Teamwork

It’s 20:30 hours. I had a glorious day in all aspects. The weather could not have been better, 72°, light breeze. Dauntless is under the roof, no problems with sun or rain. Of the two projects I started out this morning to get done: one’s done and the other two are almost done.

But this evening, I felt a disquiet. My project list is not even a quarter done and I’m leaving for the winter in 5 days.

Then I realized it’s not about progress on the projects, days left, or anything else. It’s that I’m alone.

But even that is not so simple. In fact, my happy meter is well above my “normal”. Boat wise, relationship wise, career wise, pretty much everything, I’m quite happy about.  So why the grumpy face and thoughts?

I’m not feeling lonely; but something is still missing.

Then it occurred to me. My entire life, from as early as I can remember, has been about teamwork. Working with others to a common purpose.

I can’t even begin to tell you the times I sacrificed personal accolades for the sake of the team.

All my successes in life can be attributed to building and nourishing successful teams.

Even when I started my teaching career, I did not become a successful classroom teacher until I realized that I needed to make the students in each class understand that they were a team and needed to help each other for their own learning, not for me.

As a high school principal, it was harder, because professionals in education have never been taught anything about teamwork, but the successes we had were all because the entire staff was working together for the good of our students. Sure, there were a few bad apples, but despite them, we got a lot of kids to college and success that would not have happened otherwise.

Then, I look at the other side. Even though I was quite successful selling cars, I hated it. The General Manager at a very successful dealership once made the comment to all in our sales meeting that, “Bost, probably tells everyone that he is a lawyer” I wondered how he knew, though I didn’t pick lawyer, I just never told anyone I sold cars.

While I was successful there, I was a duck out of the water.

With my project list for Dauntless, the list would feel less daunting if my teammate was here. Teammates don’t let you get overwhelmed with small stuff and they convince you the big stuff isn’t so big.

Even better, teammates give you that Cesar Milan nudge or click, that gets you off the obsession and back on track.

That’s what I miss. Otherwise it’s too easy to go around in circles or become obsessed about the unimportant.

In teaching, once I realized that I had to convince the students that they are a learning team. One time, I noticed one of my special colored pencils was missing from my grade book, that was open on the first row of desks. I used color codes for different types of work. I was irritated about it and started complaining to the class about my missing pencil.

In a New York minute, which in this case was probably 30 seconds, one of the students calls out, “OK, we get it Mr. Bost, now can we move on”

I snapped out of it. It was the nudge I needed.

(A couple of days later, in walking around a different class, I saw my pencil in front of one of my problematic students. Without a word and I just took it back.  Months later I finally got that student to start working and she passed with a 72 out of 100 on the NY State Regents.  She worked hard, finally. How we got there, is another story, I’ll save for the book).

And I wouldn’t have spent 3 hours on the Maretron power problem without checking the fuse from the very beginning.

Oh Richard, since you know the circuit had power until you shorted it, why don’t you check that fuse once again?

Oh yeah, that’s probably better than spending the next three hours on this connector!