The more you give, the more you get

A UK finalist for the FIRST^® Leadership Award, Fabian is one of the young people showing what leadership in FIRST^® Tech Challenge really looks like.

Partway through his first-ever regional competition, Fabian disappeared.

His team had every reason to feel confident that morning. Fabian had led the build of a very strong robot, and competition day was the moment to show it off. Instead, nobody could find him.

“He disappeared right at the start,” remembers Matt Fry, his teacher and team lead. “We didn’t know where he was – and we found him helping a team who had arrived without a working robot. He managed to sort that all out for them.”

It’s the story Matt tells over and over, and it’s easy to see why. Here was someone who’d poured months into his own machine, spending the biggest day of the season rebuilding somebody else’s. And it cost him nothing: his team still placed near the top of the robot game that day.

For Fabian, that day was also the start of understanding what the programme is really about. “It’s not just about building robots – not just making the best machine you possibly can. It’s about gaining skills not just in robotics, but in organisation, and planning and communication – all those vital skills that FIRST^® Tech Challenge encourages.”

Ask him why he’d make his own competitors better, and he doesn’t hesitate.

“It’s not about helping someone with the hope of them helping you. The point of the programme is to learn. If you help other people, they will help you too – everyone gains. The more you give, the more you get.”

Guiding the thinking, not doing it

That instinct has matured into something more deliberate: coaching. When Fabian stepped back from competing this year, his school fielded a completely rookie team, Syntax Terrors. Fabian could have handed them answers. He chose not to.

“You guide the thinking, but you make sure you don’t do the thinking for them.”

Teaching yourself the hard stuff

In his FIRST^® Leadership Award interview, the judges heard how Fabian taught himself CAD and finite element analysis – engineering tools with no classroom or course to follow. His method turns out to be the same questioning approach, pointed inward.

“The first and most important thing is getting as much exposure as you can to FIRST^® Tech Challenge and the global community. And then the second part is being really curious about everything you see. If it’s something you don’t know how to do, break it down as much as you can until it’s something you can understand, and build out from there.”

Taking the mission to the top

The instinct to make everyone around him better didn’t stay at his own competition table. Representing Great Britain internationally, Fabian and his teammates built an outreach project around a simple question: what’s stopping more young people from getting this opportunity?

His competing days may be done, but Fabian isn’t going anywhere. He still volunteers as a Game Changer, passing on what he knows to newer teams. And Matt has learned that when Fabian says something will work, it usually does. “There’s an element of trust you can have in someone like Fabian, who’s got that capacity to have thought it all through and come back and say: yeah, this will work. And in a very strange way, it always does.”

The more you give, the more you get. He’s still proving it.

Join the movement

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