I was asked by Mike Glennon, the organizer of the Hombres Pajaro,
2011 in Roldanillo, to give a little talk on competition techniques on the
second to last day of the competition, in a new hall at a local social club. I
wasn't asked to give a talk on launch techniques, thankfully.

I was asked to do this as the long time foreign competition pilot and perhaps
because I have written extensively reviewing my competition mistakes and
pointing out what would have been the right thing to do under the circumstances.

I prefaced my discussion with a statement that I was very skeptical of my or
anyone else's ability to learn from other people's mistakes, much less from
one's own. I told them that I understand that humans learn by imitation, not by
analysis of errors (which put the wrong emphasis in your mind - what to avoid).

In spite of my warning, I said that I would concentrate on two errors that I had
made on the first day of the competition. I phrased it positively. I stated
that, before you flew the first task, you wanted to "know" who it was that you
were competing with. By that I meant that you needed to be able to identify a
number of the pilots that you would be likely to be flying with by their glider,
harness, and helmet colors. You needed this information to help you make
decisions based on their behavior in the air and who they were.

I also told them that they wanted to be sure to fly with their "friends," the
other pilots, until it was less risky to go to goal on your own. That the
competition was a competition amongst other pilots and you benefited a lot from
flying with them, and that you only needed to get to goal ahead of them by a
small amount, and not have to take the risk of getting there by a lot by going
off on your own and somehow doing much better than they would flying together.

I felt that just concentrating on a few small issues would be the way to go,
because I also told them that as pilots we (I assume that this is true for the
rest of the you also), have greatly diminished mental capacity when we are
flying in competition. That we have to make decisions in an emotionally
stressful situation and that we just don't have as much mental space to do this
as we would in a much calmer and relaxed situation. Therefore we needed to keep
things as simple as possible for your prefrontal cortex as possible.

In spite my desire to keep it to a few topics and to keep it very simple, the
discussion turned to many topics, some of them old chestnuts, like whether a
thermal rotates in one direction in the southern hemisphere and another in the
northern because of the
coriolis
effect? They don't.

This
NY Times article had something to say about giving too much advice:

Management is much squishier to analyze, after all, and the topic
often feels a bit like golf. You can find thousands of tips and rules for how to
become a better golfer, and just as many for how to become a better manager.
Most of them seem to make perfect sense.

Problems start when you try to keep all those rules in your head at the same
time — thus the golf cliché, “paralysis by analysis.” In management, as in golf,
the greats make it all look effortless, which only adds to the sense of mystery
and frustration for those who struggle to get better.