Mike Tyson is an American former professional boxer who competed from 1985 to 2005. He reigned as the undisputed world heavyweight champion and holds the record as the youngest boxer to win a heavyweight title at 20 years, four months and 22 days old. Tyson won his first 19 professional fights by knockout or stoppage, 12 of them in the first round. He won the WBC title in 1986 after stopping Trevor Berbick in the second round and added the WBA and IBF titles after defeating James Smith and Tony Tucker in 1987. This made Tyson the first heavyweight boxer to simultaneously hold the WBA, WBC and IBF titles, and the only heavyweight to successively unify them. May his quotes inspire you to take action so that you may live your dreams.
1. “Whatever you want, especially when you’re striving to be the best in the world at something, there’ll always be disappointments, and you can’t be emotionally tied to them, because they’ll break your spirit.” Mike Tyson
2. “Everyone has a plan ’till they get punched in the mouth.” Mike Tyson
3. “The boxing’s the easy part. When you get into the ring to fight, that’s the vacation. But when you get in the gym, you have to do things over and over till you’re sore and deep in your mind you say, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore,’ I push that out of my mind.” Mike Tyson
4. “Everyone says I wish I was in your shoes, the hundreds of people that wish they were in my shoes don’t know the tenth of it. If they were in my shoes they would cry like a baby.” Mike Tyson
5. “As long as we persevere and endure, we can get anything we want.” Mike Tyson
6. “You can change your mind or your life whenever you want to.” Mike Tyson
7. “I feel like sometimes that I was not meant for this society.” Mike Tyson
8. “We wanna believe that we’re different than the average guy that’s working 9-to-5, that our thoughts are different than his. Our inspirations and desires are different than his, that’s why we succeed and he didn’t cos we wanna believe we’re different, but he just didn’t get the break that we had or he wasted it on something else.” Mike Tyson
9. “It’s good to know how to read, but it’s dangerous to know how to read and not how to interpret what you’re reading.” Mike Tyson
10. “Fear is the greatest obstacle to learning. But fear is your best friend. Fear is like fire. If you learn to control it, you let it work for you. If you don’t learn to control it, it’ll destroy you and everything around you.” Mike Tyson
11. “We live in a society where we basically live and strive on what people think about us. We’re more visual people so what we see is basically what we believe which is not necessarily true.” Mike Tyson
12. “Confidence breeds success and success breeds confidence. Confidence applied properly surpasses genius.” Mike Tyson
13. “I’m a Muslim.” Mike Tyson
14. “When you have something in life that you want to accomplish greatly you have to be willing to give up your happiness. I’ve lost all my sensitivity as far as being embarrassed, being shy, you just have to lose that.” Mike Tyson
15. “I’m a dreamer. I have to dream and reach for the stars, and if I miss a star then I grab a handful of clouds.” Mike Tyson
16. “Anyone with a grain of sense would know that if I punched my wife I would rip her head off. It’s all lies. I have never laid a finger on her.” Mike Tyson
17. “Some people try to get you out of slavery for you to be their slave.” Mike Tyson
18. “A man who was friendly with everyone was an enemy to himself.” Mike Tyson
19. “Our money is bait money, and bait money is not to be used.” Mike Tyson
20. “Everyone that you fight is not your enemy and everyone who helps you is not your friend.” Mike Tyson
21. “If they don’t have that extreme addict personality, you can never understand how a guy can blow 300 or 400 million dollars. If I have to live at the top of the world, I also have to live at the bottom of the ocean. I don’t know how to live in the middle of life.” Mike Tyson
22. “Some students would make fun of me, but nobody messed with me.” Mike Tyson
23. “Sometimes I’d give my mother a hundred bucks and she wouldn’t pay me back. She didn’t respect me like that. I’d say, “You owe me some money, Ma. And she’d just say, You owe me your life, boy. I’m not paying you back.” Mike Tyson
24. “Discipline is doing what you hate to do but doing it like you love it.” Mike Tyson
25. “Burning cocaine is the worst smell in the world. It smells like burning plastic and rat poison combined.” Mike Tyson
26. “Everybody thinks this is a tough man’s sport. This is not a tough man’s sport. This is a thinking man’s sport. A tough man is gonna get hurt real bad in this sport.” Mike Tyson
27. “The ability to apply the discipline, the ability to do what needs to be done no matter how he feels inside, in my opinion, is the definition of a true professional.” Mike Tyson
28. “People are going to say what they say. I know sometimes I say things; I offend people.” Mike Tyson
29. “Another thing that freaks me out is time. Time is like a book. You have a beginning, a middle and an end. It’s just a cycle.” Mike Tyson
30. “Greatness is not guarding yourself from the people; greatness is being accepted by the people.” Mike Tyson
31. “Unfortunately, sometimes you can’t have fun accomplishing your goals. Sometimes people don’t have the determination, the will, the steadfastness, the tenacity, they give in under the slightest struggle.” Mike Tyson
32. “That equals to being a fool, having fame and no fortune. A lot of guys out there have fame doing this and doing that, but they are broke.” Mike Tyson
33. “I know how hard it is to be a woman, especially a black woman.” Mike Tyson
34. “You can’t be disturbed by anything. There’s no emotion involved. You can’t feel sorrow, you can’t feel pity, there’s nothing you feel. The job has to be done.” Mike Tyson
35. “It’s good to be successful and have financial status but if you’re only gonna live for the money, you’re only gonna reach a certain status and I’m in there for greatness and peace of mind.” Mike Tyson
Check out the cool video Evan Carmichael made on Mike Tyson’s Top 10 Rules For Success:
My name is Asad Meah, I am the CEO & Founder of AwakenTheGreatnessWithin. I am a dreamchaser who has gained a wealth of knowledge in entrepreneurship and personal development over the past five years through self-education. My mission is to inspire millions of people to become entrepreneurs by awakening their minds to their greatness that resides within them.
