A while back, I read a thread on the CAP Talk Forums about cadets participating in emergency services. While that may be an interesting topic in itself, the much more fascinating aspect was the behavior of the cadets involved in that thread.

Without naming names or getting into the details, I'll just say that the participants were a little, uh, boastful about their training and capabilities. Not that boastful is bad necessarily, but I've made it a rule to avoid boasting about things that aren't worth boasting about.

Speaking of boasting, there's always been a lot of discussion about elitism in cadet programs. In the Civil Air Patrol cadet program, for those unfamiliar with it, the elitism tag has often been given to graduates of activities such as National Blue Beret, Pararescue Orientation Course, Hawk Mountain Ranger School, and Honor Guard Academy.

Those activities represent some of the more challenging things you can complete in the CAP cadet program. Sweating it out while supporting the largest airshow in the country, completing grueling physical training at the hands of USAF PJs, learning advanced SAR techniques while surviving on mountain terrain, and mastering complicated and precise drill and ceremonies techniques.

Something all of those activities have in common is that you can go to them with little knowledge of the subject matter, and graduate with a working understanding of what the courses are trying to teach. You may even go back multiple times, and get even better.

What they also have in common is that none of them will allow you to truly master the craft. Graduating from PJOC in no way makes you something resembling a real USAF PJ. Completing all the levels of HGA does not a USAF Honor Guard master make.

What was I talking about again? Oh yeah, attitudes and abilities.

Something I've noticed is that boastful attitudes (or elitism) and experience seem to correlate to one another, but not in a way one might think. Here, re-printed in its original form, is the soon-to-be famous hastily sketched graph I made to illustrate my point:

When you start out at something, you usually have a good attitude about it. You know you don't know squat. After some time, training, and experience, you reach a point where you think you know everything there is to know (known in life as the "teenage years"). You have basic skills at this point, and you're probably pretty good at what you do. But you're not the best there is, you just think you are.

Over time, as you learn more, you begin to see that, back when you thought you knew everything, you really didn't know squat. Smart people realize this, and adopt a more appropriate attitude.

On the far right of the experience line, really, really good people are generally very affable, and have almost no elitist attitude. Everyone knows they're good, and they don't need to exude attitude to prove it. They're also humble enough to know they've made mistakes, and they don't know everything. The so-called "quiet professional".

Unfortunately, a lot of people never get beyond basic comprehension and knowledge, and/or never grow beyond the attitude that corresponds with it.

When I Was a Cadet . . .

No good essay would be complete without embarassing tales of my youth. Let's turn back the clock to an encampment of yore. I was a C/Lt Col, and the Deputy Cadet Commander. The Commandant had a firm rule that formations will start on time, dammit. If a flight was missing, too bad, they missed formation.

One evening, the Commandant was doing a leadership-type class that ran late. He had the entire cadet corps in this class (which took place on the bleachers behind our formation field). When the class was over with, he rushed up to the formation field, and proceeded to demand that formation begin (on time). Thing is, the cadets were still marching up from the class.

"You can't do that!", I screamed, "none of the cadets are here!" The first sergeant stepped off with maybe two of the 12 flights present. Confused flight commanders were trying to bring their flights onto the formation field, while the Commandant was yelling "formation has begun, you are late, get off the field!" I screamed back "It's your fault they're late, why don't you just wait? What the #$%^&* are you doing?!?"

I'm sure the actual transcript was different, and probably more obscene. The gist was, I was loudly chewing out the Commandant in front of the entire cadet corps. It didn't matter what the rule was, I knew what was best, and no #$%^&* senior member was going to tell me otherwise.

Now, there were clearly a number of things going wrong here, but one of them was that my confidence exceeded my experience. The Commandant knew he was the reason the cadets were late, but formation needed to continue regardless. There were other things on the schedule that shouldn't have gotten held up by a late formation. It really was okay for the cadets to miss formation, and a statement needed to be made that formations start on time (dammit), regardless of who is at fault for the schedule slip.

Encampment management is an interesting beast, and I learned a few things about it that night. I thought I knew best, but when you look at it as part of the whole, it makes sense to do what he did.

Taming the 'tude

Although I was a C/Lt Col in my story, the cadets most prone to attitude-over-experience syndrome are cadet NCOs and junior officers. They're right in that range where they know enough to be dangerous, but they aren't terribly well learned yet, and don't have a lot of experience. To no great surprise, the worst elitist attitude offenders we've seen on the CadetStuff forums were generally senior NCOs and junior officers.

As important as it is to know what you know, and be proud of what you've done, it's equally important to know what you don't know. Training is a journey, not a destination. The first few times you think you're an expert on something, you're probably wrong. I thought I was a really good programmer in college, until I graduated and saw how much better other people were. A couple years later, I thought I was a really good programmer until I worked more closely with people better than me. Now I think I'm a pretty good programmer, but know that there are things I don't know, and I'm not the best out there.

When you begin to accept that you don't know squat, you stop thinking of yourself as better than other people, and start thinking of how much better you can be tomorrow compared to where you were yesterday. Eventually, the attitude of self-improvement and skills development will get noticed by other people, and you will get the respect you're due without having to boast about anything.

You will become the "quiet professional" (but even then, you may still not know squat!)