Only mediocre people are always at their best. …. Bill Russell, the legendary center for the Boston Celtics basketball team, used to keep his own personal scorecard. He graded himself after every game on a scale from one to one hundred. In his career he never achieved more than sixty-five. Now, given the way most of us are taught to think about goals, we would regard Russell as an abject failure. The poor soul played in over twelve hundred basketball games and never achieved his standard! Yet it was the striving for his standard that made him arguably the best basketball player ever.