A Doing Word…

We just completed this 600 km loop as a fun excursion from our base of Chiang Mai and something that Jen can do as she recovers from her scooter accident.

Despite a rental promise of a Toyota they gave us a very old and beat up Suzuki with 145,000 KM on it. It was fine but accelerated only with pedal-to-the-medal coaxing, and even then, only slowly.

The loop is windy and narrow and busy will all kinds of vehicles, which means there’s a lot of need for tricky passing. The procedure goes something like this:

1. As soon as an opportunity appears to be possible, floor it and accelerate towards the target vehicle ahead.
2. If it still looks good, move to the passing/oncoming lane and continue flooring it as the little engine gives it all and revs push past 5k. It’s not at all clear at this point if it’s going to work, but if you don’t do it then you have no chance of succeeding.
3. The moment of decision comes as the front of your car reaches the rear tire of the target vehicle. It’s the last easy moment to abort, and future acceleration no longer factors significantly into the equation unless you have a much more powerful car than I do. The work has been done, now it’s just the velocity of you, your target vehicle, and anything oncoming like a vehicle or a blind spot. This is easier to judge than predicting acceleration of a Suzuki.
4. If you go for it then it is usually a surprisingly quick and straightforward few seconds until success. If it’s not then you probably shouldn’t have gone for it in the first place and perhaps you rethink your criteria. As you pass your velocity relative to the target car continues as it did for the first 20% of it and the brain is pretty good at extrapolating the outcome from there.
5. You enjoy the wide-open road of possibilities ahead!

When you move into the passing lane you’ve done most of the work but so far have no demonstrable success. You’ve only begun to overtake. Yet the outcome at this point is likely enough that you’re about to bet your life and others on it, yet it is primarily just taking advantage of the work that’s been done prior.

This struck me as much like many endeavors in life.

When you’re working hard to become something new it can be very hard to see the progress towards the goal. There is so much work and, sure, you can appreciate the joy of learning and all that, but it’s also really nice to see some progress. The work comes before the success, and then from there, the success appears relatively easy.

You see this in stories about business leaders, actors, rock stars, scientists: “Yes, success came to me overnight, after 18 years of hard work”. I thought about Rick starting his writing career – working hard to take classes, learn, write and write and rewrite drafts before I even read the last one.

The chicken does come before the egg. It has to grow up, learn, stay safe, find food, not get run over, stay healthy, find a mate, and have chicken sex. After all that work then yes, there is an egg that appears almost by magic.

If you’re working hard on something new, keep going! You might have just passed the rear wheel!