Transcription
1963 was one of the most intense years in American history. The President, John F. Kennedy, was assassinated live on television. America was in the middle of the Vietnam War, which would last 12 more years, and racial political tensions were just at an all-time high.
But for one ordinary, middle-class family, this would be one of the best years of their lives. As on a lazy Sunday afternoon, Dolores and James Jordan gave birth to a beautiful baby boy. They called him Michael Jeffrey Jordan, and little did they know that this baby boy would go on to be the greatest basketball player of all time.
His athleticism, his drive, his ultra-competitiveness, and the way he could just seemingly fly would go on to inspire an entire generation of players and fans that came after him. But he didn't start off this way. All accounts of a young Michael Jordan were that he was just kind of average. Biographies written about him that I read described him as a young man who was stalked by self-doubt, and his father, his very own father, James Jordan, would often call him the laziest boy he had ever met, not wanting to work or help out around the house doing his chores.
This young Michael Jordan was like many of us how we were when we were growing up: shy, insecure, and lost. He had potential for sure, but it had to be unlocked. And what I realized by reading a ton of biographies and watching a lot of interviews on Michael Jordan was that he figured out a way to unlock his potential. And the way that he did this was create himself a sort of guidebook, a set of principles that he's lived by his entire life.
These principles were like Michael Jordan's own personal Ten Commandments that he used no matter what was happening in his life. They had nothing to do with his physical talents; they were all tools of his mind, and they helped to transform him from a lanky boy from North Carolina to the once-in-a-generation immortal basketball player that we know of him today.
And the most exciting thing about all of this is that we can take these principles that Jordan used and apply them to our own lives. In fact, this is the very purpose of this channel: to take lessons from the most ambitious people in history and apply them to our own lives so we can level the [ __ ] up and be great.
But making changes is hard, and Jordan knew if he was going to dedicate himself to something big, he better enjoy doing it. And that brings us to our very first principle that Jordan lives by: find work that feels like play.
So we touched on the early Jordan, his parents thinking that he wouldn't amount to much, and quite frankly, that he was lazy. But he wasn't lazy; he just knew from a very young age that he did not want to be like everyone else. He didn't want to work a standard nine to five. Boy, can I relate with that? He wanted to do something with his life that truly excited him. I wanted the freedom to do what I wanted to do, and I wanted to do it my way, not blindly, but with my own twist.
To this day, I don't enjoy working; I enjoy playing and figuring out how to connect playing with business. To me, that's my niche. People talk about my work ethic as a player, but they don't understand what appeared to be hard work to others was simply playing to me. Wowzers, this is truly brilliant, and Michael has actually carried this principle throughout his whole life, not just in basketball, with many of his other business ventures too.
For example, his partnership with Nike on the Air Jordan sneakers. Now, I'm sure we all know there are many brand deals where brands hook up with celebrities, and celebrities will just slap their name on a product without giving two shits about it. But Michael's collaboration with Nike on the Jordan brand was legendary, and this was because he was intensely passionate about basketball. He wanted to get the best performance out of these shoes, but also he had an intense passion for fashion, passion for fashion. He really did have a passion for fashion, specifically suits and crazy outfits.
And what was so brilliant was he combined these two passions of basketball and his love for fashion and hooked up with an incredible designer at Nike, Tinker Hatfield, to basically create the Air Jordan sneakers that would eventually go on to be the Air Jordan brand, which is a 5 billion dollar a year business for Nike. But it all started with these shoes.
Now I want you to listen to me when I tell you how much work went into creating these Air Jordans. Nike started taking high-speed films of my feet as I played. They even dissected the shoe to see where my foot movements were weakening the structure. We went to podiatrists to determine the stress points on my feet, feet, and where they were impacting the shoe. No one saw all the work we were doing away from the game.
When you love something the way Michael loved these two things, you have no qualms about giving it 100% of your effort. For you, this work, whilst it can be hard, is enjoyable because you are so passionate about it; it feels like play. I resonate with this principle on a really deep level, as I'm sure many of you do as well.
For me specifically, it's with this YouTube channel. I've been working at this channel in different iterations for more than two years now. I've actually published 90 different videos, and there were many times over these last two years that I would have quit if I wasn't so passionate about my goal. But I wouldn't have known this content creation thing was for me if I didn't take a shot at it.
And this brings us to our second very powerful principle that Jordan has lived by his whole life: always take the shot. Now, this is both a literal and metaphorical lesson that we can learn from Jordan. On the court, in his basketball career, if his team was tied or down with a few seconds left, Jordan wanted the ball in his hand so he could take the shot.
"Sellers has Jordan. Jordan with two seconds to go at the buzzer. Michael Jordan has one. In full Chicago. I've missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times I've been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I failed over and over again in my life, and that's why I succeed."
Jordan knew that you miss 100% of the shots that you don't take. And this core principle to always take the shot led him to many interesting places in his life. Obviously, most notably, to be one of the most successful basketball players of all time, winning six championships, scoring over 32,000 points in his career. But he did a lot more outside of basketball. As many of us know, he tried his hand at professional baseball, he won two Olympic gold medals, he tried his hand at acting, he bought the Charlotte Hornets basketball team, which has proved to be an incredible investment for him, and he's done so many other amazing things all because he took the shot when it was given to him.
Now, most of us aren't professional athletes, and we may never have the ball in our hand with a few seconds left to make the winning shot. But there are lessons we can learn from this. In my nine-to-five job, one of the things that I've noticed throughout my career is that so many people are scared to take initiative. I don't know whether it's because they're scared of being judged or perhaps scared that they might fail, but I've personally made it a point of mine many years ago to always put my hand up for opportunities when they arise, to always take the shot.
That could be something as simple as just putting your hand up in a meeting and giving feedback or taking an extra piece of work. And many of these things might seem super small and like they don't lead to anywhere, but what I've noticed in my life and in my career is that this has definitely helped me to get pay rises and promotions over the years. And I believe this is simply because of my attitude to take initiative, to take the shot, and to put my hand up whenever there was an opportunity.
We want to be the person that takes initiative. You want to be the person that takes initiative in your life, even for small things, things because when bigger opportunities come up, you are going to be the person that's at the top of that list. But I know what you're thinking, Headsource, it's hard to take initiative. It's hard to keep that motivation going when the days just roll by and there really isn't anything exciting happening.
And this leads us to my favorite principle that Jordan lived by: to bring focus and intensity to his life at all times, and that is: raise the stakes on yourself. Now, there has been a lot of coverage over the years on Michael Jordan's legendary trash talking, both on and off the court.
"The game's just about to start, and Michael walks over to Lacey and he points to says, 'We took care of you.' And he looks at Kent and he says, 'If we took care of you.' And he looks at me, 'And we take care of you today.'"
Looking in from the outside, you may just think that he was arrogant, but there was actually something much deeper going on here. We all have things that motivate us. For Michael Jordan, the two things that motivated him were his ego and his legacy. "It was a threat, you know? I'm not saying he wasn't a threat, but me being compared to him, I took offense to that."
Michael Jordan wanted to be the greatest basketball player of all time, and he could not stand anyone outperforming him. So to ensure he played as hard as he possibly could for his 1073 professional games in the NBA, he would intentionally trash talk other players, and in doing so, he would raise the stakes on himself.
This started from a very young age. It continued when he went to play basketball at the University of North Carolina. When he was just a freshman, he hadn't played in the NBA yet, obviously, he hadn't been signed, but he was still adamant on trash talking other players in the team. One of his teammates at UNC, James Worthy, said Jordan seemed eager to bully the older players at North Carolina, and part of his bully game was talking trash.
So imagine this: a young Michael Jordan shows up, it's his first year, he's a freshman, and his first order of business is to go to the senior players on the team and start telling them how hard he was going to dunk on them. I love this excerpt from the Michael Jordan biography, "The Life." This is in relation to his teammates at UNC. They saw Jordan possessed a complex personality. In one sense, the trash talk seems silly and innocent, but in another sense, it showed that he really was intent on challenging them. But his teammates soon began to realize that he was using the trash to push himself. The more he talked, the more he had to back it up. I love it. He wanted these senior players to come at him with everything that they had. That added pressure to him in every single game, but also in all of his practice sessions.
And Michael is known for having legendary practice sessions. The way I think of this best is it's like running a race by yourself versus running a race while there's an entire team of people chasing you. In which scenario do you think you're going to perform better? And this idea of continuously raising the stakes on himself by trash talking other players continued throughout his whole professional career.
Now, remember, Michael Jordan walks into our locker room, suit and tie. I'm like, "What the hell is he doing in our locker room? Is he coming to, you know, to the training room?" Well, what's going on? So he walks by me, he walks by Kevin. We get to Randy. With me, he said, "Lace 'em up. It's gonna be a long night." I'm like, "Did he just come in our locker?" I didn't know what to say. I was shocked. He had 60 that night.
This is a really powerful principle to use in my personal favorite. Jordan knew that his ego would not let him fail, and if it did, he would come back at you the next time 10 times harder. But if we're going to use this principle in our own lives, we need to do some self-reflection. Perhaps legacy or ego is not the thing that drives us in the same way that it was driving Jordan.
For me, a huge motivator in my life is having freedom, freedom to be a full-time content creator and leave my traditional nine-to-five job. And recently, I took a page out of the Jordan playbook and raised the stakes on myself. I did this by hiring a business coach. This guy is keeping me accountable and making sure that I'm moving in the direction of my goals, which is to become a full-time content creator. This has actually been mind-blowing for me, and it's amazing how much impact one person can have in your life by keeping you accountable, especially when you're paying them a lot of money.
But I want to up the ante now here on this video for people that stuck around. So I'm giving myself a deadline of 12 months from the day this video is published. If I am not a full-time content creator in 12 months and I'm still working at my nine-to-five job, I will quit my nine-to-five and move into the world of full-time content creation. How's that for raising the stakes? 365 days to go.
So that's me. But my question to you is, how will you use these principles that Jordan has taught us to level up your own life and move towards greatness? Thank you for watching, and thank you to all the people who have stuck with Headsource over the last few years. I know this channel has iterated and had a bunch of different content, but I finally feel like I know deep down inside of me what my why is and how I want to continue Headsource in the future. So I appreciate you, and stay tuned because 2023 is going to be a massive year for us. Love you.