Mamba Mentality: How I Play contains takeaways on discipline, sacrifice, passion, work ethic, mental toughness, willpower, time management, and perfecting one's craft through other lanes. Here's one of my favorite passages:

"After [my ankle injury in Game 2 of the 2000 NBA Finals], I missed Game 3, but managed, thanks to stimulation therapy, to play the rest of the series. This treatment involves wires that deliver low-level electrical current directly through your skin. It actually helps bring the pain down. But the ankle was so bad that, to be honest, I couldn’t hoop much that summer. What I did do, though, was take up tap dancing.

That’s right: tap dancing.

That was my worst sprain, but it certainly wasn’t my first. I realized at that point I needed to be proactive about strengthening my ankles. After researching the matter, it became apparent that tap dancing was going to be the best way to build up my ankle strength while simultaneously improving my foot speed and rhythm. So I hired an instructor and started going to the studio. I worked on it all of that summer and benefited for the rest of my career."