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.'
Offense is not equal opportunity
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote emphasizes that not everyone gets the same chances or opportunities when it comes to offense, particularly in sports or competition.
Bobby Knight's quote, 'Offense is not equal opportunity', suggests that success in offense—whether in sports, business, or life—is not distributed evenly among participants. Some individuals may possess more skill, strategy, or resources than others, leading to unequal opportunities for scoring or succeeding. This highlights the necessity of recognizing the varied circumstances and advantages that influence outcomes in competitive environments.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
A coach could use this quote to explain to players why some teams perform better offensively than others.
More from Bobby Knight
All quotes →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.
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I got a chance to listen to and watch Thelonious Monk and his quartet play two shows a night, for six weeks. It was a great education. There was my university, man.
A good part of 'The Information' is about the transition from an oral to a literary culture. Books effected such a great transformation in the way we think about the world, our history, our logic, mathematics, you name it. I think we would be greatly diminished as a people and as a culture if the book became obsolete.