirming that they do not need to just go in the house.

And they continue to confirm it even after the father has gone to dust, as if they are unconsciously yelling across time in an argument with the old man.

That was an excerpt from the book I'm going to

talk to you about today, which is Michael Jordan, The Life, and it was written by Roland Lazenby.

Remember that part about his father for the end, because the end of the book brings that story full circle.

So before I jump into the book, I want to tell you why I wanted to do this book.

1, I would say I've looked up to Michael Jordan since I was a little kid.

He's probably, if I look back, he's probably the first hero I ever had.

And so I had a deep personal interest in learning more about him.

But also I've come across recently, I was thinking about, you come across these deals that people or individuals are able to obtain for themselves in their life and career that almost seem impossible to believe.

And so we've seen a few examples of these over the last couple of weeks.

Coco Chanel, she went from orphan to the richest woman in the world by the time she died.

Part of her doing that is signing a deal where she got 2%, 2.5%, I can't remember if it was 2% or 2.5% of gross sales, worldwide gross sales for all the Chanel perfumes, which is 1 of the most commercially successful products ever created.

That gave her an income, if it was adjusted in today's dollars, she was getting paid this starting in the 1940s, it'd be the equivalent of if you made $300 million a year in today's dollars and the company had to pay for every single 1 of your living expenses.

Another example of this that's hard to believe is that Steven Spielberg gets 2% of all ticket sales at Universal theme parks.

So without having to do anything else, that's estimated to bring him about 50 to $75 million a year.

And then you have Jordan, which we'll talk about today, the Jordan brand.

The most recent numbers I found was 3.6 billion a year in sales, which would mean he makes about 180 million, he made $180 million.

And so I just wanna bring that to your attention because it's just a reminder that life is unpredictable.

Steven Spielberg started out as a 17-year-old kid trying to get an internship on Universal Lot.

And as Jordan says in the book and in interviews, he just started out as a poor country boy from Wilmington, North Carolina.

And there's a sentence in the prologue I think speaks to just how unbelievable life can be.

And he says, sometimes I wonder what it will be like to look back on all of this, whether it will even seem real.

There's a bunch of just one-liners that I think will prompt a lot of thoughts.

The note I left myself on this 1 is, this is a one-sentence summary of Michael Jordan.

His competence was exceeded only by his confidence.

And what's interesting is we'll see that the confidence he had later in his career was very real.

The confidence he had when he was in high school, maybe even early days of college, a lot of that was just him hyping himself up to convince himself to some degree.

You could say it's a false confidence to convince himself that he can compete with the very best.

So he had this like fake external confidence that acted as fuel and covered up internal doubts.

Another line for you and another myself is this is something I want to copy.

I was actually on the phone with a friend of mine having a conversation about what I was learning in this book, because he's a huge Jordan fan as well.

And when I talked about Jordan having this trait that I'm about to read to you, he's like, this is something that I'm extremely interested in hearing about.

This is something I'm extremely interested in copying.

He says he worked at his game, and if he wasn't good at something, he had the motivation to be the best at it.

And the method he used for improvement was a complete and utter dedication to practice, which is another main theme of the book that I'm going to talk a lot about, because I think there's just so many parallels between how Jordan prepared for his basketball career that we can use in our work.

In fact, I started reading another book on him, and he talks about that in the prologue of this other book I have, where it's just like, it's the same approach I used for basketball.

I used to approach to building the Jordan brand.

Another trait that he had was the fact that he was very interested in seeing like, what is the limits of my potential?

And so it says, mostly he tested himself.

He seemed that he discovered the secret quite early in his competitive life.

The more pressure he heaped on himself, the greater his ability to rise to the occasion.

And finally 1 more thing from the prologue, it says, actually I'll read my note to you after I read this.

Tex Winter, who worked with Jordan longer than any other coach, said he had never encountered a more complicated figure.

He is a mystery man in an awful lot of ways.

And I think he will always be, maybe even to himself.

And so the note I left myself on this page is after reading 700 pages about him, I feel this way too.

I've talked to you about this in the past that 1 of the great things about reading biographies is you're spending, in some cases,

I mean, I spent 30 hours reading this book.

I wish you could see how many notes I have.

But normally when you get to the end of that kind of experience, you feel you know the person or you have an idea of who they are.

I know about his drive, his competitive spirit.

I know about the traits that I want to emulate and use in my own career.

But Jordan, the person, is still very misunderstood, even to me, and an enigma.

So not only did I read, so let me tell you how I prepared for this podcast too.

Before I sat down to speak to you, I read close to 700 pages, took probably over a hundred notes on the book.

I also re-watched the 10 part series, the documentary that's on Netflix called The Last Dance, which covers mainly Jordan's last year, but it also gives an entire overview of his career and his early life.

And then what I did is, because a lot of people talk about his induction into the Hall of Fame, his speech.

I watched that speech twice, and then I found the transcript and I read and took notes on that as well.

So I'm gonna combine notes that I have on all 3 of those things, and hopefully by the end of this, you have a good understanding of Jordan's approach to not only his basketball game, but then his business that is, you know, made him.

I think the estimate is almost $2 billion so far by the time he signs with Nike in

Let's go to a famous story of his where he gets cut.

It's really he's playing high school basketball.

He's 15 years old the time and he doesn't make it.

So I know if myself is lazy and unmotivated about things he is not interested in but obsessed with his 1 goal.

So says the 15 year old boy who pinned his hopes on trying out for the high school varsity basketball team in the fall of 1978 was a far cry from the supremely confident Michael Jordan the world would come to know.

So that's that's an echo of what I was saying earlier, how I think the confidence he has in later life, no doubt that is extremely real.

But I think he had a false sense of confidence that he actually used this fuel as a way to convince himself that he can do this.

So he says, and he hated, so they're talking about the fact, his mom and dad would talk about, he had no interest in ever having like a job.

He was completely obsessed with sports and being as good as baseball at baseball and basketball as he possibly could.

But he wouldn't go out just to do things to make money like his other siblings would.

So he says he had any hated working, making no effort to do anything to earn extra money.

It was clear to his father that Michael would do anything to avoid would do anything to avoid anything that resembled effort.

James Jordan would say time and again, if he had to get a job in

a factory punching a clock, he'd starve to death.

And that's a surprising sentence because he's known for his legendary work ethic.

And it says and now we see that it's not that he wasn't lazy, it's just that he wasn't interested.

Yet that laziness magically disintegrated when it came to sports.

It if involved a ball in the air, A contest to be settled, the switch came on.

In his adolescent mind, Michael figured maybe he could be a professional athlete.

That was really about the only thing that interested him.

And so that's another main theme of Jordan's life, singular.

Once he gets to the NBA, he still only has then he switches to another goal, but it's not multiple goals.

I want to win as many championships as possible.

And the way he looked at it was I can't be the best player I can be if I'm not focused on just 1 thing.

There's actually a scene about this in the last dance.

I took a screenshot and now I made it my my home screen on my phone.

It says a guy that was totally focused on 1 thing and 1 thing only.

And so now we get to the experience of where he does not make the team.

the beginning, he uses every single slight.

Everything is motivation and he never forgets.

The realization of his defeat fell on him like a boulder that day.

He walked home alone, avoiding anyone along the way.

I went to my room and I closed the door and I cried.

And so this is the first example of many examples of pain as I'm reading this book as I'm watching the documentary.

It's amazing how often not only Jordan, but also his teammates talk about the pain, the pain they went through.

You have physical pain of obviously the sport, but the emotional pain is really what I was trying to focus on.

Of constantly trying to achieve a goal, coming up short, having to fall down, to dust yourself off, to pick yourself up.

It really reminded me of what the founder of 4 Seasons says, and ever since I read that, that founder's number 184, if you haven't gone back and listened to that episode.

But EZ Sharp, the guy that founded 4 Seasons, there's just a line.

It's amazing, you read hundreds, I guess, tens of thousands of pages, and just how a random 1 sentence will stick in your mind and you'll never forget it.

And he talked about how difficult it was building up 1 of the most premier luxury brands in the world.

And he says, excellence is often just a capacity for taking pain,

the ability to experience it, go through it and keep going.

This is something that comes up over and over again.

It's in the book, it's in the documentary, it's in his speech, into his induction to the Hall of Fame.

It's that time is the best filter and you should study the greats, which is exactly what you and I are doing right now, right?

And so says, young Michael had begun taking note of the pro games on TV.

Later, thanks to the rise of ESPN, the televising of NBA games became omnipresent and Jordan's own play would spawn a generation of young players attempting to imitate his game.

That wasn't it was extremely hard to see games on TV at the time.

He explained that he had done the same finding rare and special instructors through television were finding rare and special instructors through books.

This is the guy that he asked to to accompany him to his his induction to Hall of Fame.

First, there was David Thompson, followed by Dr.

And this is also maybe a surprising part where Jordan's got a gigantic ego, right?

But 1 part where he does not have an ego is constantly talking about, hey, I couldn't have done what I did without learning from the people that came before me.

And he has later in the book, I'll give you towards the very end, he's talking about Kobe Bryant in 2008.

And there's this interview in the book where he talks about that.

Like he's very, contrite is not the right word.

He's like, of course, you know, stop saying that Kobe's copying me.

We all copied somebody in everything I've seen with Jordan, everything I've read about him.

He's constantly talking about learning from and respecting the people that came before him.

So this is just a sentence, even at a very, he's still in high school and he's extremely driven.

And it says, at each step along the path, others would express amazement at how hard he competed.

At every level, he was driven as if he was pursuing something that others couldn't see.

And while still in high school, we're going to see that he makes a mistake.

He understands that teams win, not individuals, and that you have to manage your ego.

And so he's talking about, you know, I didn't want, since the team didn't want me, I didn't want them to win.

And so he says, I wanted them to lose to prove that I could help them.

That this is what I was thinking at that time.

You made a mistake by not putting me on the team and you're gonna see it because you're gonna lose.

That experience brought Jordan face-to-face with his own selfishness for the first time.

It would be 1 of the dominant themes of his career, learning to channel the tremendous drive and ego of his competitive nature into a team game.

the things that helped Jordan smarten up is that every single person from the high school coach, his college coaches, his professional coaches, his trainer.

They talk about that Jordan surprisingly to maybe meaning surprising to people that don't know him is the fact that 1 of his best attributes was the ability to listen.

He says, but what impressed me was that Michael said was what Michael said when Bobby introduced me to him.

Gibbons, what do I need to do to be a better player?

He's a junior in high school and this is happening.

This reminded me of something that I heard the Nick Saban, the coach of Alabama's football team, say 1 time that was really interesting, I think applies definitely to Jordan.

He says, average players want to be left alone.

Great players want the coach to tell you the truth every day on every play because they want to be perfect.

This is Michael reflecting on the preparation of what he was doing and trying to get better because I talk about the difference between sophomore year and junior year.

They could not believe how much you progressed.

Same thing from junior year to senior year.

And his college coaches said the same thing.

And so what he's about to tell us here is really, you have to find what gives you that extra motivation.

So he says, whenever I was working out and got tired and figured out how to stop, I'd close my eyes and see that list in the locker room without my name on it.

And this is 1 of his high school coaches remembering Jordan's approach to his teammates.

So this is something that's talked about over

and over again the fact that he was extremely hard.

Some of his teammates would would would describe him as a bully.

Really, this 1 sentence he's about to say here reminded me of what Steve Jobs told us, that you should be a yardstick for quality.

Some people are not used to an environment where excellence is expected, Where excellence is expected.

Nobody had ever had this kid's drive even in high school He took pride in his defense Mike was feared at this point in

Mike was furious if his teammates didn't play good defense in practice That's a dedication to practice It's something it's gonna be 1 of my main takeaways from this book that I'm gonna think about constantly.

What he's about to say here reminds me of Arnold Schwarzenegger what he taught us, that if you see your, seeing your goal in your mind helps you see it in person.

So it says at 17 he had a clear notion of what he wanted and he wasn't reluctant about expressing it publicly.

And so we see he's deadly serious about that goal.

This is a description of high school Jordan as he is getting recruited to play college ball.

The coach would later recall that Jordan kept sneaking back into succeeding groups for more work.

OK, so we're still right before Jordan goes to college.

This is what I'm about to describe to you.

I'm about to tell you is, he says, it was the turning point of my life.

That is a crazy sentence when you think about his life, right?

So what's about to happen is he's gonna test himself against better competition.

And this helps him realize, wait a minute, I'm good at this.

Remember, he's just like you describe yourself as a poor, poor country boy from Wilmington, North Carolina at this point.

He's maybe good at a small high school in North Carolina.

He's never been tested against the greatest competition.

So it says the result was that the unknown player from Wilmington, still something of a mystery to the Carolina coaches, was headed to 5-stars Pittsburgh 2 camp to see how he stacked up against other players from across the country.

And these are players, it says, who had actually made their varsity teams as freshmen and sophomores, which Jordan obviously didn't, and distinguish themselves.

The conventional wisdom was that the best young players had already been identified.

Conventional wisdom is we already know who the great players are.

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Michael Jordan: The Life