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Mike Krzyzewski
Collegiate Basketball Champion
In high school, in sport, I had a coach who told me I was much better than I thought I was, and would make me do more in a positive sense. He was the first person who taught me not to be afraid of failure. He'd tell me to shoot 25 times a game, and I'd say, "No, I can't do that, everyone will hate me." "You do it." And even though I didn't do that all the time, he kept pushing me to be better. If success or talent were on floors, maybe I saw myself on the fifth floor. He always saw me on the twentieth floor. As a result, I climbed more floors when I was with him. I've tried to use that in my way of teaching. He even helped me choose West Point to go to school, where I was afraid of that. He felt that that would give me many more floors in my building, and he was right.
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Mike Krzyzewski
Collegiate Basketball Champion
Imagination has a great deal to do with winning. In my case, and I try to tell kids -- I teach at summer camp -- to imagine yourself. But it's your imagination. Why would you lose in your imagination? Why would you not achieve really neat things in your imagination? Why would you let someone else do your imagination for you? So in all these games that I would fantasize, I always won, and I always played well. Therefore, as a player, as a coach, even though we might have lost in a season or not won a championship, it was like a self-fulfilling prophecy that I'm going to win some time. I've never felt myself a loser. I never let a defeat determine what I think of myself. I think that I win. I don't all the time, but if I play long enough, I'm going to be a winner. I believe wholeheartedly that that came about because of imagination when I was younger.
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Charles Kuralt
A Life On the Road
Charles Kuralt: I had a little insight into life that most kids growing up in small town North Carolina probably didn't have. My mother was a school teacher, and a good role model for me. But, my father was the real one. He was a social worker and, for years, head of the social services department in my home town. And so, through his eyes I saw the underside of society. I saw how many people were poor and how many kids my age went to school hungry in the morning, which I don't think most of my contemporaries in racially segregated schools in the South thought very much about at the time. I think that was an advantage for me. I knew a little bit more about real life than most kids did, I think. And then, the storytelling tradition that you bring from the South, I don't know where it arose, but it's still there. You can't go to the feed store or the country courthouse on a Saturday afternoon without running into storytellers. And, I had some favorites. I was charmed to sit and listen. And my father, who was a New Englander and a little more reticent, not a great storyteller himself, also was charmed. And so, he and I would stand around and listen to these old guys tell whoppers. And, I think that appreciation for stories probably helped me.
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Richard Leakey
Paleoanthropologist and Conservationist
I knew the fossils. I knew the background. I had a lot of energy, and I was fairly cheap, and so I would be sent off with a vehicle and a couple of men to explore the possibility of A or the possibility of B, and so I got into field work and prehistory that way. Fortunately, my first real venture into looking for fossils in a small group resulted in a very important discovery. That was in late '63 or early '64, where we discovered a lower jaw of an Australopithecus that had not been found before. It was in perfect condition. We found it on the first attempt, and so that got me very excited, and I began to realize that there were probably a lot more of these things, and that if you find these things, you get a position in the ladder which you can't get to unless you have either got an education or something else. So by finding important things, you immediately get into the game, which you'd been excluded from otherwise.
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Richard Leakey
Paleoanthropologist and Conservationist
Richard Leakey: Finding fossils, you've got to be looking in the right place, so an understanding of geology is very important. You've got to be able to locate areas where there might be fossils, because of the geological evidence or conditions under which fossils are formed, and conditions under which fossils might now be re-exposed through erosion. Then you've got to ascertain that there are fossils where you are looking, and then you have got to look mighty hard, and you can look and look and look and not find anything, go back exactly to the same place a year later, and there was something there all the time. It really is a question of persistence and doggedness, but you could look as doggedly as you like in the wrong place and never find it. So there is an element of subliminal knowledge that plays a major part that a lot of people obviously don't have. I had it because I was raised in it. It was second nature to me.
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