[Garret]

During my final season of FLL my team lost at our state championship, because of a bug in the NXT software. We had won every competition we had went to up to until then, and we were crushed by the loss, despite taking home awards. For a long time I was very bitter about losing. I was angry because I had lost to teams that were "sucky" and had terrible robots.

My father then told me that bringing down the achievements of those who beat you is dumb. If I called those who beat me sucky, that means I must have sucked worse. The same goes for teams who didn't do as good as us, if everyone else sucked, then I am better than sucky, not so great of an achievement. So I always try to have my team members and the FLL teams I mentor think about how we have done well, not how other teams did bad.

Instead of moping about always losing in the past, my team has made a real effort to improve ourselves. Instead of holding a grudge against those that beat us, we instead have emulated them.

All of this may seem like common sense to some people, but for me realizing this was a big deal as I am incredibly competitive.

This year despite having a rather poor record at the LA regional (we had electrical and some programming bugs early on) and then being slaughtered in the LA regional quarterfinals, our team is still incredibly proud of how well we did, this is the best robot we have built.

I don't know if I make any sense, but basically I agree with everything in the OP, I could not have said it better myself.