I don't believe in luck, I believe in preparation.
Interpretation
Success comes from being well-prepared rather than relying on chance.
Bobby Knight emphasizes that luck is not a reliable factor in achieving success; instead, thorough preparation and hard work are what lead to favorable outcomes. This perspective underscores the idea that one should focus on what can be controlled—preparation and effort—rather than leaving success to the whims of luck.
In practice
During a motivational speech to students about achieving their goals.
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.
When good news about the market hits the front page of the New York Times, sell.
If you can't invent the future, the next best thing is to fund it.
It would have been great to have had 10 victories and been in the playoffs and have gone all the way and then said, 'Goodbye,' but it didn't work out that way.
Most entrepreneurial ideas will sound crazy, stupid and uneconomic, and then they’ll turn out to be right.
I was doing a campaign once for a manufacturer, and I couldn't think of an ideas, and I was kind of desperate about it. The night before I had to show something to my client I had a dream, an interesting dream. I woke up and for once in my life I wrote it down and went back to sleep Next morning I went to the office and had that dream out into a TV commercial which is still running thirty years after and which has made that particular product the leader in its field.
Great players never look in the mirror and think I'm a great basketball player. You ask yourself, Am I the best player I can be?
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