Reaching Their Potential

On Monday the MLB (Baseball) draft started and one of the Mariner Bloggers that I follow Jeff Sullivan had this to say about the draft:

This afternoon or evening, the names of several future disappointments will be announced. Zero or one or two or three of the players will develop fully. Many more will develop partially, and the rest will develop not at all. It sounds so grim and makes it all seem like a complete waste of time, but the math isn't really different in other professional fields. Most of us are destined to disappoint. High baseball draft picks just get more publicity than most of us do.

That sounds down right depressing but it is so accurate and I think you could apply it to hiring anyone for any company, organization or school. You hire on potential, hopes and dreams. Much like companies baseball teams take risks on young potential players hoping they will work out. Some do, others don't, while still some who are drafted at the very end of the day make the biggest impact for a team or company. 

I think about education and students. We don't get to hand pick our students, we're given a class list in August/September and we're told to develop them and help them reach their full potential. We're not allowed half way through the season to say "Look kid you're not cutting it here, we're going to send you back down for more work in the minors." We're told to help the student reach their full potential no matter what. 

I think of coaches who know they don't have the best team, but they do the best with what they have. Helping everyone develop, staying positive, and providing support where needed. They dream of days when they'll have that ultimate state winning team. But until then they battle through the hard years doing what they can to develop players. 

Baseball General Managers get paid a lot of money to pick potential players......and fail most of the time. 

Educators get paid much less are given a bunch of players and are successful most of the time. 

Not sure if any of this makes sense...but that paragraph has been running through my head since I read it a couple days ago and I needed to write some of these random thoughts down.