the muse.

Since Sunday, the stories about Kobe keep coming - and I’m so grateful and sad and just torn up about the whole thing. Jason Witten (tight end for the Dallas Cowboys) recounting what he learned from Kobe - which was apparently his mantra - was “you can’t cheat the muse”. Kobe was known for his hard work, dedication, discipline, unrelenting competitive spirt and insistence on excellence and it’s all captured in that “you can’t cheat the muse” saying.

You can cheat yourself, your coach, your boss, your partner, your ego, but you can’t cheat the muse.

What is the muse?

Well, I go to Pressfield for that - which may not be what Kobe was thinking but I like it for myself.

“The Muse,” as I imagine her, is the collective identity of the nine goddesses, sisters, daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (Memory), whose charge it is to inspire artists. Other names for this mysterious force might be the Unconscious, the Self, the Quantum Soup. Whatever it is, it represents the unseen dimension of Potentiality that is either within us or beyond us. It’s where ideas come from.

We can’t cheat the unseen dimension of potentially that is either within us or beyond us. We just can’t.

Shit, that’s good.