Be slow to write off the imperfect ...

General Dwight Eisenhower said: "In my experience with Blackie [an old army horse] and earlier with allegedly incompetent recruits at Camp Colt, is rooted my enduring conviction that far too often we write off a backward child as hopeless, a clumsy animal as worthless, a worn-out field as beyond restoration. This we do largely out of our own lack of willingness to take the time and spend the effort to prove ourselves wrong: to prove that a difficult boy can become a fine man, that an animal can respond to training, that the field can regain its fertility."