David Robinson Quotes

One measure of your success will be the degree to which you build up others who work with you. While building up others, you will build up yourself.

I expect to push my teammates as much as I can, and I expect them to do the same with me.

Let's learn from our peers and then beat them at their own game.

A good objective of leadership is to help those who are doing poorly to do well and to help those who are doing well to do even better.

Back in Romania, always I was struggling to compete with Vladislav Rastorotsky, the great Russian coach of Lyudmila Turishcheva. He was a powerful coach, internationally. I took him like the major challenge of my life, and pretty soon I'm beating him and we are pushing each other so hard, so fierce. But out of the arena, we are friends.

If I write a book where all I've ever experienced is success, people won't take a positive lesson from it. In being candid, I have to own up to my own failures, both in my marriage and in my work environment.

It is only as we develop others that we permanently succeed.

It's failure, really, that you grow by, although nobody likes to experience it.

I think there are a number of things that you can do to encourage your kids' dreams, but I do believe in speaking by experience of having a lot of help along the way, stumbling in the past. We've all stumbled, and we certainly all deserve to get up and walk again.

For me, I'm always looking for opportunities to work with people who are better than me, who are more experienced than me, people from whom I can learn. And who could I learn more from than someone with an unprecedented movie star career that has spanned over thirty years whose name is Tom Cruise?

I'm fortunate now that I coach at Duke University and we've won a lot. I have some kids who haven't failed that much. But when they get to college, they're going to fail some time. That's a thing that I can help them the most with.

I've always been extremely lucky in playing with great people who knew much more than I did. That's how I got from there to here.

Losses have propelled me to even bigger places, so I understand the importance of losing. You can never get complacent because a loss is always around the corner. It's in any game that you're in - a business game or whatever - you can't get complacent.

One thing I've done is surround myself with people who are as good as me or better.

Leadership is not about you; it's about investing in the growth of others.

I've worked with some very good directors and some very bad ones. I learned a great deal from both. From the bad, untalented people, you learn what not to do. And when you work with very highly talented people, you want to emulate them.

I believe failure sometimes teaches you more than success.

I think my failures in Houston is what made me who I am. I think it's given me that drive, that drive to keep working, because you never know what can happen type deal.

Being at the top means never being satisfied with what you're comfortable with - comfortable means you've stopped pushing, and you're either going to get passed, or you already have been. But if you're constantly pushing yourself, then you're exposing yourself to falls and injuries.

If someone works with me, I try to take them to the next level.

When you are working with someone who is so aware of what they do, you become better, too.

Iron sharpens iron, and that's one man getting another guy ready to play.

I gotta go play with people who want to see me succeed, who want me to be great.

What if the Secret to Success is Failure?.

From success, you learn absolutely nothing. From failure and setbacks conclusions can be drawn. That goes for your private life as well as your career.