When were you inspired?

[Madison]

I don't think that I was ever really inspired by FIRST in the sense that most people expect the inspiration mechanism to work. I have always been interested in design and engineering, though FIRST has given me tremendous opportunities to learn about those interests in non-traditional and exciting ways.

I've tried to tell this story a bunch of times on these boards and it never quite comes out right and I delete what I've written and move on. I'll try to do better here.

In 2002, I was at the Championship for the third time since starting FIRST in 1999, and though I was in college, I was not mature or useful enough to be a mentor in any capacity. I'd just lead a rookie team through the first, very successful season and managed the design and production of my first robot, but I was feeling around in the dark the entire way. I was young, naive and stupid -- whereas now I guess I'm just stupid -- and was still in FIRST because I got to play around with someone else's money. It was still very much about me.

It's a shame that most of the people in FIRST nowadays weren't around to see how amazing the events held down at Epcot were. Dave mentioned the "Olympic Village" in his post and that describes it perfectly. We had a wrap party back then, too, but instead of carnival games and inflatables, everyone was invited into Epcot's Future World West -- home to The Land, The Living Seas and the Imagination Pavilion. There was food everywhere, dancing, and we had free run of the attractions in each pavilion.

One of those attractions was Honey, I Shrunk the Audience, a 3D film sponsored by Kodak and part of the Imagination Pavilion. The theater sat 600 people, but before entering, everyone was first loaded into a preshow room and asked to watch a short film, provided by Kodak.

The film used a variation on Cyndi Lauper's "True Colors,"and the room was filled with 600 excited students, parents and mentors that probably had one of the most amazing experiences of their life in the last three days.

Words would pop up on screen, accompanied by pictures -- imagination, creativity, inspiration -- and everybody went nuts; cheering, screaming, clapping.

I'd never really felt like this was anything more than a neat diversion until that moment. Then, though, I immediately realized that I was surrounded by 600 people that wanted to make the world a better place. These were the people that are going to cure cancer and save the environment and campaign for human rights all over the world.

I'm reasonably intelligent, but I never thought that I'd be among the people doing that important work. It weighs too heavily on me -- or maybe I'm just too easily distracted -- but that night, in that theater among those people, I realized that the very best I could offer those people and my team is to be a good mentor and leader and give them all the encouragement they need to do the amazing things they're all meant to do. I'm hard on them; heaven knows I'm hard on everyone, but I've become enormously protective of FIRST and of the circumstances that let that experience happen to me.

So, yeah -- I guess that's it. FIRST inspired me to become a pain in the patootie or something.