When I started middle school in sixth grade, I mostly loved Doritos, Nintendo, baseball, and playing Dungeons and Dragons all the time. But the craze of remote control cars was headed my way, and looking back, I can see how much I gained from being immersed in that world.

Serious Fun

When you hear “remote control cars” you might be thinking of the dinky, pre-built kind that you buy in a toy store: the kind that go less than a mile per hour and have a range of approximately one living room floor. They’re fun for kids, but not what my friends and I were growing obsessed with.

Instead, we were getting into hobby-grade RC cars, the kind that come disassembled with hundreds of parts and take anywhere from a week to a month to build (and not to mention, come with a pretty hefty price tag—anywhere from $100 to $200, back in the early 90’s). We got a real adrenaline rush from racing those cars, at speeds of over fifteen miles an hour, in parks, backyards, and empty parking lots.

Sourcing Solutions

Our first RC cars were battery powered. Of course, this was way before Tesla was around, but I’d be willing to bet that much of the design that now goes into today’s battery-powered cars was inspired by the technology behind RC cars. Anyway, the first car I ever got was called a Grasshopper, considered a beginner’s car in terms of its features and complexity.

I remember sitting for hours at a time, looking at the instructions and trying to figure out which parts were which, and how to put them together. It was a real struggle in the beginning, matching the parts I had in front of me to the diagrams in the booklet, and trying to visualize how the process of putting them together was going to work, step by step. Often, the instructions were unclear or poorly presented, and the only way to figure it out was to envision the possible configurations of the various pieces as best I could, and then work by trial and error. 

On top of understanding the diagrams and design, I had to learn which tools to use, and how. Often, it turned out that I simply didn’t have the right tool for the job, so I had to improvise, finding an alternative that would work, or give in and go buy the tool I needed. Keep in mind, there was no YouTube then for looking up how to do things. My resources were pretty limited. I mostly had to turn to my friends and parents for help when I got stuck, and they were usually as clueless as I was!

Pushing My Limits

I often had to re-do large parts of the build, because things would stop working, and I would realize that somewhere along the line I had skipped a step or made a mistake. This meant that I had to disassemble everything I’d completed and go back to that point, of course. It was a very humbling experience, and I had to work hard not to let the frustration get to me and make me quit. In the end, I think that working through those failures helped to build a lot of grit and patience in me.

My hand-eye coordination was improving, as well: I was learning to use tools properly and handle small pieces carefully, often in awkward, tight spaces. Using the remote control to operate the car helped a lot, too—but that came later, after I was able to successfully build the car. At any rate, in my opinion nothing can replace the lessons you learn from burning your finger on a soldering iron, cutting your hand with an X-ACTO knife, or jabbing yourself with a Phillips-head screwdriver. It was visceral and real—something a video game can’t quite simulate.

The Friendship Factor

By the time I had built my first car, and then crashed it and rebuilt it a few times, I had saved up enough money to buy my next one, which was a Big Foot truck. It was much bigger than the Grasshopper, and about three times as complicated to build. So even though I had a fair amount of experience by that point, it still took me more than three weeks to complete. Once I did, though, I spent the next three months racing it and playing with it. 

My friends and I ended up creating an entire ecosystem around our RC cars. We were not only building the cars, but finding scrap wood and metal to create ramps and obstacle courses for them. We were digging up our backyards and making dirt pits and basically doing all kinds of stuff that our parents freaked out about, once they realized the havoc we were wreaking on their properties.

Ultimately, building RC cars involved both long periods of isolation, and long periods of bonding socially, and for me, the balance was great. It was the best of both worlds, teaching me both how to rely on myself, and how to cooperate and “play nice” with others. I would spend hours on end trying to figure stuff out by myself, and then seek the help of my friends for the things I couldn’t do alone. We would spend entire days and weekends racing our cars and repairing them on the spot whenever someone would crash. We were an extremely cooperative group, and at the same time, fiercely competitive. It taught me that you can be both; the two aren’t mutually exclusive.

Compartmentalizing Complexity

Eventually, I found that I had gained enough experience to move on to gas-powered RC cars like the Burns. It was a scaled-down version of a real, gas-powered buggy car. Enormously complex to build, it took me almost six months to master, and gave me a real appreciation of how real cars actually work, and how much goes into engineering machines like this. 

I learned a lot by learning to break down the systems of cars into smaller systems, which were much more manageable to understand on their own: for example, I would focus on learning and building the steering mechanism, and once I had mastered it, I could move on to the transmission, the electrical system, and so on. Then I had to connect the systems together, and make sure they all worked correctly together.

But my most enduring takeaway was that, by building a good foundation, I was able to master these machines inside and out—something most adults can’t even do, and back then I was just a kid. This prepared me to take on larger challenges, because I knew that, even though I might not seem capable at the start, I could eventually figure things out. This lesson has served me well ever since.

My RC obsession would last all the way through high school, fizzling out just after senior year.

During that time, however, the things it taught me affected my life and growth in ways that I only began to really appreciate as an adult. I realize that to some, hobbies like RC cars might seem to be frivolous—and expensive—amusements that have little to do with “real life.”  But my experience has taught me the opposite. For example, I have no doubt that my experience building and operating RC cars helped me ace my college classes like Organic Chemistry which required strong 3D visual skills and also in business by honing my tenacity and patience to start over again and again after each failure. 

I’m not saying that every hobby is valuable, of course. But I think it’s absolutely true that opportunities and experiences can be found in unconventional places, and that sometimes our personal interests teach us things that we didn’t even know we need to know, in ways that are more interesting and impactful than we could have ever predicted.