Motivation Quote by Steve Nash

There is a quiet defiance in Nash's phrasing that feels more Canadian than chest-thumping: not the myth of the born prodigy, but the stubborn insistence of someone who kept getting told his ceiling was low. The line lands because it acknowledges doubt without granting it authority. "People have always doubted" is deliberately vague; he doesn't bother naming the scouts, the coaches, the league gatekeepers. They blur into a single, persistent noise. That choice keeps the focus on the only contest that matters to him: the internal one.

"I thought I was, and I thought I could be" is the real tell. It's not "I knew". It's belief as a daily practice, confidence as a verb. Nash isn't selling invincibility; he's describing self-trust as a working hypothesis he refused to abandon. That humility makes the conviction credible, especially in a sport culture obsessed with physical templates. Nash, famously undersized and unflashy by NBA archetype standards, turned "not built for this" into a career of angle, timing, and mind games. His greatness wasn't a rebuttal in a press conference; it was an argument made with pace, spacing, and decision-making.

"What other people thought was really always irrelevant" is less a claim of emotional impermeability than a boundary-setting tactic. It's a way to protect process from opinion, to keep development from being held hostage by external verdicts. In the era of nonstop sports talk and now social media scrutiny, Nash's stance reads like an early manual for mental hygiene: you can hear the doubt, but you don't have to live inside it.