Hi everyone, what coping mechanisms do you have to still be happy after seeing every revealed robot be better than yours?
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Keep moving forward and improving your own bot in little ways, without being focused on what you donât have.
A. youâre not likely to run into these teams at your event or even end up in the same divisions at worlds. You will run into some but not most.
B. You have time before events and all season long to keep working. Yay for No Bag Day! A motivated team can learn from the reveals and make improvements they didnât think of before
C. A cool video does not win championships, driver practice and focus do. If your team practices and has an amazing driver and nothing but a good blocking wall, the best defense can shut down any âamazingâ offense robot out there
D. Everything looks good in a video in a lab with controlled conditions. On the real field they will not be able to perform like that. 5 other robots will be around doing their own thing and getting in the way
Edit: for a personal example of our team of what @Akash_Rastogi pointed out below about looking at how your team has grown
Last year we had just a chassis and were building our scoring mechanism at the first official event. This year we are 80% through the scoring mechanism and the chassis is done before the week 0 we were supposed to go to. We missed that goal now which was a bitter pill for the students yesterday, but compared to where we were this time last year we vastly improved
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Every team and every individual in this competition is capable of achieving great things. Try to measure yourself against your former self and your teamâs prior performances.
External entities can be a gauge of overall direction, but your goals each year should focus on improving upon your own historical individual and team performance.
I get it, but you can use some of these cool examples of robots and teams as motivation to improve at least one thing about your team or robot in the coming weeks or even next year.
Success is iterative, please give yourself time to celebrate what youâre doing right before you look elsewhere for inspiration to make improvements.
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Compare the performance of most of those robots at their first event to their reveal videos. What you see on the reveal is not necessarily what you get on the field (there are exceptions, of course). In many cases, the edited best-of compilation is not reality and a person can take solace understanding that.
Itâs an equivalent question to ask how you stop competition depression, especially for regionals. How do you cope when you know that year after year some teams consistently bring robots with ability that your robot cannot match.
I cope by enjoying the ride. Was it fulfilling to solve some problems, to see your design come to life, to watch students learn and grow in multiple ways?
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Keep in mind that the reveal videos only show when everything was working right, and before they got hit by a defender at warp factor seven.
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Reminding myself that my team won district champs in 2022 and consistently ends up alliance captains at events.
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If you go into battle thinking everyone else is better than you, youâve already lost the war
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Bury my head in the sand.
Which is less âcoping mechanismâ and more âwe just had to roll back to an AM14U chassis on Thursday and we play Week 2â, but itâs quite effective!
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âComparison is the thief of joyâ
-Theodore Roosevelt
Seriously though, a personâs quality of life greatly increases when they stop comparing themselves and their accomplishments to others.
Be proud of what youâve made. If you enjoyed the robot building process and learned something, thatâs all that matters. At the same time, you can be happy that others accomplished something so great.
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Meh. Thereâs a serious selection bias there â there are thousands of teams, and only, what, a couple dozen have posted reveal videos? Thereâs a reason that the very large majority of teams havenât posted a video.
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Everyday <movie star> doesnât look as good as they do on the screen. Who knows how many takes each shot took. So it is with robots. As @Akash_Rastogi said âmeasure yourself against your former self and your teamâs prior performanceâ â the important things is that you are moving in the right direction. If you can get even just 10% percent better each year, think where you will be in a few years!
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This⌠thing⌠comparing yourself to others (teams, robots, or you as an individual) is a known issue with social media. Turns out that people aged 13-24 are especially susceptible to it as well, and thatâs nearly every student and young mentor in FRC!
- Donât compare your holistic story to some other teamâs highlight reel without defenders involved
- Actively identify and acknowledge things youâre thankful for, and things you/your teams has improved upon internally
- Donât watch every single reveal video. I try to avoid them.
- Be a part of the cure. When youâre at an event, or browsing a build thread, or seeing a clip online from another team that isnât a super fancy, find something positive or encouraging to tell them, it can make all the difference in the world.*
*In 2010, my first year coaching full-time, we had a not-great robot, didnât get picked for playoffs, and only got to go to one event. But at that event a coach from another team came by, dragging along another coach, and pointed to our robot and said: âsee? thatâs what the wiring and pneumatics in our robot should look like! how do you guys do that?â and I have clearly not forgotten the impression it left on me.
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In addition to all of this, realize that there are thousands of teams that did not create reveal videos. This may be a strategic decision by some, and a lack of resources by others, but many MANY teams robots either arenât completed yet or donât feel confident in their abilities yet.
This is one of the reasons Open Alliance is so beneficial. Seeing the work it took to get to the final product is informative and hopefully helps everyone improve in small (or large) ways.
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If you run the numbers⌠(I donât have a current total on number of robots revealed)
But there are over 3000 teams competing this year, we only see a fraction of them in the reveals. If we were generous and said 300 teams revealed and are done already (thatâs very very generous) then roughly 10% of teams have their robots complete right now and ready to show off to the world.
The rest of the 90% are still working, still adding or in some cases redoing design concepts because they didnât got better ideas til just last night or from watching week 0 events. There will be teams that show up at the event thinking you build it there.
If your team has a mostly working robot at this point you are doing well by most standards.
You didnât say you were unhappy or to what extent. If you think you have a problem that effects you, consider professional help if all these wonderful posts donât do the job for you. Hereâs a modest start that actually is somewhat similar to the above posts:
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Itâs the simple solutions to the game that absolutely trivialize the challenges that I am afraid of. I.e. Barker Redbacks.
Beyond simple solutions that play the game well I just enjoy the cool machining, interesting robot architecture, and clean integration.
Teams with complex subsystems likely wonât have those working at full potential until week 5 at the earliest, with many teams not able to get the most out of their complex bots until AFTER worlds. At that point the jealousy or similar should have passed.
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Reveal videos are highlight reels of the robot. In between shots that robot made terrible mistakes and oppsies.
It doesnât matter how good the video is or robot looks, if it doesnât perform on the field video is wonât matter.
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Reveals are the Instagram of robotics
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I have the perspective of an old person who is here to see students thrive and grow, so seeing any team doing great stuff is thrilling. However, I get not knowing how your team compares with others, and feeling low when you see something cool that you didnât come up with or build. If thatâs how youâre feeling then I suggest not watching, as others have said reveals are curated and not a realistic view of how teams and robots are really doing. Try to avoid stuff that makes you compare yourself to unrealistic expectations. Social media is the worst at it, but robot reveals can contribute to the problem too.
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Keep in mind that a lot of reveals show the bot being perfect, and a lot of the time, thatâs not always the case. So just keep in mind for every âperfect autoâ thereâs probably about 50 other autos not on camera that were all over the place.