No reserves, no retreat, no regrets! Published May 1, 2009 By Maj. Matthew Pollock 56th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron commander LUKE AIR FORCE BASE, Ariz. -- Luke Air Force Base is successfully completing final unit compliance inspection preparations; our inspection success will be indicative of the incredible efforts and planning by all 56th Fighter Wing Airmen over the last year. We should all be extremely proud of our collective accomplishments. After the inspection is over, what will be our center of attention? Will the processes we revamped slowly slide into decline? Will our self-inspection focus shift to other areas? Will our continuity sit on the shelf untouched until the next inspection? Brig. Gen. Mark Atkinson, 402nd Maintenance Wing commander, Warner Robins Air Logistics Center, Robins Air Force Base, Ga., recently spoke at the Luke Maintenance Professional of the Year Banquet about sustaining a record of success. He spoke about being at the pinnacle of success and the difficulty in staying on top. One of the greatest challenges as Airmen is to keep the winning formula intact. To illustrate his point, he discussed the difficulty of repeating back-to-back Super Bowl championships and named the only three NFL teams that have done so - the Dallas Cowboys, San Francisco 49rs and the Pittsburgh Steelers did it twice! A great illustration of failure to sustain excellence is the Pittsburgh Steelers' 2006 season. Fresh from the win in Super Bowl XL, the Steelers squandered their opportunity to repeat. Most of their players remained the same from the previous year yet the hunger, the drive to succeed was diminished and the team seemed satisfied with their previous successes. The defending Super Bowl champs recorded only two wins and six losses for the first half of the 2006 season. On their way to an 8-8 season record, the Steelers failed to make the play-offs and they did not even post a winning record for that season. Contentment and reliance on past victories kept the Steelers from moving forward. What does it take to stay on top? General Atkinson used the story of William Borden to drive his point home. In 1913 William Whiting Borden, heir to the Borden Dairy fortune, died in Egypt enroute to China. News of his death made headlines and was printed in all the major papers in the United States. William Borden had forsaken his multimillion dollar inheritance to become a missionary to China. After his death, three sentences were found in the inside cover of Borden's Bible. These words were hand-written at different steps of his ten-year journey toward missions work and defined Borden's drive: No reserves! No retreat! No regrets! Sustaining our Thunderbolt successes will not be an easy task and we must resist the urge to retreat into complacency. We cannot allow our past victories to define our identity; we must bolster our reputation with our continued mission execution and preparation for tomorrow's challenges. With everyone's focus and effort, we can all realize Borden's drive to succeed: no reserves, no retreat and no regrets. Let's continue to press forward on our final preparations and then execute a winning performance in our upcoming unit compliance inspection.