Some of the most touching and most touché Kobe quotes

This weekend was a time for reflection and looking inside myself. Mostly due to the .Cocoon programme that I took part in. But of course, the most defining event of the weekend was on Sunday evening when the news of Kobe Bryant’s death came.

He was not only a great man in basketball – a sport that I followed a lot when he started his career as a first guy coming to the NBA before even going to university. Despite all the doubters, he became one of the all-time great in the whole sport-scene not only in his own domain.

So many times many people draw parallels between sports and business and life in general. Teams in sports are compared to teams in business and effort in the trainings and competitions is compared to effort in life. From time to time these parallels feel just so right. This Sunday I went through some of the best quotes by Kobe Bryant and listed my favourites which seem to be true in life as well as in sports. So here they are.

“Everything negative – pressure, challenges – is all an opportunity for me to rise.”

“I can’t relate to lazy people. We don’t speak the same language. I don’t understand you. I don’t want to understand you.”

“If you’re afraid to fail, then you’re probably going to fail.”

“Pain doesn’t tell you when you ought to stop. Pain is the little voice in your head that tries to hold you back because it knows if you continue you will change.”

“We all have self-doubt. You don’t deny it, but you also don’t capitulate to it. You embrace it.”

“It’s the one thing you can control. You are responsible for how people remember you—or don’t. So don’t take it lightly.”

“My brain . . . it cannot process failure. It will not process failure. Because if I sit there and have to face myself and tell myself, ‘You’re a failure’ . . . I think that’s almost worse than death.”