“To be the best, you have to constantly be challenging yourself, raising the bar, pushing the limits of what you can do. Don’t stand still, leap forward.”
“I am not looking to escape the pressure. I am embracing it. Pressure is what builds up in the chamber behind a bullet before it explodes out of the gun.”
“The kind of hope I’m talking about is the belief that something good will come. That everything you’re going through and everything you’ve gone through will be worth the struggles and frustrations. The kind of hope I’m talking about is a deep belief that the world can be changed, that the impossible is possible.”
“I want her to look at me. I want her to stare me in the eye. I want her to see that I have no fear. I want her to know she stands no chance. I want her to be scared. I want her to know she is going to lose.”
“No one is ever going to give you anything of value. You have to work for it, sweat for it, fight for it. But there is far greater value in accomplishments you earn than in accolades that are merely given to you. When you earn something, you never have to worry about justifying that you truly deserve it.”
“Once you give them the power to tell you you’re great, you’ve also given them the power to tell you you’re unworthy. Once you start caring about people’s opinions of you, you give up control.”
“Everyone wants to win. But to truly succeed - whether it is at a sport or at your job or in life - you have to be willing to do the hard work, overcome the challenges, and make the sacrifices it takes to be the best at what you do.”
“Most people focus on the wrong thing; They focus on the result, not the process. The process is the sacrifice; it’s all the hard parts - the sweat, the pain, the tears, the losses. You make the sacrifices anyway. You learn to enjoy them, or at least embrace them. In the end, it is the sacrifices that must fulfill you.”
“There have always been people who have written me off. They’re not going away. I use that to motivate me. I’m driven to show them just how wrong they are.”
“People want to project their own insecurities on others, but I refuse to allow them to put that on me. Just because you don’t think that you could be the best in the world doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t have the confidence to believe I can do anything.”
“You have to fight because you can’t count on anyone else fighting for you. And you have to fight for people who can’t fight for themselves. To get anything of real value, you have to fight for it.”