People don't understand how hard it is to get recognized, how hard it is to get people to read your books. How hard it is to get people to even to understand what they're reading when they're talking to you about their books.
A lot of people get to the NBA, but how many people stay in the NBA?
People assume that, as an NBA athlete, you can get access to any kind of sneaker you want, when in reality, it's hard to get the exclusive releases or shoes from the past and feel confident they're authentic.
Do you want to understand how to swim, or do you want to jump in and start swimming? Only people who are afraid of the water want to understand it. Other people jump in and get wet.
It's a luxury to play. I get to play basketball for a living. I'm a lucky guy and I'm thankful for everything I have and what I get to do. I realize how many people would give their left foot to just play one game in the NBA. This is the NBA!
That's what people don't understand, that in the NBA these are the best 450 players in the world, in the game of basketball, are in the NBA.
It's not hard to motivate myself because once you get a taste for winning races, you simply don't want to do anything else. You get a buzz from it. You want it every day. Only someone who has experienced winning can understand how good it feels.
If you're struggling, it's easy to feel powerless until you take control of it and assert what you want. I can understand that feeling. I can understand how it feels to be alone, to not want to get help from people and to not trust people who are actually wanting the best for you. I feel like that's true for a lot of people, actually.
People want to see how we get teams to come together so quickly. They want to see how we get young guys to play so hard and so unselfish. I'm fine with that. I have no problem sharing that.
Even before I made my high school team, I'd say I want to be a NBA player, and people laughed at me with, 'Get out of here, you ain't going to be a NBA player. You don't even play basketball.'
A lot of people don't understand that playing in the NBA, the toughest thing is to win an NBA championship. I was in the NBA 15 years. I'd been in the playoffs. I'd been in the Finals. But it took me 15 years to finally win one.
I understand how hard it is to talk to people about MS. You don't want pity or random advice.
Obviously, in the NBA, there's a lot of different decisions that people make. The whole thing in the NBA is that people sometimes have an opportunity to go where they want.
I think Memento movie was hard because people didn't get it, they just didn't understand it. Not from the stage when we read the script and liked it. It's sort of a famous story now how we finished the movie and showed it to distributors and nobody wanted it. So it wasn't just they didn't get the script, they really didn't even understand the movie when it was done. But I think that was a particularly hard one. I don't think it was harder because we were girls, but I do think obviously there are particular challenges to working in a male-dominated industry.
Knowing how hard it is to collect a fact, you understand why most people want to have some fun analyzing it.
When I came to North America, it was hard. It was hard to understand, hard to get someone to understand me. I only knew Russian. I studied French in school, but it didn't help. I forgot most of that.