The Mamba Mentality by Kobe Bryant. Quotes

-From day one, I wanted to dominate. My mindset was: I’m going to figure you out. Whether it was AI, Tracy, Vince—or, if I were coming up today, LeBron, Russ, Steph—my goal was to figure you out. And to do that, to figure those puzzles out, I was willing to do way more than
anyone else.
-I always felt like if I started my day early, I could train more each day. If I started at 11, I’d get in a few hours, rest for four hours, and then get back to the gym around 5 to 7. But if I started at 5 AM and went until 7, I could go again from 11 until 2 and 6 until 8. By starting earlier, I set myself up for an extra workout each day. Over the course of a summer, that’s a lot of extra hours in the gym.
-I wasn’t willing to sacrifice my game, but I also wasn’t willing to sacrifice my family time. So I decided to sacrifice sleep, and that was that.
-From a young age—a very young age—I devoured film and watched everything I could get my hands on. It was always fun to me. Some people, after all, enjoy looking at a watch; others are happier figuring out how the watch works.
-If you really want to be great at something, you have to truly care about it. If you want to be great in a particular area, you have to obsess over it.
-If you want to be a great basketball player, you have to be in great shape. Everyone talks about the fancy workouts and training sessions, but I also worked relentlessly to make sure that my legs and lungs were always at peak performance.
-Pain in one area of your body often stems from an imbalance somewhere else. With that in mind, it’s important to treat the root cause and not the effect.
-I always made sure my ankles were activated and moving. If your ankles are stiff, that can create problems in the knees, hips, back, and all the way up. So, I’d spend a lot of time before games working on my ankles—the core of the problem—so that I wouldn’t exacerbate the symptoms.
-I would begin stretching a couple of hours before games. Then, as the game got closer and closer, I would start doing more active, more range-of-motion things to get ready.