Things I learned this week:
1) It’s up to the leader to be enthusiastic, it’s up to the team to be passionate
I’ve been around long enough to see groups rise and fall, and this is one of the Catch-22s that often happens. If the team is struggling, the leader often begins to lose enthusiasm, which further hurts morale. This can be extremely difficult to reverse, which is why you see football teams desperately try to switch coaches or eliminate cancers on the team. By passionate, I mean the team has to be consistent, have good work ethic, and care about doing a good job. By enthusiastic, I mean the leader has to be firm, attuned to the team’s needs, and inspirational.
2) Wikipedia was the worst thing to ever happen to movies.
I haven’t seen District 9 or Inglourious Basterds, and now I won’t because I already know what happens. Not only do I know the plot, I know the symbolism as described by the director, the details of the marketing campaign, and reviews both good and bad about both movies. Perhaps I’ll rent them at some point in the future or watch them on HBO when they come out, but the movie theater just lost my $9 because I went to Wikipedia. More than DVDs or downloads, that is more devastating to the artist’s work because now I may never see it at all. I haven’t seen a scary movie in a theater for years, but I can tell you what happens in every Saw movie, all because of the power of the Wiki.
3) Amateur sports is the new exploitation
Do you realize that BCS football and March Madness are each billion dollar events? They make more money than any other sporting event except the Super Bowl. Little League World Series is probably ESPN’s biggest draw in the late summer, in that dead period before the race to the finish for baseball and before the football season begins. Yet these amateur athletes don’t see a single dollar for their effort. Oh sure, the little league kids win a year’s supply of free stuff and that’s very special to kids from countries other than the US and Japan, but in proportion to how much ESPN and Little League makes, it’s nothing. The term “student-athlete” is the biggest farce in the world, because most of these kids are trying to be athletes, not students. I don’t know if the solution is to start paying the kids or at least giving them a bigger slice of the pie, but there’s no doubt that these events are exploiting their games.
Goals from the week:
1) Fell just short of 200 questions, did much more poorly than 80%
2) Got the pullups, pushups, and squats, only did 60% of the situps and none of the running
3) Minimal foreign language studying
4) Minimal sleight of hand practice. BTW, by “minimal”, I mean “none at all”.
Verdict: Pretty awful, but give me a break, demo practices more than filled the gaps