Never change a winning game;
always change a losing one.BILL TILDEN, legendary American tennis player
Never give a golfer an ultimatum unless you’re prepared to lose.ABIGAIL VAN BUREN, advice to wives of golfing husbands
Never relax for a second, no matter what the score.TONY WILDING, legendary New Zealand tennis player
Wilding, the Wimbledon champ from 1910 to 1913, added: “The body will usually respond if you have the willpower, pluck, and determination to spur yourself to fresh efforts.”
Never swing at a ball you’re fooled on or have trouble hitting.TED WILLIAMS, quoted in a 1954 issue of Sport magazine
In his “advice to young batters,” Williams also said: “Hit only strikes” and “After two strikes . . . shorten up on the bat and try to put the head of the bat on the ball.”
Never complain about the officiating. It does no good.
During the game I don’t want to be fighting two opponents.JOHN WOODEN
When he died at age ninety-nine in 2010, Wooden was history’s most successful college basketball coach. Wooden’s impressive career was described at the beginning of the chapter and it seems fitting to bring the chapter to a close with some of his other favorite neverisms:
Never lose your temper.
Never discourage ambition.
Never be out-fought or out-hustled.
Never mistake activity for achievement.
Never let your emotions overrule your head.
Never allow anyone else to define your success.
Never believe you’re better than anybody else,
but remember that you’re just as good as everybody else.
(his father’s favorite saying)
Don’t worry about being better than someone else,
but never cease trying to be the best that you can become.
twelve
Never Get Caught in Bed with a Live Man or a Dead Woman
Politics & Government
Shortly after Richard M. Nixon’s death on April 22, 1994, family members began going through the former president’s effects in his Park Ridge, New Jersey, home. When they opened the center drawer of the desk in his home office, they discovered a laminated piece of paper that began with these words:A President needs a global view, a sense of proportion and a keen sense of the possible. He needs to know how power operates and he must have the will to use it. If I could carve ten rules into the wall of the Oval Office for my successors in the dangerous years just ahead, they would be these.
What followed were ten rules that have come to be known as “Richard Nixon’s Ten Commandments of Statecraft.” Five were expressed neveristically:
Never be belligerent, but always be firm.
Never seek publicity that would destroy the ability to get results.
Never give up unilaterally what could be used as a bargaining chip.
Never let your adversary underestimate
what you would do in response to a challenge.
Never lose faith.
Faith without strength is futile, but strength without faith is sterile.
Nixon wasn’t the first U.S. president to be intrigued by the idea of compiling a list of ten guiding principles or ethical imperatives. As a student of history, he was certainly familiar with Thomas Jefferson’s efforts to do the very same thing. Jefferson worked on his project over the course of many years, tinkering with the items on his list as he got new ideas from his reading of ancient Greek thinkers, like Epictetus, or more contemporary European writers. He eventually pared his list down to ten, which he called his “Decalogue of Canons for Observation in Practical Life.” Here are the first three:
Never put off till tomorrow what you can do to-day.
Never trouble another for what you can do yourself.
Never spend your money before you have it.
Some of the items in the Decalogue were copied directly from other sources (like that first one, from Lord Chesterfield), while others appeared to be his own creation. Jefferson viewed the sayings as an important set of moral and ethical guidelines, and he recommended them to family members and friends as well.
While people from every walk of life have formulated rules of life, politicians have especially favored the approach. In 1867, Secretary of State William H. Seward arranged for the purchase of Alaska from Czar Alexander II of the Russian Empire. The acquisition, which added nearly 600,000 square miles to the territory of the United States, cost the U.S. Treasury $7.2 million (about 1.9 cents per acre). It is now considered one of history’s shrewdest real estate deals, but at the time many American newspaper editorials described Alaska as “a frozen wilderness” and decried the purchase as “Seward’s Folly.” Seward was unruffled by the intense criticism, though, and forged ahead resolutely until the deal was done. After his retirement, he was asked by a friend why he did not respond to the vicious attacks. His reply was immortalized in a 1910 New York Times article titled, “Mottoes That Have Guided Prominent Men to Success”:
Early in my life I made it a rule
never to reply to personal criticisms,
never to defend myself from political attacks.
Seward said he was inspired by a quotation originally authored by the British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli: “Never complain, never explain.” About Disraeli’s saying, which we discussed in the classic neverisms chapter, he said:
That rule I have followed faithfully.
I never complain and I never explain,
and I feel that my adherence to this rule has made me what I am.
Many U.S. presidents have cited neveristic rules of life and conduct. After he retired, Martin van Buren was asked what rule he had found most important in all his years of political life. He almost instantly replied:
It is a very simple rule. You can put it in three words:
“Never write letters.”
When politicians put things in writing, he explained, the documents have a way of coming back to haunt them. To guard against the possibility of leaving potentially damaging evidence behind, Van Buren conducted almost all of his political affairs in private conversations. He added: “I would rather travel a hundred miles by stagecoach or packetboat than write one political letter.”
While not putting things in writing has been preferred by many politicians, there are even more subtle methods of conducting political affairs. Some classic ones were articulated by a Boston politician named Martin M. Lomasney, who said:
Never write if you can speak;