Los Angeles Lakers legend Shaquille O’Neal dominated the basketball court during his 19-year career in the NBA. While the former star attained massive success in this area, the same couldn’t be said for some other aspects of his life. A recent message shared by Shaq on social media acted as an inspiration for everyone, including the 4x NBA champion, who once learned the meaning of failure the hard way.

‘greatblackfathers’ is an Instagram handle, with over 154000 followers, that focuses on posting ‘Edutainment’ stories featuring people of the African-American community. From talking about real-life stories to inspirational messages, the page has it all.

Shaquille O’Neal shares an inspiring quote on his Instagram story

The handle recently uploaded a post with the following quote on it: “A man is great not because he hasn’t failed, a man is great because failure hasn’t stopped him.” Shaq took to Instagram to share the post on his story. Acting as a source of motivation for himself and his 31.1 million followers, the quote possibly lead the 15x NBA All-Star to reminisce about how his failures helped to mold him as a man.

The same would have brought him back to his initial failure as an investor. Almost a year ago, the NBA icon sat down for an interview with Grant Cardone on his ‘Power Players’ show. During the same, a topic was raised about how Shaq’s greediness got the better of him. It all started when Shaq obliged to spend a few moments with some kids while he was staying at a hotel.

Afterward, their father expressed his gratitude by telling Shaq about “this thing” that he was working on. That thing turned out to be Google. “It’s going to be big, I want to give you some shares,” Shaq recalled the conversation. After taking the tip into consideration, Shaq invested and, within a span of 19 years, the investment paid off in huge numbers.

Even though Shaq gained a significant amount of wealth from this investment, it also led to him developing a sense of greed afterward. “I got greedy and so I started thinking I was an investor. An investment master,” Shaq said during the interview. “Because I got such a big hit with Google, I was only on the ‘Get Rich Quick’ schemes.”

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The schemes, some of which involved Shaq’s own line of products, did not succeed. It lead to the former player losing a considerable amount of money. After meeting Jeff Bezos and making an initial investment in Amazon, Shaq changed his perception and strategy. He decided to hold his investments on a long-term basis and not rush into making some quick bucks.

Shaq’s story serves as a reminder that our failures don’t define who we are. What we learn from those failures and mold ourselves accordingly is what defines us as a human.

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