I tell the students, is work and study, study and work, hard as we can. Put another way: We must all be professors of the jungle.

And like so many teens, he started every sentence with “I.” I think this. I think that. I, I, I.

The cowards never started and the weak died along the way. That leaves us, ladies and gentlemen. Us.

What if there were a way, without being an athlete, to feel what athletes feel? To play all the time, instead of working? Or else to enjoy work so much that it becomes essentially the same thing.

Don’t go to sleep one night. What you most want will come to you then.

‘Hey, Buttface,’ and the entire management team turns around?”

Each of us found pleasure, whenever possible, in focusing on one small task. One task, we often said, clears the mind.

Reality is nonlinear, Zen says. No future, no past. All is now.

Not that any of us thought we wouldn’t fail; in fact we had every expectation that we would. But when we did fail, we had faith that we’d do it fast, learn from it, and be better for it.