Our expert: Arne Duncan, the outgoing Secretary of Education who played college basketball at Harvard and professionally in Australia. He’s known to play pickup with President Obama.
“My advice is no mercy. You play hard, you compete, and whatever happens happens. I don’t think you ever do less than your best—if anything, that’s disrespectful.
“I don’t know if you want to get to the point of your boss being rattled. Maybe you back off a little at that point. But for us, if it’s playing basketball or whatever, we love to compete. Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose, but the fun is the competition, and it would actually lose its joy, lose the point of it, if you started not playing your hardest.”
Read more advice, tips, and tricks from Washington natives in our Secrets of the City package.
This article appears in our January 2016 issue of Washingtonian.
