Preparation is Culture

I got back home from Academic WorldQuest 2026 just a couple of hours ago and I've had some time to think about our team's performance.

To preface, Academic WorldQuest is a competition hosted by the World Affairs Councils of America where teams of four high school students compete in a quiz bowl style competition about current events and international relations.

This was my second time competing in this competition, albeit with a different team, and I performed worse than I wanted to. Our team scored a total of 54 correct questions out of 100, which is 30 less than what the winning team scored.

I think the core of our issue comes down to a couple of problems:

  • Firstly, our team only started seriously preparing two days ago. Sure - we had all been discussing what we would do and delegating tasks, but no one was really on top of their stuff.
  • Another issue was that we didn't split up the work properly. One team member got the hardest topic and another easier one, and two team members got three topics out of ten each and another got two easier topics.

What can be changed is team culture. My dad told me, when I informed him of our poor performance, that team culture is something that needs to be set at the very start and dictates how the team will perform. If everyone is goofing around, the chances that our team performs the way we want to are minimal. If everyone is locked in from the very start, we're much more likely to get where we want to. This is not just a lesson about Academic WorldQuest. It's a lesson about team leadership and I'm glad that I learned it this way rather than in a professional setting.

I put together this team and I didn't enforce culture from the start. That's on me.

Going forward there are a couple of changes I want to make:

  • Primarily when I'm putting together a team, I want to make sure I'm picking people that have the time to put the team's goals above their personal ones.
  • Choosing team members that are willing to work inside the margins of the team culture I set from the very start.
  • Enforcing that everybody gets delegated an equal, fair, and proportional share of work to what they're capable of and what they have the time for.

Most importantly I'm going to make sure that I set team culture that revolves around working hard and a winner mindset from the very start.