Posted by Anton Abaya.
Coach on team #419, Rambots, from UMass Boston / BC High and NASA, Mathsoft, Solidworks.
Posted on 4/29/2000 10:26 PM MST
In Reply to: What the acronym really stands for posted by Kate on 4/29/2000 9:45 AM MST:
To Colleen, (note my letter was a general statement and not really a response to yours. but here's a more direct response)
YES! That is our goal. That was Dean's goal, to change the spirit of competition and competitiveness and bring it to a higher level and into gracious professionalism! In that, FIRST has boldly tried to incorporate the values of teamwork and cooperation, into a major stressful, expensive, and difficult task of working with people that you do not necessarily have to get along with.
I had my fair share of attitude problems from many people. And in many cases, I tried to not only coexist with them, win their trust, praise them, and buddy up with them, BUT I also tried to change them. To alter what I see as bad character traits by winning them rather than fighting them was the best way I found. Complete change is always an impossibility, but in the end, I was happy to have worked things out with them, and I was happy to have been able to make them better persons. In many cases, I even had to change myself becuase I knew I had some character flaws as well. It's part of growing up, a process that never ends.
We cannot always choose who we work with. It's one of the lessons one will learn in FIRST. The next thing to learn is how to get along, or how to change the person you do not like, or even how to change yourself to work with that person. The future will bring a whole variety of people who you wish you never had to work with, have bad attitudes, have rude personalities, and just be plain difficult. But it's this diversity that makes FIRST so interesting!
Just imagine if everyone was always cheerful, helpful, generous, lively, loving, caring, thoughtful, and non-violent... God what a boring world this would be. I need some arrogant, rude, stupid, annoying, irritating, and 'full-of-himself' types of people ONCE in a while. It keeps me sane, it keeps everyone sane from all the goodness in FIRST. A balance so to speak.
So you lost in a competition. So you lost in the awards. So you lost in pleasing people around you. SO WHAT? Too many factors involved. I mean seriously! We're learning right? If say we were given 10 years to design and build a robot for this year's competition, start a team of students, engineers, have giveaways, get sponsors, the works -- 10 years would be a lot of time and would allow you to do things perfectly. But nope, that'd be less exciting. The challenge is there to do your best and show it! If you lazily built a robot, then you do not deserve praise. But if you poured your heart out, the hell with a trophy for you know what you are capable of.
Every problem I faced, every hardship I had to go through, and every failure I had, all added to every joy, knowledge, experience, and greatness I found as well. I treated every negative experience as a mere pixels in the entire picture. Without them, there wouldn't be a picture.
FIRST is a gift that sprouts more gifts. But to get to those other gifts, one must experience those hardships, stresses, hassles, and even those people that have hurt you. But little by little, as we get more people involved, as WE set the ideals of FIRST, as we set examples to rookies and newcomers, then we will, little by little, slowly change the world.
Long live FIRST.
ANTON ABAYA
Rambots #419
UMass Boston / BC High