One Wardell Steph Curry II was technically at USF to talk about history.

On Aug. 30, he returned to USF’s Silk Speaker Series for a screening and panel on The Baddest Speechwriter of All, the documentary he co-directed with Ben Proudfoot about Clarence B. Jones, MLK’s longtime speechwriter and adviser. The film won the Short Film Grand Jury Prize at Sundance this year.

The panel covered storytelling, civil rights and social justice. But the moment that’s stayed with me was smaller. Someone asked Curry, essentially, what advice he’d give about becoming successful. He said:

Not to be too good at giving advice, the idea of, ‘If you want to be successful,’ your life needs to look different than the person to the left or to right of you. And figuring out what that is for you is a big deal.
For me, one of the life principles, though, is I try to genuinely have a sense of gratitude and joy every single day. There’s something — no matter what’s going on in your life — you can always find something that you’re grateful for, something that you’ve been blessed with, and that’ll keep you going as the highs and lows in life come at you.
So find a sense of gratitude and find an element of joy in everything that you do and that’ll carry you through life’s toughest and greatest moments, for sure.

The room applauded when he finished.

I paired that clip with something Steph said about a week and a half later, at Li-Ning’s headquarters in China, while he was being measured for sports apparel on some genuinely high-tech devices. Talking about the work Li-Ning’s people had put into this new chapter of Curry Brand, he said it brought him to tears of joy.

Different country, different setting, same idea. Saying something like that once is easy. Saying it again, in a completely different context, starts to look less like a talking point and more like something he actually practices.

I’ll get further into that Li-Ning trip soon — Steph did a longer Q&A recently about what this new relationship means to him, and there’s more worth unpacking there.

For now, I want to sit with the USF version a little longer. There’s something nice about a room full of college students applauding a guy for saying, essentially, find something to be grateful for every day. It’s a simple idea, and it’s one I try to carry into how we do the watch parties of the Warriors every season over on YouTube — not instead of digging into the roster or the cap sheet, we’ll still do plenty of that here, but alongside it.

There’s a version of this era, right now, with Steph still out there, that we’re going to miss one day. Might as well enjoy it while it’s here.

🫶💙💛

LetsGoWarriors.com

Steph Curry on Gratitude and Joy — and…