The will to succeed is important, but what's more important is the will to prepare.
Interpretation
Success requires preparation and effort before achieving it.
Bobby Knight emphasizes that while the desire to succeed is a crucial factor in achieving one's goals, the true foundation of success lies in the preparation and work that precedes it. It's not enough to simply want to succeed; one must be willing to invest time and energy into preparing for the challenges ahead.
In practice
This quote can inspire students before exams to prioritize their study time over simply wishing for good grades.
My dad was a very quiet person, and unbelievably tough. But my grandmother gave me my first look at negative thinking to bring about positive results. When I was just a little guy, anytime I came to my grandmother and said I wish for this or that, Grandma would say, 'If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.'
Your biggest opponent isn't the other guy. It's human nature.
People want national championship banners. People want to talk about Indiana being competitive. How do we get there? We don't get there with milk and cookies.
When we're playing a good scoring center, we tell our team that it is not our defensive man's job to stop the center. It's the responsibility of our perimeter people to stop the ball from going inside.
Failure, to me, is not having the desire to try. Having the desire to try is in it own way success.
I'm not sure that an athlete is prepared to be a role model. He has a lot of attention paid to him that he shouldn't have, and then the athletes tend to think of themselves as better than they are.
Regardless of what you do put in, every game boils down to doing the things you do best and doing them over and over again.
You have to come up in the world before it's worthwhile for those worth less to put you down.
By striving to do the impossible, man has always achieved what is possible.
Sorry, but retirement offends me. You donβt just stop fighting in the middle of a war because your legs hurt. So why do you get to stop working in the middle of your life just because your prostate hurts? Thatβs desertion.
With your desire defined, quietly go within and shut the door behind you. Lose yourself in your desire; feel yourself to be one with it; remain in this fixation until you have absorbed the life and name by claiming and feeling yourself to be and to have that which you desired. When you emerge from the hour of prayer you must do so conscious of being and possessing that which you heretofore desired.
What you persist in doing gets easier. The task hasn't changed, but your ability to do it has increased.
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