Motivation Quote by Jim Valvano

Valvano isn’t selling charity as a virtue; he’s pitching it as an urgent, almost athletic assignment: do something that changes the scoreboard. The line moves fast, like a coach talking over a timeout. “Try if you can” sounds modest, but it’s a subtle dare, a challenge that assumes you’re capable of showing up. Then he widens the lane: “whether it’s AIDS or the cancer foundation.” In the early 1990s, AIDS fundraising still carried stigma and political neglect, and pairing it with cancer is a deliberate refusal to rank suffering by comfort level. He’s insisting that compassion isn’t a boutique identity; it’s a practice.

The repetition of “might” does the real emotional work. It admits uncertainty, which makes the appeal feel honest rather than sanctimonious. Donation doesn’t guarantee a miracle, but it increases the odds for “someone else.” That phrasing matters, too. Valvano is speaking as a dying man who knows he will not be the beneficiary. The ask is explicitly future-facing, built on the idea that your money becomes time for strangers.

Then he snaps the whole thing into a single, bracing endpoint: “actually be cured.” Not “treated,” not “managed.” Cured. It’s aspirational, even slightly reckless, but that’s the point: he’s borrowing the motivational language of sports - belief, effort, stakes - and redirecting it toward medical research. The subtext is plain: we don’t get to control mortality, but we do get to control whether we leave the next person a better fight.