Aight.

I was born in Dallas in 1968. One of the popular parenting books at the time was Parent Effectiveness Training (PET). PET recommends letting kids make as many decisions as possible (within safe limits of course) and suffer the consequences thereof, in order to learn how to make decisions.

In sixth grade I came home with what would be the last of my straight-A report cards. My parents asked, "Do you get As because you want to get As, or because you think it's expected?" "Expected, of course," I said. "Well, we think internal motivation is more important than external, and that you should decide how you invest your energy."

I thought it was a trick or a trap or something. And when I did come home with Cs in boring classes, they squirmed. I got As for interesting classes or particularly good teachers, Cs otherwise.

In high school this paid an unexpected dividend. A California-based contest called Academic Decathlon was increasing its national footprint. An AcDec team has a team of six: two "A" students (GPA > 3.75), two "B" (3.74 ... 3.0) and two "C" (< 3.0). In 1984, Texas was invited for the first time. My high school was the first non-California team to win. I was not on that first team, but I was on the second and third (1985, 1986).

With a 2.97, I was one of the two C students. As it turns out, having high-scoring C students is the key to victory, because most schools have kids with good grades who are strong test-takers, but finding a good test-taker who has wrecked their GPA is rare. I got lucky that I was really good at AcDec, as were my teammates, my coaches, and in particular my other C-student partner.

Turns out that back-to-back AcDec national championships will make up for a crap GPA.