Luol Deng Quotes

Honestly, I felt pressure more when I was a lot younger.

Nobody likes to fail but failure is an essential part of life and of learning. If your uniform isn't dirty, you haven't been in the game.

High school isn't necessarily the best time of your life.

I made stupid decisions as a kid, or as a young adult, but I'm trying to be now, I'm trying to take this lemon and make lemonade.

I went on to Cincinnati. I had got a taste of the big cities and them bright lights. I stayed there until I was about 18 or 19 and then I went on to Detroit.

I came to London when I was 16 and lived with my older sister.

The biggest lessons I learned were probably the times where I had the biggest setbacks and the biggest challenges - when I had the biggest jumps forward and lessons learned.

High school is something that we have to deal with. It's not a glorified fluffy, fun, prince-and-princess kind of time.

I think, all my life, I've grown up and had high expectations, but that becomes so stressful.

I don't worry about the thought of the game going to penalties - it doesn't matter!

I would be up until 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning on nights I was facing a wall. Because when I walked into WWE, I was told I was going to be fired ten times because I'm the smallest guy around.

So it has come, the day of testing. Without warning, without fanfare, it is here, and he is in the middle of it. In his chest his heart hammers so hard that it too, in its dumb way, must know. How will they stand up to the testing, he and his heart?

I feel like the life I live is extraordinary in a lot of ways but that it also comes with a lot of responsibilities. I've had to grow up pretty fast and deal with situations most 22-year-olds aren't really put into. There are days and weeks and months when you just don't stop.

It helps to have someone in the same boat as you... There's a lot of pressure, so it helps to have someone who's also young and famous and has a lot of pressure to succeed.

I'm a producer on my show, which is great, but it's also kind of a mixed blessing because there's so much responsibility. Everything is a decision. You have to worry about the money, you have to worry about daylight, who we're going to cast and if this location doesn't work out, what are we going to do?

We spend our whole lives recovering from high school.

Everything always gets crazy at the end. You just have to keep going, regardless of how awful it gets. So that's what I do.

The worst pressure is the pressure I put on myself.

Mistakes wreck your life. But they make what you have. It's kind of all one. You know what Hester told me when we were working the sheep one time? She said it's no good to complain about your flock, because it's the put-together of all your past choices.

If you are not careful, you will drown in your expectations.

It's a culture shock to go from obscurity to notoriety in a flash. Its more to it than talent and money; its pressure, stress, enemies, critics; you have to develop relationships and a team. There are all of these things that go along with taking a leap and following your dreams.

I don't like stress because stress stresses me out.

It's pretty popular today to say that everybody should learn to fail and that failure's a good thing. Intellectually, it's an obvious thing. But in fact, it gets conflated with another meaning of failure, so when we grow up as kids, failing in school was a really bad thing.

As far as change, anyone from the age of 13 to 19, you become a whole new person because you grow up. There was so much that I didn't know or that I thought I knew because I was just a 13-year-old at the time who thought I knew everything. But I realized very quickly that, no, there's so much about everything that I don't. So what I've at least tried to do is accept that I don't know everything. Life is so much more fun that way. And it's easier. I've just been trying to learn, rather than to pretend that I'm perfect.

I was shocked when they told me congratulations, you won, that's the good news. Then the bad news is that you have six battles next week. That was a bit of a shocker. I was exhausted. And I had Chopped shooting that same week. I didn't have a sous chef lined up; I thought that was bad karma to try to think ahead. So I scrambled. I scrambled the jets, took off and we bombed our target. I think it's gone well.