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.
Ambition is to the mind what the cap is to the falcon; it blinds us first, and then compels us to tower by reason of our blindness.
God ever works with those who work with will.
I never use that word, retire.
Every failure is a blessing in disguise, providing it teaches some needed lesson one could not have learned without it. Most so-called Failures are only temporary defeats.
We don't need heroes so much as recognizing ourselves as heroes.
I remember as a kid watching one of the Olympic games, and I was cheering for a big track athlete. He was the favorite to win, and he lost. I realized in that moment the pain he felt was so much greater than the pain that those who never thought they were going to win would have felt had they lost.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.