I don’t care what the task was, there was always a reckoning in terms of how you performed. My dad [had a] saying, “If you don’t have the time to do it right the first time, how you gonna find the time to do it over?” The last thing, which was probably most important, was, it was never about beating the other guy. It was about, “Did you do as well as you could do?”
There’s this thing called relief syndrome, where when we accomplish something of significance, society promotes the fact that you should be able to rest on your laurels. That’s something I never learned how to do growing up. I mean we won, like, twenty-six games in a row when I was in peewee, and it was never good enough. Then we lost one game in high school, then we won about thirty more games, and it was never good enough. We won a state championship. That was really never good enough. I finally asked my mom, “Why is it never good enough?” And she said, “Well, it’s not really about beating the other guy. It’s about, did you do as well as you’re capable of doing?” That’s one of the things that helped me deal with success, because, if we won a game, it wasn’t like, okay, that’s the end of it. It was just the beginning of a new horizon.
