The year of 2020 will be remembered by this generation of humans as the year everything became uncertain. Our health, our safety, our finances, the livelihood we once believed could not be altered. Despite that, one thing remained certain in 2020, LeBron James’ continued display as the best basketball player (and perhaps athlete) on the Earth. While LeBron James’ career may appear to be flirting with immortalization, he still shares the same air as us all. Some idolize him, others vilify him; but the commonality is that we’ll never know what it is like to be in his sneakers. However, just like the uncommon nature of 2020 has taught us all something, we can also attempt to learn from the uncommon career (and life) LeBron Janes has lived.

So here is my best shot, in a five segment series:

High School, A Young & Lucky Fighter: Opportunity Overwhelming Pressure

LeBron James is 35 years old as of his 4th NBA Championship, but he entered into the national spotlight at a mere 16 years old. Do the elementary math, and he’s been under the microscope of millions of people for more years than he was allowed to be a regular person. Which is fine, because LeBron James was not born to be a regular person. As David Goggins would say, he was purposed to be “common amongst uncommon men”. LeBron has often suggested that his life’s foundational origins should have taken him down a different path. He had no father figure, he was raised by a single & unassured mother, developed in a poverty ridden community, many times homeless, and not to mention the odds stacked against him just being a black man. While one can assume LeBron wrestled whether he could defy all those odds, the weight of it all didn’t matter, because he’s a fighter. 

That’s what fighters do. They do not grunt at their toil or moan at their despair, that’s left for the enemy. LeBron James did not only arise from the dirt solely on talent, but as Sun Tzu states in The Art of War “in the midst of chaos, there is opportunity”. Most of us have encountered the beginning stages of an opportunity that could change the trajectory of our lives. Then; chaos ensues, pressure mounts, and before we know it we are back to square one. It probably would not have taken much for LeBron to fall down the rabbit hole back to square. A teenage pregnancy, an altercation with the wrong crowd, a social circle filled with hacks, or a someone disguising mentorship to be an early venture capitalist on his potential. You can argue all day who kept LeBron’s muse in security, but as a young man he refused early on to let pressures overwhelm his opportunity. Instead, he overwhelmed his pressures by seizing the opportunities that let him to a life he could have never predicted. And that, is where the story truly begins for this kid from Northeast Ohio.