Lou Williams says he had NBA talent but not NBA discipline when he entered the draft “That was just blind confidence and blind arrogance at that time. That's why I got picked 45, because I wasn't in shape. I wasn't ready. I didn't take the workouts serious.” “I was just going on being naive to think, hey, look, if these guys can do it and I'm in the conversation of guys going, I want to be one of them, too. Watching that draft and my name not get called the first 30 picks, that was the first time I thought about, ‘Damn, I done made a mistake.’” “The talent was there. The discipline wasn't there. The discipline wasn't there to do the things that they needed me to do at the college level.” “The work that it takes, the discipline that it takes, some of the sacrifices, I didn't have none of that in my system. So I figured, look, I'm going to look at this like a job. If this is a job and this is a career, if I get drafted anywhere, if I get a foot in the door, it becomes an internship to me.” “If I'm not going to be able to play year one, year two, this is an internship.”

Michael Strahan says you can’t complain about something you’ve always wanted and asked for “I’m not very good with idle time. That is a problem for me. I have to fill time. I find that a lot of people watching this probably will be in sports, and obviously I think we have a lot of people in business.” “I don’t want this to be a podcast that’s strictly, ‘Oh, you’re going to talk about football.’ I love so many different things, but I do love football, and I do love the aspect of teamwork. I love the aspect of hard work.” “I love the aspect of you have to have this vision of where you want to go, because it’s so hard to get there that if you don’t see where you want to go, you’ll never make it. You’re going to quit because the journey’s too freaking hard.” “And that’s what this business is. That’s what sports was for me. And I just hope that people watch this and understand from the guests that we bring on and from our stories that everything isn’t a given. Everything isn’t easy. And once you want something, you make your mind up and you get it.” “One thing I tell myself… You cannot complain about something that you always wanted once you get it. Because it may not be exactly what you thought it was going to be when you’re sitting on the sidelines watching somebody else do it.” “So when you get it, you asked for it, you better suck it up and deal with it. And if you don’t like it, then figure out something else to pivot to that you might like. But you can’t complain about something that you’ve always wanted and asked for.”

Joe Mazulla says he got rejected for the Utah Jazz head coaching job because he tried too hard to win the interview, and says he’ll never wear a suit again on an interview “The first thing I learned? I’m never wearing a suit again. I wore one there, and I felt too uncomfortable. I was like, I’m never doing this again.” “What I learned was, throughout that interview process, I didn’t take full ownership of my coaching identity. I kind of went in hesitant.” “Instead of 100% being myself, wanting to win the interview. I didn’t do a good enough job owning myself. Which I think is very important.” “There’s having an identity. There’s knowing yourself. But then there’s conviction of, like, this is what I believe in. This is what my identity and philosophy is. And you’re convicted to that. I didn’t bring that. And that’s what I took out of that.”

Jalen Brunson says he mentally moved on from winning the NBA championship while New York was still celebrating “No one tells you… Everyone talks about the emotion of winning it right when it happens. Literally as the buzzer goes off, the rest of the evening, the celebrations in the locker room, everything.” “But no one tells you how long people could really celebrate for. The entire city, I feel like, has been celebrating since that day. Another thing people don’t tell you is that you have to find your own way to flip the switch and figure out what’s next. No one told you the time and day when to turn the switch and start focusing on the next one.” “I’ve been there for a while. When I had surgery is when it clicked for me. It clicked for me that it was time to move on. When you are still trying to accomplish more, the quicker you can move on from an accomplishment, something you worked so hard for, is the quicker you can continue to get better and not be satisfied.” “I’ve wanted to be a champion for a long time. But I didn’t want to let it define me and who I was. This is everything I worked for, but I feel like I’m still working on a lot.”

Greg Oden reveals exactly when he realized he wouldn't become the player everyone expected him to be, and how he processed that “I would say after China. That was two years, or a year and a half, after I played for the Heat. I was very hopeful to have me a good season and then get another opportunity to get on a team. And it just didn't happen like that.” “After our second preseason game, I broke my thumb, and I was out for a month and a half. It was just like, again. That's when I started thinking about retirement. Figuring out what was going to be next.” “Is it my body breaking down? Is it my opportunity? Is it really my mental? Do I want to get up every day and put myself through this?” “And that struggle back and forth to be looked at as not that guy that I definitely thought I was, or that I was told to be since I was twelve years old… That's a lot. That weighs a lot on you, man.”