The Dream Dean

Another excerpt from “Discipline is Destiny: The Power of Self-Control” by Ryan Holiday:

A promising young officer named Jimmy Carter was applying for a spot in the Navy’s nuclear submarine program. There he sat, for more than two hours, across from Admiral Hyman Rickover, who not only created the world’s first nuclear Navy through sheer willpower in 1955, but he ran it with an intense focus for the next three decades, which included interviewing, in person, every single person who would touch his prized submarines. As they sat and talked, they covered a wide range of topics from current events to naval tactics, electronics, and physics. Carter has prepared for weeks for the interview and sweated through each question, as Rickover – never smiling – steadily ratcheted up the difficulty. Then finally, he lobbed what seemed like a softball: “How did you stand in your class in the Naval Academy?” “Sir, I stood fifty-ninth in a class of 820,” Carter said, swelling with pride. But having, seen, by then, generations of America’s best military talent, Rickover was not particularly impressed by rank. “But did you do your best?” He asked the young man.

Of course, Carter felt himself rushing to answer, as we all might if asked such a questions. But before he could, something inside stopped short. What about the times he had been tired? What about the classes when he’s been confident enough in his grades that he could coast? What about the questions he hadn’t asked or the times he’s been distracted? What about the professors he’s found boring and paid little attention to? What about the extra reading he could have done – on weapons systems, on history, on science, on trigonometry? What about the morning PT he’d shuffled through? “No sir,” he found himself confessing, “I didn’t always do my best.” And with this, Rickover, got up to leave, asking one final question before he departed: “Why not?”

Why didn’t you do your best? It was a question that would take many shapes, and challenge and inspire the young man in many ways for the rest of his life.

As in:

• • Why are you holding back?
  • Why are you half-assing this?
  • Why are you so afraid to try?
  • Why don’t you think this matters?
  • What could you be capable of if you really committed?

If you’re not giving your best, why are you doing it at all?

You might think from this exchange that Rickover was a ruthless taskmaster who refused to accept excuses for failure. This is partly correct. His exacting standards – which he expected of himself and anyone he hired – not only transformed the United States into a global power, but it also propelled Carter, eventually, into the presidency.

Still, in his single term, Carter’s successes – no foreign wars, a peace settlement between Israel and Egypt, negotiating and ratifying the Panama Canal Treaties, normalizing diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China – were also accompanied by struggles. One such area was energy policy, where, in a 1977 address to the nation, a forward-thinking Carter declared energy and climate change the “moral equivalent to war.” Although he knew his proposals were going to be unpopular among the American people, he said, “It was impossible for me to imagine the bloody legislative battles ahead.” He’s fight the war against Congress for his entire term and was mocked for putting solar panels on the White House. Despite his efforts and sincerity, Carter fell short.

Rickover, the ruthless taskmaster, nonetheless beamed with pride. “There is no question that the public will ultimately understand and he will be regarded as a far-seeing man who has attempted to protect the people of the United States,” he said of Carter’s energy efforts. “It took about 400 years for the Lord Jesus Christ to have his message accepted.” Up to that time, he would be considered a ‘failure.’ As long as a man is trying as hard as he can to do what he thinks to be right, he is a success, regardless of the outcome.

This is the wonderful thing about doing your best. It insulates you, ever so slightly, from outcomes as well as ego. It’s not that you don’t care about results. It’s that you have a kind of trump card. Your success doesn’t go to your head because you know you’re capable of more. Your failures don’t destroy you because you are sure there wasn’t anything more you could have done. You always control whether you give your best or not. No one can stop you from that. You don’t have to end up number one in your class. Or win everything, every time. In fact, not winning is not particularly important. What does matter is that you have everything, because anything less is to cheat the gift.

• • The gift of your potential.
  • The gift of the opportunity.
  • The gift of the craft you’ve been introduced to.
  • The gift of the responsibility entrusted to you.
  • The gift of the instruction and time with others.
  • The gift of life itself.

Ralph Ellison was a student as Tuskegee Institute when his piano teachers, Hazel Harrison, gave him the gift not just of her time and energy, but also a way of thinking about the obligation that every performer and talented person has. “You must always play your best,” she had told him, “even if it’s only in the waiting room at Chehaw Station, because in this country, there’ll always be a little man hidden behind the stove…[who know] the music and the tradition, and the standards of musicianship required for whatever you set out to perform.”

Chehaw Station was the train station outside the campus. The little man behind the stove? That became the artistic conscience that guided Ellison, much like Rickover’s standards hovered over Carter, just like the dictum of John Wooden guided his players from the day of his first lesson in the basics of putting on a pair of socks: “Your best is good enough.”

Not perfect. Your best.

Leave the rest to the scoreboard, to the judges, to the gods, to fate, to the critics.

Do your best.