A once dear friend hand-wrote Rudyard Kipling’s If and mailed it to me while I was in bootcamp.

A once dear friend hand-wrote Rudyard Kipling’s If and mailed it to me while I was in bootcamp.

I read it every morning and every night. The recruit laminated copy I carried everywhere is still somewhere upstate in New York, but the lessons remain.

The poem isn't about knowledge per se; it’s about intelligence in the truest sense: judgment under pressure, discipline without ego, humility in success, and steadiness in failure.

Facts can be learned. Character has to be forged. I hope those words have slowly permeated the way I think, choose, and live.