Hardest personal lesson learned?

[Jcarbon]

This year, I learned a lot about how other teams work, both in our area and around the world, and it brought me a new rush of perspective. As a result, I came to the uncomfortable realization that my team is just not doing as great of a job as I thought it was in many areas, from teaching students to designing robots. To be clear, I'm still excited by what we're doing and proud of our accomplishments. But I had an idea in my mind of how comparatively successful we are, and it turns out that idea is unrealistic.

I'm continually inspired by how awesome other teams are, and I'm really trying to use this perspective positively to motivate improvement, but it's still hard to accept the fact that we're not as good I thought we were.