Former pro basketball star Bill Bradley tells that at the age of fifteen he attended a summer basketball camp that was run by Easy Ed Macauley, a former college and pro star. "Just remember that if you’re not working at your game to the utmost of your ability," Macauley told his assembled campers, "there will be someone out there somewhere with equal ability who will be working to the utmost of his ability. And one day you’ll play each other, and he’ll have the advantage."
Bradley, who became a U.S. senator, saw in those words "a totality of truth." He took them to heart and made them the guiding principle of his life. Nearly thirty years later he recalled: "The important thing about the story is the type of young man I was, who would be so totally accepting of words like that and who, hearing them, immediately acted on them."