#### Building Self-Confidence
It was the final hockey game of a lousy season. We had won the first three games in my senior year at Salem High School, beating Danvers, Revere, and Marblehead, but had then lost the next half dozen games, five of them by a single goal. So we badly wanted to win this last one at the Lynn Arena against our archrival Beverly High. As co-captain of the team, the Salem Witches, I had scored a couple of goals, and we were feeling pretty good about our chances.
hocky 曲棍球 lousy 糟糕的，极坏的 archrival 主要竞争对手
It was a good game, pushed into overtime at 2–2.
比赛达到了加时赛
But very quickly, the other team scored and we lost again, for the seventh time in a row. In a fit of frustration, I flung my hockey stick across the ice of the arena, skated after it, and headed back to the locker room. The team was already there, taking off their skates and uniforms. All of a sudden, the door opened and my Irish mother strode in.
In a fit of frustration 在沮丧之中 ，fling flung 生气地扔，arena 圆形的舞台，strode stride 大步地踱入
The place fell silent. Every eye was glued on this middle-aged woman in a floral-patterned dress as she walked across the floor, past the wooden benches where some of the guys were already changing. She went right for me, grabbing the top of my uniform.
glue 粘 在这里就是大家目不转睛地盯着，floral-patterned dress 花式连衣裙
“You punk!” she shouted in my face. “If you don’t know how to lose, you’ll never know how to win. If you don’t know this, you shouldn’t be playing.”
you punk 你这个笨蛋/混蛋
I was mortified—in front of my friends—but what she said never left me. The passion, the energy, the disappointment, and the love she demonstrated by pushing her way into that locker room was my mom. She was the most influential person in my life. Grace Welch taught me the value of competition, just as she taught me the pleasure of winning and the need to take defeat in stride.
mortified 屈辱的，羞愧的 take defeat in stride 从容面对失败
The passion, the energy, the disappointment, and the love she demonstrated by pushing her way into that locker room was my mom. 那就是我的母亲，她以她的方式表达了那种激情，能量，失望和爱
If I have any leadership style, a way of getting the best out of people, I owe it to her. Tough and aggressive, warm and generous, she was a great judge of character. She always had opinions of the people she met. She could “smell a phony a mile away.”
get the best out of people 从人群中脱颖而出 she was a great judge of character 她很擅长判断人性 她对她遇到的总有自己的见解，她总能锈出人性的虚伪
She was extremely compassionate and generous to friends. If a relative or neighbor visited the house and complimented her on the water glasses in the breakfront, she wouldn’t hesitate to give them away.
compassionate 富有同情心的 compliment 称赞 would not hesitate to 毫不犹豫地 breakfront 橱柜
On the other hand, if you crossed her, watch out. She could hold a grudge against anyone who betrayed her trust. I could just as easily be describing myself.
grudge n.积怨;怨恨;嫌隙 v.勉强做;不情愿地给;吝惜;认为…不应得到 watch out 小心点
And many of my basic management beliefs—things like competing hard to win, facing reality, motivating people by alternately hugging and kicking them, setting stretch goals, and relentlessly following up on people to make sure things get done—can be traced to her as well. The insights she drilled into me never faded. She always insisted on facing the facts of a situation. One of her favorite expressions was “Don’t kid yourself. That’s the way it is.”
stretch goal 较长远的目标 relentlessly 不遗余力的 无情的 can be traced to 可以追溯到 归因于 drill 滴灌 drill the insights into me 那种远见滴灌给了我
“If you don’t study,” she often warned, “you’ll be nothing. Absolutely nothing. There are no shortcuts. Don’t kid yourself!”
不要自欺欺人
Those are blunt, unyielding admonitions that ring in my head every day. Whenever I try to delude myself that a deal or business problem will miraculously improve, her words set me straight.
blunt 愚钝的 admonition 警告 应该是看着很简单，不变的警告萦绕在我的脑海
delude 哄骗 miraculously 非凡的神奇的出乎意料的 her words set me straight. 她的话使我明白了 拉回了现实
From my earliest years in school, she taught me the need to excel. She knew how to be tough with me, but also how to hug and kiss. She made sure I knew how wanted and loved I was. I’d come home with four As and a B on my report card, and my mother would want to know why I got the B. But she would always end the conversation congratulating and hugging me for the As.
excel 超越
She checked constantly to see if I did my homework, in much the same way that I continually follow up at work today. I can remember sitting in my upstairs bedroom, working away on the day’s homework, only to hear her voice rising from the living room: “Have you done it yet? You better not come down until you’ve finished!”
But it was over the kitchen table, playing gin rummy with her, that I learned the fun and joy of competition. I remember racing across the street from the schoolyard for lunch when I was in the first grade, itching for the chance to play gin rummy with her. When she beat me, which was often, she’d put the winning cards on the table and shout, “Gin!” I’d get so mad, but I couldn’t wait to come home again and get the chance to beat her.
gin rummy 一种棋牌游戏，玩牌者争取使手中牌加起来不超过10点 itch 渴望
That was probably the start of my competitiveness, on the baseball diamond, the hockey rink, the golf course, and business.
Perhaps the greatest single gift she gave me was self-confidence. It’s what I’ve looked for and tried to build in every executive who has ever worked with me. Confidence gives you courage and extends your reach. It lets you take greater risks and achieve far more than you ever thought possible. Building self-confidence in others is a huge part of leadership. It comes from providing opportunities and challenges for people to do things they never imagined they could do—rewarding them after each success in every way possible.
写得很好啊
My mother never managed people, but she knew all about building self-esteem. I grew up with a speech impediment, a stammer that wouldn’t go away. Sometimes it led to comical, if not embarrassing, incidents. In college, I often ordered a tuna fish on white toast on Fridays when Catholics in those days couldn’t eat meat. Inevitably, the waitress would return with not one but a pair of sandwiches, having heard my order as “tu-tuna sandwiches.”
impediment 障碍 stammer 口吃 comical 滑稽的
My mother served up the perfect excuse for my stuttering. “It’s because you’re so smart,” she would tell me. “No one’s tongue could keep up with a brain like yours.” For years, in fact, I never worried about my stammer. I believed what she told me: that my mind worked faster than my mouth.
stutter 结巴 serve up 提供
I didn’t understand for many years just how much confidence she poured into me. Decades later, when looking at early pictures of me on my sports teams, I was amazed to see that almost always I was the shortest and smallest kid in the picture. In grade school, where I played guard on the basketball squad, I was almost three-quarters the size of several of the other players.
Yet I never knew it or felt it. Today, I look at those pictures and laugh at what a little shrimp I was. It’s just ridiculous that I wasn’t more conscious of my size. That tells you what a mother can do for you. She gave me that much confidence. She convinced me that I could be anyone I wanted to be. It was really up to me. “You just have to go for it,” she would say.
shrimp 虾
My relationship with my mother was powerful and unique, warm and reinforcing. She was my confidante, my best friend. I think it was that way partly because I was an only child, born to her late in life (for those days), when she was 36 and my dad was 41. My parents had tried unsuccessfully to have children for many years. So when I finally arrived in Peabody, Massachusetts, on November 19, 1935, my mother poured her love into me as if I were a found treasure.
confidante 密友 reinforcing 强大的
I wasn’t born with a silver spoon. I had something better—tons of love. My grandparents on both sides were Irish immigrants, and neither they nor my parents graduated from high school. I was nine when my parents bought our first house, a modest two-story masonry home on 15 Lovett Street, in an Irish working-class section of Salem, Massachusetts.
I wasn’t born with a silver spoon. 并不是含着金汤匙出生的 masonry 砖石结构
The house was across the street from a small factory. My father would often remind me that was a real plus. “You always want a factory for a neighbor. They’re not around on the weekends. They don’t bother you. They’re quiet.” I believed him, never recognizing that he was engaging in some confidence building himself.
it was a real plus 真的好处
My dad worked hard as a railroad conductor on the Boston & Maine commuter line between Boston and Newburyport. When “Big Jack” went off in the early morning at five in his pressed dark blue uniform, his white shirt starched to perfection by my mother, he looked like he could salute God himself. Nearly every day was the same, a ticket-punching journey through the same ten depots, over and over again: Newburyport, Ipswich, Hamilton/Wenham, North Beverly, Beverly, Salem, Swampscott, Lynn, the General Electric Works, Boston. And then back again, over some 40 miles of track. Later, I would get a kick out of knowing that one of his regular stops was at GE’s aircraft engines’ complex in Lynn, just outside Boston.
starched 上浆的 ticket-punching journey 固定孔一样的旅程 get a kick out of 从…中获得极大的乐趣和刺激
Every workday, he looked forward to climbing back on the B&M train that he always thought of as his own. My father loved greeting the public and meeting interesting people. He moved through the center aisles of those passenger cars like an ambassador, with good humor, punching tickets and welcoming the familiar faces in the bench seats as if they were close friends.
aisle 教堂
During every rush hour, he traded smiles and hellos with passengers and spread a good bit of Irish blarney. His cheerful disposition on the train would often contrast with his quiet and withdrawn behavior at home. This would annoy my mother, who would complain, “Why don’t you bring some of that baloney you pass out on the train home?” He seldom did.
blarney n.花言巧语 谄媚 disposition 性格 withdrawn 内敛的 baloney 胡说 谎话
My father was a diligent worker who put in long hours and never missed a day of work. If he got a bad weather report, he’d ask my mother to drive him to the station the night before. He would sleep in one of the cars on his train, so he’d be ready to go in the morning.
Rarely would he get home before seven at night, always picked up at the station in the family car by my mother. He’d come home with a bundle of newspapers under his arm, all of them left by his passengers on the train. From the age of six, I got my daily dose of current events and sports, thanks to the leftover Boston Globes, Heralds, and Records. Reading the papers every night became a lifelong addiction. I’m a news junkie to this day.
junkie 有毒瘾者