Yet each of us ignores this call in our way, if not outright, then in the way that Jimmy Carter did—a man whose life was shaped by his early reading of the parable of the talents as much as it was by the intervention by Admiral Rickover, who asked him pointedly why he hadn’t always given his best. When we don’t do our best, when we hold something back, we are cheating ourselves. We are cheating our gifts. We are cheating the potential beneficiaries of us reaching our full potential.
