800 Makes: What Kobe Bryant Teaches Us About Process-Oriented Investing
At 4:15 AM in Las Vegas, a phone rang in athletic trainer Rob’s hotel room1.
Rob was working with Team USA Basketball ahead of the London Olympics.
On the other end of the line was Kobe Bryant, asking if Rob could meet him at the practice facility and work him out.
Twenty minutes later, Rob walked into the gym to find Kobe alone, already drenched in sweat. For the next two hours, they worked through conditioning drills and strength training. Then Kobe returned to the court to shoot while Rob, exhausted, went back to his hotel room.
When Rob returned at 11 AM for the team’s scheduled scrimmage, the other players were chatting and hanging out but on the far side of the gym, Kobe was by himself shooting jumpers.
Rob walked over and said, “Good work this morning.” Kobe thanked him.
Then Rob asked when he’d finished his workout. “Oh just now,” Kobe replied. “I wanted 800 makes so yeah, just now.”
Rob was blown away.
While his teammates slept, Kobe not only put in a 2 hour conditioning workout he also made—not attempted, but made—800 shots.
Process vs. Product: A Framework for Excellence
Sport psychologists have long observed that elite athletes fall into two categories: those fixated on outcomes (championships, scoring titles, accolades) and those obsessed with the daily process of improvement.
The product-oriented athlete measures success by the scoreboard. And they’re singularly focsused on that.
The process-oriented athlete sees things on a broader scale. They measure they’re success on how well they executed their training plan. They find their reward in the activity of training and getting better. What some people call “the love of the game”.
Kobe Bryant was a process-oriented athlete. He didn’t show up at 4 AM because he thought it would guarantee a gold medal like a product oriented athlete. He showed up because making 800 shots was the standard he’d set for himself.
For investors, this distinction is equally critical. As Michael Mauboussin writes in The Success Equation, “deliberate practice works when skill dominates, while a focus on process and probability is appropriate when luck is the greater force.”
Investing operates in a domain where luck and skill deeply intertwined and aren’t as clearly delineated in a sport like basketball. You can make excellent investment decisions and still lose money in the short term. You can make terrible decisions and get lucky. The scoreboard—your quarterly returns—is a noisy signal. This is precisely why focusing on process rather than product becomes essential for long-term success.
Why Process Matters More Than Results
Wesley Gray and Jack Vogel make this explicit in Quantitative Momentum: “the ability to stay disciplined to a process is arguably the most important aspect of being a successful investor.” They didn’t say “the ability to pick winning stocks” or “the ability to time the market.” They said stay disciplined to a process.
Like Kobe’s 800 makes, this is about showing up and doing the work regardless of whether yesterday’s trade worked out. It’s about having a system and trusting it through the inevitable drawdowns, the periods when your process feels foolish because the market is rewarding behavior you know to be unsustainable.
Robert Hagstrom adds in The Warren Buffett Way, that “more thoughtful decision-making will lead to better results, and more thoughtful decision-making can be encouraged by evaluating how well they were made rather than an outcome.”
The question to ask isn’t “Did your portfolio beat the market this quarter?” but rather “Did you follow your investment process? Did you do the work? Did you make decisions based on sound analysis rather than fear or greed?”
You need to build a continuous learning process; the better the process, the faster the learning. This is the compounding effect of process orientation.
Kobe’s thousands of practice hours built not just muscle memory but deeper pattern recognition and game intelligence, a rigorous investment process builds judgment. Each decision, properly documented and reviewed, becomes data. Over time, you develop an intuition for what works in your particular approach.
The Love of the Game
There’s another dimension of Kobe’s story that matters for investors: he loved the process itself. At 34 years old, with five championships and more money than he could ever spend, Kobe still wanted to make 800 shots before practice. Because he loved the loved the game and he loved the process of becoming a better basketball player.
The process-oriented investor, like the process-oriented athlete, finds satisfaction in the work itself—the research, the analysis, the continuous refinement of their approach.
This is tedious.
This is maintaining an investment journal even when you’re short on time. This doing post-mortems on your losers when you’d rather forget them. This is stress testing your DCF models. This is reading the SEC filings for the last several years. Tracking management’s capital allocation history. These are your 800 makes.
The Investment Challenge: Noisy Feedback and Ambiguous Outcomes
In portfolio management, the feedback loop — the mechanism by which you learn — is far slower and noisier.
Kobe could see immediately whether a shot went in or not and immediately adjust to what he learned.
You might not know whether a position was a good decision for years, and even then, the counterfactual is unknowable.
Did you sell too early or demonstrate proper risk management?
Did you hold too long or show conviction?
This ambiguity makes process orientation even more essential. As Paleologo writes in Advanced Portfolio Management, “the life of the good portfolio manager is one marked by continuous self-doubt and adaptation,” focused on improving stock selection, sizing, and timing skills.
You must trust the process precisely because outcomes are so ambiguous.
Practical Steps: Your 800 Makes
What does a Kobe-level commitment to process look like for investors?
Define your process explicitly. What is your edge? What types of opportunities do you seek? What are your decision rules for position sizing, entry, exit, and risk management? Write this down. Be specific enough that someone else could theoretically follow your process.
Measure your adherence to process. Did you follow your rules this week, this month, this quarter? Not: did you make money? But: did you execute your process? Create a simple scorecard. Track how often you’re actually doing what you said you’d do.
Review your decisions systematically. Keep a decision journal. For every position, document your thesis, your entry price, your target exit criteria, and the scenarios that would invalidate your thesis. Conduct regular post-mortems. What did you learn? Where did your analysis fail? Where did you let emotion override process?
Embrace the boring consistency of excellence. Kobe’s 800 makes weren’t glamorous. They were repetitive, exhausting, and invisible to everyone but him. Your investment process won’t be glamorous either. Reading SEC filings is boring. Stress-testing DCF models is tedious. Documenting your thinking is unglamorous work. Do it anyway. This is your 800 makes.
Cultivate genuine love for the process. If you’re only in this game for the money, you won’t have the stamina for the decades-long marathon that investing requires. You need to enjoy the puzzle-solving, the detective work of uncovering value, the intellectual challenge of thinking probabilistically in the face of uncertainty. You need to be the person who, metaphorically speaking, shows up at 4:15 AM not because you have to, but because you can’t imagine doing anything else.
Story edited from https://www.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/euohq1/my_favorite_story_about_kobes_work_ethic/
If it can be done with sports and investing, it can be applied to many areas of life!