Another Culture Change

[MrForbes]

John--I don't know if you really understand how things look from the other end. Maybe you do, or maybe you did at one time, but forgot.

I read Neal's book "The New Cool". 2009 was a great year for the our team the NERDS, we had a lot of seniors who were very enthusiastic, and we built a pretty good working and looking robot, mostly out of plywood and plastic pipe (it even sported a couple pieces of wood 2x4). Reading Neal's book brought back the whole thing, our robot was similar to 1717's design, and we played against them in Los Angeles. They went on to dominate at the Davis regional, we went on to dominate at the Arizona regional. We both went to Championships, where we got lost in the shuffle and they lost to an unstoppable powerhouse alliance at the division level.

While reading the book, it occurred to me that our team put in maybe half as much effective effort as 1717 that year. From what I've seen of how some of the "powerhouse" teams operate, my guess is that 1717 put in about one quarter to one half as much effective effort as those teams. Yet we blew away the field at Arizona that year. With 1/4 to 1/8th as much as it takes to be a powerhouse. Where does that put the majority of teams?

The powerhouse teams not just incrementally "better" than most teams. This is an exponential phenomenon. The teams that look at your robot don't think to themselves "if we worked a little harder, we could do that!". They think "Gosh golly, those guys have magic!"

I called it "effective effort", and that's really what it is. There's some combination of brainpower, enthusiasm, experience, energy, and who knows what, that makes a powerhouse team. It's magic. Sure, all the other teams can get there....just like anyone can win the lottery.

We're human, we have emotions, and one of them is jealousy. When the chasm between what one team can do and what another can do is so great, there are bound to be resentments.

How we deal with these emotions is something we can control, and we have to control. Thanks for bringing this issue up in public where we can talk about how to deal with it.