Motivation Quote by Stan Wawrinka

“I like to think that I can play better every day” is the kind of optimism that only sounds banal until you remember who’s saying it. Stan Wawrinka built a Hall-of-Very-Good career in the long shadow of Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic, then punctured that hierarchy with sudden, violent peaks: Grand Slam titles earned not by inevitability, but by becoming unrecognizably great at the exact right moments. The quote is less about confidence than about permission.

Wawrinka’s “I like to think” is doing quiet work. It softens the claim, leaving room for doubt, injury, bad days, aging legs - all the realities elite athletes usually bury under slogans. Yet it still asserts a choice: the daily decision to believe improvement is possible, even when evidence is mixed. That’s a veteran’s mentality, not a prodigy’s. It’s also a subtle reframing of success away from the scoreboard and toward process, a move that protects motivation in a sport designed to humiliate you weekly.

Context matters here. Tennis rewards repetition and punishes stagnation; it’s an individual sport where your failures are public and unshareable. Wawrinka’s career, marked by late blooming and brutal comebacks, makes “better every day” feel less like self-help and more like survival strategy. The subtext: you don’t need to be the chosen one. You just need to keep building, patiently, until lightning has somewhere to land.