Woodie Quotes

“Set Screws Suck”

“Go be kind and creative”

“Facts, feelings, and fairness”

“FIRST is a community of leaders.”

“FIRST is not fair in an absolute sense.”

“A professional is in a trusted position.”

“In FIRST, the veterans help the rookies.”

“FIRST is not perfect, but it’s very good.”

“Make friends with a knot in your stomach.”

“Societies get the best of what they celebrate.”

“I want to die proud of having been an engineer.”

“We need to learn to enjoy making our brain hurt.”

“It's your future — which is, in fact, our future.”

“Learning with almost always trumps learning from.”

“Buckle up, FIRSTers. It's going to be a wild ride.”

“I believe that robust ethics is rooted in empathy.”

“Mother Nature applies all her rules, all of the time.”

“You must be able to do things machines cannot yet do.”

“You must do more than just wish your robot will work.”

“None of this is easy, but help is everywhere you look.”

“Listen to the empathy bubbling around in your GP brain.”

“Each of you must pull at least a dozen others with you.”

“Mother nature applies all of her rules, all of the time.”

“Learn to acknowledge and listen to some of your feelings.”

“Gracious Professionals tend to be satisfied, happy people.”

“Use your FIRST experiences well, they will serve you well.”

“I think the FIRST competition is a great way to get a boost up”

“FIRST is probably the best tasting medicine you’ll ever encounter.”

“I actually think that FIRST may be better than a doctoral program.”

“I believe that empathy leads to good products and ethical behavior.”

“With the privilege of knowing comes the responsibility of integrity.”

“At some point we must face the fact that anti-science is pro-stupid.”

“A well-rendered bad idea is a horrible disservice to your colleagues.”

“You represent facts, feelings, fairness, and gracious professionalism.”

“We are launching students into a society that does not think critically.”

“Gracious professionalism, in many ways, is the heart and the soul of FIRST.”

“Learn to compete like crazy while treating others with empathy and respect.”

“[Gracious professionals] compete like crazy but compete fairly and ethically.”

“Gracious professionals are simply good, smart people doing good, smart things.”

“The most valuable thing that you can do is share an experience with an expert.”

“Society does not work unless people can trust those who have special knowledge.”

“Unless you align your aspirations with the laws of the universe, you will fail.”

“It’s not just the technology that’s changing, it’s the process that’s changing.”

“Give back. Let your professional pride show, and share with the next generation.”

“You will have fun, it will be quite intense fun. And it will mount and become joy”

“I believe absolutely that equations explain only to those who already understand.”

“Being in the game, folks, will make your heart sing a lot more than money or fame.”

“Joy will happen when your team says thank you, and when your robot actually works.”

“One of the most sophisticated things a designer ever does is decide what to design.”

“In FIRST, recognizing something others need and responding helpfully is fundamental.”

“There have been a whole bunch of studies that neither money nor fame make you happy “”

“Don’t let your primitive brain convince you that others will love you if you oversell.”

“By practicing gracious professionalism, it becomes part of the way you define yourself.”

“Being persuasive does not make you right, and being right does not make you persuasive.”

“Being right does not make you persuasive, and being persuasive does not make you right.”

“FIRST is about being stumbling tired because you’re working on something you really love.”

“True Education… learn to do much more than answer the questions at the end of the chapter.”

“Being persuasive is part of being gracious, and being right is part of being professional.”

“Learn about yourself, be a little selfish. You’re navigating your own path through life.” -”

“MIT is either a steamroller or a candy store — you have to pick. The default is steamroller.”

“[Gracious Professionalism is] Competing in such a way that would make your grandmother proud.”

“FIRST is a great example of a society where the opportunity playing field is relatively level.”

“If your self-image includes faith in your own ability based on experience, you are doing well.”

“I really love that FIRST helps us learn that working hard can be fun and profoundly satisfying.”

“In FIRST, we do our best work while helping others and treating folks with respect and kindness.”

“Gracious professionals know how to pick out the good parts of tribal instinct and reject the bad”

“Happiness is really nice — it's a big deal. But an even bigger deal is having a meaningful life.”

“Popular culture is headed in the wrong direction; FIRST culture is headed in the right direction.”

“Being graciously professional will attract other gracious professionals. That is the right crowd.”

“It feels good to see that light come on with somebody — when something you're telling them clicks.”

“Gracious professionals have learned metacognition. They know how to think about their own thinking.”

“You know what it feels like to go home feeling quietly proud of something you did, that’s good stuff.”

“I don't think any of the things that we see out here that don't work are failures — they're missteps.”

“The saying that you're teaching implies a push, and I think a pull is a better way to think about it.”

“We should get out of training, stop lecturing, stop writing textbooks, and stop building lecture halls.”

“We're probably obligated to base our seeking of good on empathy, because that's a uniquely human thing.”

“We adults have created messes. We need to help students learn to think critically about fixing our messes.”

“You could think of gracious professionalism as the Newton's law — or Hooke's law — of working with others.”

“[Gracious professionalism] creates the smallest number of victims and the maximum number of beneficiaries.”

“It is extremely important, in fact, it’s expected, that you practice gracious professionalism with everyone!”

“The most fun you will ever have is doing something hard... We want you to experience the joy of the struggle.”

“One of the things that makes FIRST so great is that it mixes technology with human behavior and understanding.”

“I like to think of myself as someone who tries to create an opportunity for someone to learn about themselves.”

“There are laws of thermodynamics, but no 'laws of fairness' in the universe. There are no equations for ethics.”

“Being informed is not enough; knowing calculus is not rocket science, but knowing how to think using calculus is.”

“As machines prove more and more effective, humans who straddle will be needed. “Both” is becoming more important.”

“Telling someone something that's written in a textbook is not my version of education. I believe that's training.”

“If the GP habit gets started and moves into your subconscious, it can be a major asset in everything you do in life.”

“Evolution has left us with brains capable of believing six impossible things before breakfast – without realizing it.”

“You log enough hard fun that gives you a leg up over others that arrive with a lot of training and not much education.”

“A uniquely human characteristic that's really important is making loose analogies and jumping from one venue to another.”

“If you do those things well, you will qualify for what I regard as one of the highest rankings — and that is: super nerd.”

“We have scientific proof that gracious professionalism is not only good for your well-being — it's good for your health too.”

“Rational passion is passion that’s based on things that you really understand, not what some pundit told you you should think.”

“Rational self-esteem is self-esteem based on your own knowledge that you know how to do complex things in complex environments.”

“In the last few years, rational passion has been swamped by irrational passion. Please help us bring back some rational passion.”

“I believe that FIRST is one of the cheapest opportunities that you will ever have to learn that you are competent in a fast game.”

“Education and Training are different. Training will be outsourced to machines, and education must be rebalanced and redistributed.”

“True education is the value-added piece that comes from a mentor to a student. 'Working with' will almost always beat 'talking to'.”

“That’s such tight constraints that real problems bubble up, and inevitably you will get to learn a lot about yourself in the process.”

“Mother Nature applies all of her rules, all the time. You get absolutely unvarnished feedback when you try to violate one of her rules.”

“Our professional knowledge comes from the brilliance of others. We are all standing on the shoulders of giants, and we owe others a lift.”

“If you want a meaningful AND happy life, each of you will need to figure out how to pull at least a hundred others with you toward success.”

“Gracious is mostly about feelings — both yours and those of others. Professionalism is mostly about knowledge and its application for good.”

“We are not as rational as we want to believe. Tribalism, human chauvinism, and fear interfere with critical thinking without our being aware.”

“The most important transcript is not what's written in the registrar's office on a computer file — it's what a person knows about themselves.”

“As the students pursue a meaningful life, I believe a blend of understanding the universe and of understanding self and society will be essential.”

“We adults have created a world that's changing faster than we are willing to accept. You have to grow up and lead us, and that's going to be tough.”

“[Gracious professionalism] was coined to describe the behavior of a bunch of MIT students who were competing like crazy but also helping each other.”

“Your robot is a bundle of objective truth about physics and chemistry. Your team is a bundle of more subtle and complex truths about human behavior.”

“FIRST is a wonderful vehicle — it's kind of a safe environment in which you learn about Mother Nature, about yourself, about society, and your team.”

“Surround yourself with the most active, interesting, thoughtful people you can. Don't dare be the sharpest knife in the drawer or the smartest person in the room.”

“I do not participate in the debate about whether creativity can be taught, but I absolutely believe one can create an environment in which creativity is celebrated.”

“This learning that I’m talking about, I really believe comes from deep immersion. So please get your head around as many parts of the competition as you possibly can.”

“Training is a commodity. Machines will do the training things. Education is learning to think. It’s learning to deal with information that is incomplete and ambiguous.”

“As you build and test the machine that absolutely obeys the truth of Mother Nature's laws, you can learn an important lesson about truth's superiority over groupthink.”

“You can't make people happy by taking away the things that make them unhappy. Many students learn that they can become happy through the satisfaction of being creative.”

“You can not know that you can do stuff without experience. Your brain is too smart; it simply will assume that if you haven’t done it, you are going to remain not a do-er.”

“If they're just well trained, they're not going to have a place. If they're well trained and well educated, they're going to help untangle some of the messes that we made.”

“True education has to do with helping someone develop a self that allows them to know from personal experience that they can do something that is creative, or new, or hard.”

“I’m not arguing that obscurity or poverty is the right thing, but I am saying that being in the game so you can have a meaningful life is much better than being rich and famous.”

“In the heat of an ethical crisis, the right path is often not obvious. Your chances of doing the right thing are greatly enhanced if you have thought about guidelines in advance.”

“The underpinnings of all my educational efforts is to allow people a path to change their self-image. Students might struggle with equations... but in [robotics] they can be superstars.”

“Celebrate the fact that this is not a multiple-choice quiz or a true/false quiz. This is about tough trade-offs, complicated problems; learning how to deal with them will be good for you.”

“Tribalism gave us a huge advantage over other creatures we learned to work together to share and to protect one another, and on the other end of tribalism spectrum is kill the other tribe.”

“Clearly, Gracious Professionalism is contrary to what is promoted by many parts of our culture today. It’s nothing like reality TV or bullying, it’s not about greed or ruthless competition.”

“As you learn about technology through experience, be gutsy enough to try applying the law of gracious professionalism in your own life. It will be harder than physics but even more rewarding.”

“If the robot works, it probably reflects your understanding of the universe. If your team competes well for the Chairman’s Award, it probably means you understand self and society quite well.”

“Creativity is not a thunderbolt that comes out of the sky, it’s something we all have and we can enhance not only our ability to be creative but our self-confidence about relying on creativity.”

“That visceral understanding of the behavior of mechanics is really important, and it doesn't fall out of the sky, and it certainly doesn't come out of a textbook — it comes through real interaction.”

“The benefit of gracious professionalism is shared between the giver and the receiver. Obviously, they both win. When we do something nice for others, the giver wins with a boost in rational self-esteem.”

“We’ve tried to give you a problem too big, a time too short, a budget too small, and a team too large, and the reason we do that is that’s the way things happen. That’s a very realistic set of constraints.”

“FIRST is a great opportunity to learn enough about yourself and the universe so that you can get into the game, have a chance to feel some satisfaction, and thus have a much better shot at a meaningful life.”

“Learn that you can work with the laws of nature and that you can do things that artificial intelligence has not yet taken over. In your future, you’ll always be needed because you have a uniquely human contribution”

“You must know that if you want to be in the game, you can learn the hard stuff, that you can be creative, that you can work with people, and you’ve got to know how it feels to be proud of having done a really good job.”

“No one will pay you to know data, but they will wait in line to pay you if you have creative ideas on how to use the data, and work with others to create new products and services. In FIRST, you learn that you can do tha”

“It’s obvious you need to learn about the laws of the universe, not so obvious you need to learn about yourself and other people. In your lifetime, it’s likely the most successful people will be the ones that understand both”

“The gracious part has to do with an empathetic response to another person. The professionalism part has to do with understanding something well enough and using it properly, so that you're giving back to those who helped you learn.”

“Facts do not change your mind. And that's really scary, but to me it's more disturbing to notice that we adults seem to have lost allegiance to truth. And without truth, things like freedom, justice, pursuit of happiness — not so much.”

“FIRST is much more than robots; in fact, the robot is kind of the campfire around which the tribe gathers, and the design and build task is a vehicle for learning about science and technology and, in the process, learning about self and society.”

“What is FIRST and FRC all about? I believe it’s about learning, it’s about feeling good about yourself, making friends, and having fun. If you do that well, you will honor your mentors and your sponsors and your colleagues, and you will honor yourself.”

“Let’s go over that linkage. If you know you can do. People will ask you to do more. You, in turn, will learn more so you can do more. That is a win-win. Society gets things done, and you get the satisfaction, the deep satisfaction, of knowing you are in the game.”

“The ones of you that put your heart into what you are doing will change your self-image. You will come to believe that you can do stuff. That you can do hard stuff. You can do stuff that involves nature, like machines, and electronics, and people. And believe me, that is a really big deal.”

“We want you to have a meaningful life, and it seems pretty clear that’s going to be associated with being a good world citizen, and that’s probably going to come from getting some satisfaction in life, and you’re going to get an opportunity to get some satisfaction because you’re effective.”

“You have to learn that you can learn the hard stuff, you have to have faith in your ability to be creative. You have to know you can work in complex interpersonal situations and you have to experience the pride of knowing you’ve done a good job on tough problem. And none of those things come cheaply”

“High school kids ask me about advice for going to college, and I give them advice that is sometimes a little shocking. I say go find a really hard course and try to take it from the worst professor on campus, a real jerk, and then ace the course because if you do that, you know that you’re in control and you can learn what you need, no matter who’s dishing it out.”

“During the competition, focus on the really positive stuff. There are lots of different models for the way the teams operate, and some people worry about whether there’s an extreme of all students building a robot or a lot of involvement by the mentors. In the middle is where most teams are; let other teams do it the way they choose, focus on doing the best job you can with your group.”

“When you get a bit of true education, you know that you can do something from personal experience, not because someone gave you an A. You know that you can do something hard, you know that you can do something new or complex or wonderfully creative. You know you can work with a group of people. You can listen. You can lead when you need to. All that makes you able to make uniquely human contributions.”

“[Gracious professionalism] is sometimes really hard. You have to put “We” ahead of “Me”. It is not sticky-sweet or simple. It’s both from the heart and the mind. It’s sort of like wise-kindness. The “gracious” part has to do with empathy, helping, sympathy. The “professionalism” part has to do with knowledge, wisdom, judgement. “Gracious,” you probably know in your heart instinctively, but note that it must not be confused with pity, or condescension, or believing yourself to be better than someone else.”

“You are launching into a hard, fun project, that I think is the right fix. It’s high tech; all the world's problems need technology for their solutions. You’ll be deeply immersed in Mother Nature, she applies all of her rules all the time. She will be the unflinching arbiter of whether what you do works. You’ll also be immersed in a social environment, and believe me, if you learn to work better with people, that will serve you for the rest of your life. You will do all that within the context of Gracious Professionalism. For the next six weeks, or the rest of your life, if you behave in a way that would make your grandmother happy if she were watching all the time, you’ll be doing very well, and you’ll have more self-esteem. And that is much better than being rich and famous.”

“FIRST is an amazing opportunity, it’s a cure. I think our culture is addicted to a bunch of really strange things that are out of proportion. Much of our entertainment creates victims. Most of the time, getting rid of an addiction is really hard and painful. FIRST makes it easy. FIRST is probably the best tasting medicine you’ll ever encounter. Now, I think our culture is stumbling drunk on celebrity. FIRST is about being stumbling tired because you’re working on something you really love. FIRST is about nerd pride. But it’s about Nouveau nerd pride. Nouveau nerd pride means you understand about nature, the universe, technology, you understand about yourself, and how you fit in society. And if you’re surrounded by peers that think that’s not cool, believe me, that's not their problem, and by the time they figure out it is their problem, it may be too late for them.”

“That’s exactly what FIRST is about. You’re going to set out to build a robot, but some magic is going to happen along the way. You set a stretch goal. You're gonna build a fancy, powerful, autonomous, teleoperated robot from nothing, from scratch, in six weeks. And along the way, you’re gonna learn stuff that you never thought you were going to learn. You are going to work with mentors who are giving a huge amount of their time and who know a lot about the process. You are going to do cutting-edge technology. Some of you are going to program robots to interpret vision systems. Some of you are going to make precise parts with elegant machine tools. Some of you are going to make precise enough parts with a hammer, a hacksaw, and a file. You're going to manage the team’s work. I hope all of you will learn to appreciate others' unique skills. You’re going to do marketing plans, you’re going to raise money. The list goes on.”

“You’re smart enough to know you should be intimidated by what you face. You are looking at a really big, really hard problem. It’s multi-disciplinary. People, robots, schedules, team dynamics. If you do all that well. You will learn a very important thing. You will learn that you deserve high self-esteem. In fact, you will learn the right kind of self-esteem. Sociologists are having a discussion right now about the kind of self-esteem that results in arrogance and false pride and is founded mostly in insecurity. The real stuff, the stuff that I think is really important, is what people like Nathaniel Branden identify. Please listen carefully to his definition of self-esteem. “Self-esteem is the disposition to experience oneself as being competent to cope with the basic challenges of life and being worthy of happiness. It is confidence in the efficacy of our mind in our ability to think. By extension, it is confidence in our ability to learn, make appropriate choices and decisions. And respond effectively to change. It is also the experience that success, achievement, fulfillment, and happiness are right and natural for us. The survival value of such confidence is obvious, so is the danger when it is missing. Self-esteem is not the euphoria or buoyancy that may be temporarily induced by a drug, a compliment, or a love affair. It is not an illusion or hallucination if it is not grounded in reality. If it is not built over time. By the appropriate operation of mind, it is not self-esteem.”