To fail this often, you have to be pretty good

Quick post from the Western NY satellite office of The 8 Man Rotation - wanted to point out an important NBA milestone that happened last night: Lakers star Kobe Bryant set the record for most missed shots for an NBA career.

From the ESPN piece on the 'achievement':

Kobe Bryant made history Tuesday, setting the NBA record for missed field goals.

The Los Angeles Lakers star set the mark with 6:22 left in the fourth quarter of a 107-102 lossto the Memphis Grizzlies. He missed a 14-foot fadeaway jumper from the left side, giving him 13,418 career missed field goals, one more than Boston Celtics legend John Havlicek

Asked about the record, Bryant, who scored a game-high 28 points on 10-of-26 shooting and finished with 13,421 misses for his career, smiled and said he wasn't aware of it.

"Nah, I don't follow that stuff, man," he said.

How does he explain setting the mark?

"Well, I'm a shooting guard that's played 19 years," he said, shrugging and smiling. He later added, "Like I said, 'shooting' guard, 19th year."

Wow, over 13,000 missed shots in a career, more than any other player. You would think that this ignominious mark speaks pretty badly of our man Kobe. But before you come down too hard on the Mamba, take a quick look at the next half-dozen or so names on the 'Most career missed shots' leader board

John Havlicek - (Celtics legend from the 60s and 70s, Hall of Fame member)

Elvin Hayes - (The Big 'E', great scored and rebounder in the 70s, Hall of Fame member)

Karl Malone - (The Mailman, Utah Jazz legend, possibly greatest power forward ever, Hall of Fame member)

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar - (the NBA's all-time leading scorer, Hall of Fame member)

Michael Jordan - (probably greatest player of all time, Hall of Fame member)

I think you get the idea here. In order to be able to miss so many shots, you have to be an amazingly good and valuable player. Players who can't actually perform are not kept around long enough to climb very high on this kind of 'failure' list. 

The bigger picture takeaway from the 'Kobe has missed more shots than anyone' story?

That in many fields (sales, content marketing, natural resource exploration, showing price pigs at the county fair....), failure might come just as often, if not more, than success. You have to be out there competing, hustling, working it in order to fail so often. And your best performers, maybe even you, are naturally going to fail, sometimes often. But that might be ok.

I will leave this story with a quote from Kobe, asked to comment on over 13,000 misses over 19 years:

"You've got to go out and figure that out and play and do the best you can, and whatever happens, happens. You can't be held captive by the fear of failure or the fear of what people may say."

If you are open, take the shot.

Have a great Wednesday!