National Basketball Association star Kobe Bryant has been celebrated as one of the greatest players in history. But why is he so good? The answer may lie partly in his ability to concentrate intensely for long periods. There’s no doubt that Mr. Bryant, a shooting guard for the Los Angeles Lakers and a two-time Most Valuable Player in the league, is enormously talented. Still, as we reported last year , he puts in grueling hours of practice — including three workouts each day during the off-season — to hone his skills.
And when Mr. Bryant takes the court, he’s focused on winning, “not individual records, not breaking the Lakers’ franchise scoring record — none of that,” said John Brenkus, co-founder and host of ESPN’s Sports Science and producer and host of a 2014 documentary about Mr. Bryant called Kobe Bryant’s Muse . Instead, he said, Mr. Bryant is “trying to win his sixth championship and be the best player on that court.”
What makes Kobe Bryant one of the greatest basketball players of all time?
How does he train? And what can we learn from him? To answer these questions, the latest episode of the NPR podcast and video series Invisibilia focuses on Mr. Bryant. But new research suggests that what makes Mr. Bryant so effective is his ability to enter a state known as “flow” — a mental state in which time seems to stop and a person’s brain functions at its most optimal level.
“People describe it as being completely absorbed in what they’re doing,” said Steven Kotler, director of research for the Flow Genome Project . “One common way people describe flow is the loss of self-consciousness — such that you forget about yourself, you forget about time, and that all that matters in the moment is what you’re doing.”
His work ethic and dedication to the sport are also important factors in his success, said David Epstein, author of The Sports Gene
“I think the biggest single factor is work ethic,” he said. “Every study looking at what makes great athletes different from good athletes on any given sport has come up with that as one of the primary distinguishing characteristics.”
But do all people experience flow? To answer this question, Invisibilia turns to a man named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi , a Hungarian psychologist who first studied flow in the 1970s. Csikszentmihalyi tried to understand happiness and creativity by interviewing artists, including dancers, musicians and architects.
What he discovered is that they all described a similar mental state
“When I asked them to really concentrate on what was happening inside their bodies, they began to talk about this kind of tranquil state where time stopped and where the focus of attention narrowed until the only thing in their awareness was whatever it was that they were doing; or sometimes that there was nothing, no awareness of self or surroundings, they were completely absorbed,” Csikszentmihalyi told Invisibilia host Alix Spiegel.
how many game winning shots does kobe have?
Kobe Bryant has had the opportunity to hit many game winning shots over his career. Kobe scores about 24 points per game and he plays around 35 minutes in a regular season game, so that’s just shy of 840 points in a season if we do the math right. So how many gms winner does Kobe have?
Kobe has hit over 40 game winners in his career. Kobe has hit a total of 46. Kobe has the 4th highest amount of gms winners in NBA history if we count Kareem and Derek Fisher who each have broken the record with 20 or more gms winners under their belt. Dr. J also holds the record for most gms winners in history with 78.
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