What I Learned from the Race Track

The deeper your professional expertise, the broader your life outside of work needs to be. It provides context, it grounds you, and it stops you from being one of those weirdos deep into a sub- sub- sub-forum on Reddit where you argue about the most insignificant things. The other thing is does—for me, anyway—is provide parallels and comparisons. We actually talked about that on a recent 2Bobs episode, where Blair talked about how “sales is like ______” and then filled in that blank with several things.

This week, I want to talk about what I’ve learned from teaching motorcycle racing, or even just riding motorcycles. It’s okay, though; you might find it interesting even if you’ve never been on one!

Background

I grew up riding motorcycles in the remote parts of Guatemala. It’s how we got around, it was cheap, and we could get places where a normal vehicle might have struggled. Then I came to the US for the latter half of high school and didn’t ride again until I was in my 30s. It just hit me about how much I missed it, so I bought a street bike and riding became a big part of my life again. More detail for motorcycle lovers below.¹

Your Hobby Selection

I didn’t realize until I was deeply into them that I tend to pick personal pursuits that require concentration. This means that it forces other thoughts out of my mind, which is the whole point for me. If I’m still thinking about work, it’s not relaxing. We’re all different, and you may pick your pursuits for other purposes: to relax, to learn, to perfect a skill, or whatever.

Part of what motivates me, besides crowding out my work life, is to try to master something. Not that I ever really do, but there’s a satisfaction (for me) in understanding something and continuing to learn, deeply, by pulling things apart, breaking them down, practicing little things, and then putting a little bit of progress down, layer after layer. I’m particularly drawn to personal pursuits that combine art and science together (photography, anyone?). Riding provides all those things for me.

Lessons from High Performance Riding

Here are some of the parallels that have really struck me between racing and the creativity and marketing that we do in this industry:

• Your Vision Controls Everything: You go where you look. You’ve heard various phrases that mimic this, too: if you aim for nothing, you’ll hit it every time. So you have to train your eyes to look to where you want to go and your body will naturally follow. You need to look far enough ahead to be going as fast as you can on an exit, but if you look too far ahead, you’ll miss obstacles closer at hand. That applies to the balance between the “now” and the “future” when you think about financials. Yes, be around so that the future matters, but don’t eat away at your future too much to accomplish that.
• Scanning w/o Target Fixation: In a similar way, if you fixate on a particular danger on the track that you want to avoid, you’ll probably hit it. Anybody come to mind here? Maybe a fixation on the existential dangers of AI? People worrying themselves to death over that probably will become extinct…instead of learning how to use it to change their productivity habits.
• Slow Down to Speed Up: Where you really gain speed on a race track is to power out of the corners faster than your opponent. To do that, you have to enter the corner at a slow enough speed so that you are fully under control, get the bike turned while lean angle is less dangerous, and then kick some ass. If you fly into a corner in a hurry, you’ve got too much going on, you’re on the edge of control, and you don’t get a powerful exit. Does this maybe remind you of slowing down and doing some strategy and planning before you execute?
• What Gets Measured Gets Managed: Peter Drucker was famous for that quip, and it’s absolutely true. That’s why you don’t just measure lap speeds, but times through specific sections on a course to see where you are losing time. My best time at Barber was 1:46. To put that in perspective, the world record is 1:22. Ouch. There are all sorts of things to measure at a firm. Don’t get carried away, but don’t be afraid of data.
• Deep Breathing is Calming: We often underestimate the role that our physical body and physiology plays in our success. Sleep poorly and your attitude is impacted. Take a few deep breaths before you respond to a nasty email or disrespectful comment in a meeting and you’ll think more clearly. This absolutely applies before any presentation. “Deep, cleansing breaths.”
• Constant Steering Corrections are Essential: Unless you make them, you’re going to keep hitting things. These corrections need to be smooth, but they need to be definite. Leadership is a lot like that, too. You have to make lots of decisions, and you’ll need to learn from the ones that you make. Running a firm without lots of small corrections—and maybe a few big ones from time to time—is about as likely to work as taking a lap without ever touching the bars or moving your body to impact the CofG.
• Higher Speeds Create More Danger: How this applies to racing is obvious, but the intriguing comparison for me is the dangers of mismanaging a high growth rate. If you aren’t careful enough on a race track at high speeds, you can die, and I’ve had riding mates die. But when growing fast, you don’t want to mismanage hasty hires, get sloppy about how you onboard clients, ease up on enforcing processes, or get too far over your skis from a financial standpoint.
• Stay Loose on the Bars: Float with the obstacles. Don’t grip too tightly. Let things happen, within reason. Don’t be a control freak. The steering geometry of motorcycles (and bicycles) means that they are self-correcting and want to stay upright. When you tense up and don’t let that bike underneath you do its thing, you start to lose control. Same with your business. Let it move around a little and don’t try to control every single thing. Be in charge, but not a control freak.
• Physics Don’t Care About Your Feelings: This why I’ll never anthropomorphize a vehicle and name it something cute, as if somehow it’s now less likely to kill me. You know what else doesn’t care about your feelings? Your financial statements, or even your bank. The rules of gravity are as binding as the rules of bankruptcy, and don’t think (for example) that because you’re “Purpose Driven” you’ll be given a pass on the basic rules of business.
• Book Knowledge Isn’t a Substitute for Hands On Knowledge: Sure, do instruction, have written processes, and make people go through an orientation phase, but they’ll have to see you in action, and then they’ll have to be in action themselves. There’s only so much learning that can be done before you put people in front of the live fire of client situations, where the real learning takes place and sticks.
• Your Instincts Aren’t Always Best: Not too many generations ago, we were barely walking upright and then running in the forest. Our eyesight and instincts haven’t evolved as quickly as our machinery. Hitting 185 mph on a straight is not the same thing as swinging in the jungle, and our instincts to stare, to tighten, and to freeze have to be managed. The same is true in your firm. A lot is at stake and your team has to make quick decisions. It’ll take time to retrain their instincts. Just like we train horses  by desensitizing them (see the outset of this podcast episode by Jessica Melugin) to other animals and fences and having a bit in their mouth, so we need to understand our natural instincts and curb them for high performance.

Systems Thinking

I really like what Kevin Richardson wrote one time:

I race motorcycles. I’m also a 20+ year veteran of user experience research. Believe it or not there are similarities. When I race, I have my knee on the ground as I lean the bike through the turns and I’m doing 150mph down the straights. And there are riders who are much faster than me. My parents do not approve. My family worries. Friends and colleagues think I must be an adrenaline junkie, feeding off the danger. Not true. Racing, like User Experience (UX) research, is all about understanding the parameters of the system within which you operate, identifying the goals you are trying to achieve through your interaction with that system, creating a design that supports those goals and, perhaps most importantly, mitigating risk.

He's exactly right. I was an above average racing fundamentals instructor and a very average instructor on the track. How was I able to teach people? Because I learned a system from Keith Code that gave me the framework to understand high performance riding, first, and then to communicate it well. It was 100% systems thinking, and I benefited from what someone else developed. They were the ones who made me a good teacher, and you can do the same for your team.

But even with a strong system, you still make mistakes. Most of the time you survive them, though, and learn. That terrifying exploration can tell you that the envelope is bigger than you thought, that you need to not be distracted by certain things, or whatever, but you don’t learn without pressing. You enter a corner too hot…and don’t die…and that gives you the confidence to reach further. The same as in business.

But eventually you get into a flow. This example isn’t lightning fast, but it’s a “flow” of one lap around a race track two years ago on my street bike. It just feels wonderful. I see little things I could have done differently on the last project (or lap), but you realize that you’ve actually done something because you’ve applied yourself.

Your best work comes from a system. From an understanding of the parts and how they contribute to the whole. Some of this is instinctive and some of it we all have to learn.

Creatives…and Perfection

One final lesson, here. A new student might start out doing laps at the Barber Motorsports racing track in two minutes and thirty seconds. By the end of the first two days of learning, she might knock 15 seconds off that. Every two days of learning shaves a few seconds off her times, but at some point the progress slows considerably. It takes enormous mental and physical reps to shave even 2 seconds off an already fast time.

That’s absolutely true in your work for clients, too. “Perfecting” some creative execution may be linear at first, but at some point it’s more exponential. It takes maybe 30% of the time to get that last 10% of improvement.

Is the client paying for that? Does the client even notice it? No and no, usually. Save the pursuit of perfection for your personal life where it doesn’t matter, either. No, that’s not a typo. It’s a much better bumper sticker to say you always give your best, but real life is giving what the job requires and then going home at a more reasonable time.

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¹I purchased a BMW R1100RT on a whim and put nearly 100,000 miles on it, visiting 30+ states. It spiraled from there to the point where I had a dirt bike (KTM 450 EXC), a trials bike (Beta EVO 300 SS), and a dedicated track bike (Ducati ST4s and then Aprilia Tuono), and a dual sport (BMW R1200GS). And then I began teaching at the California Superbike school, flying into tracks all over the country to guide the students who had been assigned to me that day. Here are some pictures: last week on the track on a BMW S1000 RR (no. 23, front right); the unmodified dual-purpose BMW 1200GS at the track; on a Kawasaki 600 in California; on an unmodified BMW RnineT street bike; me (green Kawaski 1000) leading a student (blue)…when then passed me, but why would I show you that picture?