You go from high school, to the NBA, and you're thrown in the fire.

Always look at what your goal is. Understand that there are going to be days when you feel like crap. There are going to be days where you feel like "I don't want to do this" but you've got to understand what you're doing it for.

People say you don't need a father to be successful. I take offense to that.

I know you can't please everybody; you can't make everybody happy, but just getting that perception that I don't care about basketball and what it brings is a lie.

I do a lot of exercises where I'm so tired that I'm not supposed to do the last rep. What that does is it teaches me that no matter how far I am, how hard I've fallen, I'm never out of the fight. I just take that with me every time I'm in the weight room.

I would never, ever desert my child. A lot of my friends didn't have fathers growing up, and they were very upset that their fathers weren't around. I was lucky to have mine around.

But at the end of the day, every star, every person that been iconic, has gone through a time in their lives where it was just bad. Everybody. It just made them better.