Handing Out Gold Stars

Imagine a teacher. This teacher has mastered everything there is to know in the subjects she will be teaching. She has mastered every teaching technique that she has come across. She has innovated several ways to educate students while she was studying to become a teacher. She is professional. She is nice. When she applies for a job at a school, she says and does all the right things. She impresses the other teachers and the administrators. Not surprisingly, she gets the job.

Problem is, when it comes down to actually teaching the kids, it ends up not working out. She utilizes all these impressive, innovative ways to try to connect with them and get them to understand the material, but they just aren't getting her. They cannot adapt to what she is doing. She, sadly, cannot adapt to get through to them. Is it hard to imagine that another teacher with simpler means can get through to the students and teach them better?

Let me give you another example. Remember that time SpongeBob broke his trusty spatula and bought a new one? The new one had all these fancy qualities. It cost SpongeBob everything. It was an elite spatula, if such a thing could exist. It even had a French accent. But things did not work out. The fancy spatula refused to work for SpongeBob and left him. In the end, it was SpongeBob's old spatula that came back to him.

In both of these situations, you have someone or something that presumably had all the skill and potential in the world to get the job done, but could not. And it is not even a situation where the playing field was rigged against them in either case. The "perfect" teacher could not adapt herself to the needs of the students she had to teach. The "perfect" spatula just refused to do his job for SpongeBob.

Why do I bring this up? Because I sometimes see a lot of fans praising this wrestler or that wrestler simply for their talent and potential. You can be a fan of any person for any reason you want. But when it comes to talking about the greats in a given field, you have to actually look at whether or not they are getting the job done. How many times has there been a sports star coming from the college ranks or from a trade from another team with a ton of hype? They usually have that hype surrounding them because they had proven they had tremendous skill playing from wherever they came from. And how many times have you seen them fail to live up to that hype and get the job done? Yes, they sometimes need some time to transition. And certain people just do better in certain systems than others. Moreover, if it is the coaching staff to blame or poor play from those around them, that can hurt the supposed star's potential. You cannot just look at potential without paying attention to whether or not they are delivering and what is going on around them.

To me, praising someone just for potential and talent is like handing them a gold star for not actually delivering. You should get a gold star for utilizing that potential and talent to get the job done. If you give someone too much praise for the talent they have, you might run the risk of overrating them. Yeah, they have all these qualifications to get the job done, but are they getting the job done? If they are not, do they still deserve that high praise? While they are unable to get it done, there just might be someone out there that can get it done. Hand the person with all the potential and not getting it done a silver star, if anything. Save the gold star for that person that can actually get the job done through their own merits.

I just got through saying how much I dislike handing gold stars just for potential. Now, let me be a hypocrite and talk about someone that I would give a gold star to, even though she is not considered a major star. Of all the female wrestlers I have seen that have neither become very over nor gotten a great career to help her to get over, Sarita (Sarah Stock) is my favorite. As a fan, I think she is hot and I liked her character in TNA. As a critic, she obviously has amazing wrestling ability to get through to the wrestling fans, I think she is beautiful enough to connect with some fans that are looking for that, and I think she has a charisma that was worth her getting better storylines than she had in TNA. She obviously has a ton of potential. Pro wrestling, of course, is about using your skill to perform to connect with the audience. Sarita did not become very over. How much of that is TNA's fault? They didn't absolutely bury her during her time in TNA. She had some title reigns with the tag titles. But they could have done more. Of course, TNA's greatest mistake is not properly developing any of their women to be stars and promoting them properly to actually draw for them. They drop the ball with everyone. This is a situation where bad coaches are leading to the mediocrity of a team, not the inability of the players to deliver. Nevertheless, Sarita has not become a major star. I don't care. I would still give her a gold star. Given an opportunity in a major global promotion that would use her right, I think she would deliver. Anyway, I am always mentioning that I don't like this wrestler or that wrestler, so I just decided I would give some praise to a wrestler I do like and don't talk about often.