Hi Everyone,

Happy Friday! Thanks for spending part of it reading The Lake Street Journal.

This week we’re talking about Kobe’s selflessness and the next phase of education. Let's get into it.

Killing the Streak

In 2003, Shaq was out with a toe injury, so Phil Jackson came to Kobe and asked him to take over the offense. 

No problem. This kicked off a streak where Kobe was scoring 40+ points per game.

Before long, Shaq returned to the lineup, and Kobe was still dropping 40. He had nine straight games in a row before Jackson called him back to the office.

“We’re starting to lose the big fella,” Jackson said. “He’s not getting enough attention. This 40 point streak is taking away his fire. I need you to start dialing it back because we’re gonna lose him, and we need him in June.”

As you can imagine, Kobe was pissed.

The next game, they were playing the Clippers. Kobe had 38 points with an open shot and a chance to score 40. Instead he dumped it off to Shaq in the post. 

“The 40 point streak ended that night,” Kobe told A-Rod in a 2018 interview. “That was it. And that’s the inside stuff that people don’t know.”

38 points instead of 40 seems like a meaningless distinction, but if Kobe buried that last bucket, he would’ve had ten games in a row with 40 points. It would’ve been a record. Instead he passed the ball to the big guy to coddle his ego and save him for the playoffs.

Kobe didn’t care about personal records. He cared about championships. Calling Kobe selfish isn’t quite right. He had a singular focus on winning. Often that looked like selfishness, but if winning meant being selfless, Kobe was all about it.

And that's what the greatest leaders understand. They'll kill the streak to win the championship. The team always comes before the individual.

Class Dismissed

This is an excellent profile on Joe Liemandt, the billionaire found of Trilogy. It tells the story of Trilogy, which is interesting in and of itself, but where it really gets interesting is when it dives in to his current endeavor: Alpha School.

Liemandt is using AI to create a school without teachers, where students spend two hours per day on classwork and are testing in the top .1% in the country.

If you have kids, you can't miss this one. If you're into tech and entrepreneurship, you can't miss it either. It's a LONG read, but it's well worth the time.

Here are a couple of my favorite excerpts:

“AI is the instrument inflection for learning science,” he said. “Not chatbots. If you deploy ChatGPT to every student in America, we will become the dumbest country on the planet. Rather it’s the learning engine GenAI’s allowed me to build that can generate personalized lesson plans for every kid that are 100% engaging. It can track their knowledge graph [what they know and don’t know] and their interest graph, and dynamically teach curriculum by analogy to the things they care about.”

There’s going to be a tablet that costs less than $1,000 that is going to teach every kid on this planet everything they need to know in two hours a day and they’re going to love it. I really do think we can transform education for everybody in the world.”

Elon Musk

I've recommended Walter Isaacson's biography of Musk before. It's excellent. This podcast covers the book, and more specifically, Musk's enduring principles for company building.

It's a great complement to the book or a preview before diving in.

Workout of the Week

I've been doing a lot more running and a lot less CrossFit since I'm training for a half marathon. Here's one of the running workouts I did this week. It destroyed me just as much as the hardest CrossFit workout.

800m Speed Repeats

15 minute warmup jog into 8 rounds of:

• 800m @ 6:25 mile pace

• 400m walk/jog recovery

You can adjust to your skill level by increasing/decreasing the pace, distance, or number of rounds. Enjoy!

Quote of the Week

"Being too far ahead of your time is indistinguishable from being wrong." - Howard Marks

Have a question or a comment? Respond to this email.

Talk soon,

Joe