“After that, I thought about basketball and why I ain’t make it in basketball,” Cole admitted.
He added that he loved to play, but by the time he was around 22, he realized that he didn’t make it because he didn’t put in the work to improve his on-the-court skills.
Cole said in the video he didn’t want to look back 20 years down the road and think “the reason you didn’t make it in music was because you didn’t put in the work.”
Later in the video, Cole says, he realized that being better in music was like getting better in a sport.
“When I really, really fell in love with rap, it was a matter of like sport. I started realizing the parallels between rapping for me and basketball,” Cole said. “I gotta operate at a high skill level and the only way you’re going to operate at a high skill level is putting in the hours.”