I was never one to take risks. Often hidden in the background of every situation, I would pass on opportunities out of the fear of failure. I even passed on the opportunity to drive the robot. I was scared I would fail. Scared I would crash the robot. Scared of opportunity. 

I never signed up to try out, but it did not make a difference. The robot was finished early. The team had months to record the competition submissions. Everyone on the team ended up trying out… including me. The team, my friends, pressured me into pushing the fear of failure aside and I decided to try and race the robot through the course. The competition was a time trial: dodge the cones and complete the course. 

My first run of the course was far from perfect, hitting cones and going slow. By the end of the course; however, I felt in control. As I was running the course, I realized there was no true risk of going faster. Everyone else has hit cones on their runs. I recalled back to just minutes before where I would go out to reset the course after each run. I recalled the team mentor joking, “Aww, you ruined the course,” as the robot whipped a cone across the floor from a bad turn. I recalled the many failures that came from all of the previous attempts. If I’m going to hit a cone, I might as well go fast. I stopped fearing hitting the cones and instead challenged myself to get as close as possible, only slowing down when necessary. The robot raced into the finish, with just a single fallen cone laying in the course. “37.93,” the mentor called out as he stopped the timer. The run was far from perfect, but it was fast.

My second run was even better than I could have hoped for. I guided the robot through the course and around the cones with no problem. It felt as if I was the one on the course speeding past the cones, and in a way, a part of me was out there. Hours of effort and dedication spent designing, building, and fixing the robot, was finally paying off. The robot that I spent the past two years of my life creating was now responding to my every command, dodging cones with ease and speeding to the finish seconds ahead of the best time. 

To think that I was going to pass on this opportunity seems crazy in retrospect, but at the time, I was too scared of failure to drive the robot. My friends and the team pushed past my fears and got me to drive the robot, but the true experience gained was not driving the robot; instead, it was the lesson I learned on my first run. Opportunities come with failure, and the risk of passing up the opportunity is often greater than the risk of failing. Pushing my fears aside got me to compete and pushing them away again got me to succeed.