Truism...or wisdom...or...?

While visiting a friend in the hospital this afternoon who will very soon undergo multiple heart bypass surgery, I worked today's cryptoquote^©1 in the local newspaper². The answer that I got³ was:

Things work out best for people who make the best out of the way things work out. – John Wooden [the legendary UCLA basketball coach]

The Wooden statement is a gem of one of the classic figures of speech (I'm sure it is although I don't know which one), and we can enjoy it just for the cleverness of its wording. It can of course also be read as a maxim or a "key to happiness," which is probably the way Wooden intended it, since he was a teacher by all accounts ever seeking ways to impart helpful advice to the members of his teams and who knows whom else.

Or is it, aside from the figurative wording and the good intention, a truism—a statement of an obvious truth? In a word, a cliché? Everyone knows that it's useful to make the best of whatever happens, or to take whatever happens as an opportunity to gain some advantage or other, for yourself or somebody else.

If a statement's being a truism implies that "everyone" knows and acts on it³, then "Things work out best for people who make the best out of the way things work out" is hardly a truism, but more like a secret that many ineffective people have never suspected. Wooden's advice points beyond the given happening to what might happen next it if it is regarded constructively. For many people, that's a very big "if."

But is Wooden's statement even true? Some things happen in life that are very hard to "regard constructively." Maybe impossible. Things like discovering you have a couple of arteries blocked up in your heart. Being (or having a friend) in the hospital awaiting major surgery reminds you that sometimes you don't have a lot of control over what's going to happen next, except perhaps over your attitude.

But Wooden seems to be claiming more. Was he wrong, or wiser than I comprehend?
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1. I was unable to discover who owns the copyright.
2. From today's cryptoquote (as published somewhere in Arkansas):
   

   

3. I wonder whether someone has devised a cryptoquote of more than, say, sixty or seventy characters that has multiple sensible answers.
4. By this criterion there may be no such thing as a truism.