10 things racing cars taught me about life and business

If you talk with me for more than 15 minutes it becomes pretty obvious I have a slightly unhealthy obsession with cars and racing them. Maybe it’s from growing up in metro Detroit, maybe it’s years of engineering school, or my first few jobs in the automotive industry that really nurtured the illness. Whatever the root cause, I’ve learned more from racing than simply shuffling a car around a few turns.

If I had to synthesize it into a tweet it’d be:

Things change. Some things are out of your control so get comfortable with it. Learn to adapt and keep trying new things.

But if you’ll indulge me and allow me to expand on that thought a little more, it’d be these 10 things I’ve learned from racing cars that have had the greatest impact on my life off the track.

1. It’s going to rain

This could be a post all on its own. A book, even. Both literally and figuratively, at some point it’s going to rain. Life rarely…scratch that, never goes according to plan. And that’s okay. Just because something isn’t directly in your control doesn’t mean you can’t do anything about it. I would spend so much time hoping things wouldn’t go wrong, fingers crossed that it all goes perfect, only to feel that rush of disappointment when it doesn’t go to plan.

On a long enough timeline it will rain, don’t dread it. Expect it and adapt. This perspective has helped me to see opportunities in the bumps.

“Something horrible happened!” Yeah, of course it did. And it always will, eventually. What will you do about it and how will you greet adversity when it comes to your door?

Bad things will happen and at the worst times. But the flip side is there are hidden opportunities (like passing a GT2 RS that you can never overtake in the dry), and you get to choose how you accept and approach them. This is where you jump into problem-solving mode. Expect that it will rain and be dynamic in how you adapt.

2. You’ll suck at first. But try anyway

There are few things scarier than climbing in the driver’s seat, putting on a helmet, and lining up on the grid for the first time with zero track experience and a strong desire not to crash. The only person who’s more scared than you are is the instructor climbing in the passenger seat next to you. It’s intimidating. There’s so much information to take in and so much to process that early on it’s impossible to be any good.

Developing skills takes time. In the meantime, grass is still considered track, right?

After my very first session I felt worthless, and I couldn’t comprehend how people in the same car as mine could possibly be so fast and with so little effort. It was clear; I sucked and it was completely expected. Well, my instructor expected it. My delusions of grandeur had significantly different expectations.

So, you will suck. But not starting won’t make you better, and this applies to anything you want to learn or try. From racing cars, starting a business, to tackling a data project, even interpersonal relationships, it all takes time on task to build the skills.

There are no warp whistles to help you skip the first level. You’re going to need to:

• Get started
• Learn to rely on help from others
• Break things into smaller manageable pieces and eat the elephant one bite at a time. (nano…chomps even. Sorry, I couldn’t help myself).

You’ll start getting better, I promise.

3. You’re going to make mistakes. Try to make them survivable

It’s hard to know where the limits are until you’ve crossed them. And if you’re trying hard enough, at some point you’ll cross them. Anyone can do the minimum of taking no risks and slowly navigating their way through a track (or life). That might be fine for some people.

Not me, and if you’re reading this, probably not you either. To get better, to get rewarding outcomes, you need to push the perceived limits. That means trying new things, moving past your comfort zone, taking new approaches, challenging what you thought or KNEW to be “the way.”

When you try new things it might not work and you might not be good at it, but it’s still worth testing. In fact, most of the learning and growing happens here. Make a hypothesis and take small, survivable iterations to validate it. Don’t take those YOLO risks; that’s gambling not growing. (Unless you really know what you’re doing)

Keep trying new things, keep testing your assumptions, play in traffic and make some mistakes, but make them survivable so you can try again.

4. Everything changes at the limit

The world is built for the middle section of the bell curve. We design our products, processes and services here and dismiss the rest as “edge cases.”

“These are so rare!”

“The customer doesn’t care!”

It isn’t obvious, but almost everything you want to instinctually do at the limit in a race car will end poorly.

In a race car (once you’re good) you don’t live in that middle zone where normal actions, physics or back-up plans work. In fact when you’re “at the limit,” a lot of the things you expect to work not only don’t, but often yield catastrophic results.

Pop quiz:

You’re taking a freeway on-ramp and you realize you are going just a little too fast. What do you do?

You probably said, “Duh, lift off the throttle and push the brakes.”

But at the limit, it’s probably one of the most dangerous things you can do. At the limit of grip, lifting off of the throttle will take the weight off the back of the car and shift it forward. The result: you are now seeing the rear and front of the car trade places repeatedly while you wonder what happened.

In business, things that feel safe start to rapidly fall apart at the limits. Bad quarter results? “Let’s trim the marketing budget!” If you have a data-driven marketing team delivering high return on ad spend (ROAS) campaigns, this “safe” cost-cutting tactic is the business equivalent to lifting off the throttle mid-turn. Best case, it massively slows you down. The more likely scenario is it sends you into a spinning “code brown” that will be hard (if not impossible) to recover from.

Limit solutions work for the middle, but middle solutions don’t work at the limit. By accounting for edge cases you will cover the middle while delivering something special that challenges conventional ‘average’ solutions.

5. Just because it worked doesn’t mean it will keep working

It’s really easy to find something that works and do it over and over again. Running the same play or taking the same line works…until it doesn’t.

You can’t be so dogmatically committed to what worked in the past. You must be willing to adjust, take a different line, try something new and maybe find a better way.

The book “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There” sums this up perfectly.

The world is dynamic and we need to adapt to changing conditions. Be brave enough to take a different line even if it seems scary and unfamiliar (see lessons 2 and 3). Failing to do so will eventually put you into a wall.

We’ve seen too many examples of someone using emotion and what they know works from their past life only to deploy it, with millions of dollars invested, and find out the world turned and left their antiquated strategy behind. Constantly test and iterate with a data-driven approach to see what works now, not what worked before.

“It’s worked before. I’ll keep doing it this way” — Blockbuster, Taxis, Kodak, BlackBerry, Nokia

Pushing out of your comfort zone to test new things will put you miles ahead of everyone doing the “safe” thing. Need some aural inspiration? May I suggest “Off That” by Jay Z? We made a playlist to help you out.

6. Look at the data and learn what it’s telling you

Did you really think I would make a list that didn’t involve looking at the data? With the right objective and strategy in place data is immensely valuable. It tells you what’s working and what isn’t. Data analytics lets you in on the secrets hidden below the surface tucked away from our human perceptions, experiences and emotions. And it lets you use cool jargon like “Artificial Neural Networks” “Machine Learning” and “AI.”

Collecting the right data and figuring out what it’s telling you is the best thing you can do beyond getting started. That’s true for businesses and race cars.

At the track, putting an AIM Solo2 on board will tell you everything you need to know and even give real-time feedback on what’s working or what needs a tweak.

If only it was that easy for businesses. Plugging in a single device and having it give you suggestions on what to test next would be great. And while it’s not THAT easy, it is within reach. We built our business around that very thing. Helping marketing and product teams get better outcomes with Agile data-driven strategies, and AI analytics services to solve data problems.

Learning what the data is telling you will guide you to better decisions and inspire you to test more things to see/prove what will work.

This section also lets me inject one of my favorite quotes:

“Hold on to what is useful, abandon what is useless and add what is uniquely your own.” — Bruce Lee

7. Look ahead. But not that far ahead

Keeping your eyes up and being smooth are the foundation of driving fast. Having a solid objective, strategy and appropriately planning for the future is the life and business equivalent.

Looking ahead a turn or two helps you see traffic, obstacles, trends, and gives you an idea of what’s happening so you can adapt. Looking just far enough ahead smooths your line, improves your response time and helps you make the right decisions now to give you the best result in the future.

Not looking and planning far enough ahead makes you reactionary. You’re no longer driving your race; you’re constantly reacting to what is happening to you, but what if you look TOO far ahead?

Five-year plans are bullshit.

I said what I said.

I know some people like to sit in a room, build intricate 5 or even 10-year strategies and financial models, and play the game of “Corporation” rather than actually executing. The entire time everyone in that room knows they’re lying to themselves and the stakeholders they’re presenting to. You learn so much more by doing, testing and iterating (see lessons 1–5).

Have a long term vision of where you’re going, but really focus on the three turns in front of you (or the next 18 months). Looking right off your front bumper, living one fiscal quarter at a time is also a losing strategy.

8. It’s all about balance

Embarrassingly, while I picked this up quickly at the track, this life example took me far too long to learn.

Life is this funny balance between family, friends, goals, work, learning, being outside of your comfort zone, risk, trying, failing, supporting and challenging others. When all of these are in some level of balance the results are really beautiful, you and the people around you can grow and you attract a lot of positivity. One imbalance and everything goes sideways.

In a race car you’re transferring weight from wheel to wheel and balancing the variables while everything around you is constantly changing. Push on the brakes — weight shifts to the front, step on the gas — weight shifts to the back, turn left — weight shifts right, turn right — weight shifts left.

As you adapt to changing environments and needs you start to learn how to keep the right balance for the best results.

9. There’s someone who knows more than you

Find them, and shut up long enough to hear them. While this seems obvious enough it’s something I didn’t appreciate for the longest time. Especially the shutting up and listening part.

At track events you meet a lot of great people with a ton of knowledge, experience and expertise who are dying to share it. It’s intimidating at first to risk looking like a moron and asking for help, asking for advice, asking what has worked for someone else or even asking them to give you feedback on why something might not be working for you.

Invariably, someone smarter than you will be willing to help you and that knowledge transfer is golden. It’s the difference between learning how to swing and getting carried to third base. The ultimate hack and shortcut to rapidly growing in any area of life is finding just one person and asking them for help and feedback.

Over the years people who were my instructors have become pretty good friends who I ask for advice on a number of topics.

From someone who used to be too intimidated to ask for help for not wanting to look like an idiot, being forced to has opened me up to asking other people for help in other areas. I even joined Lunchclub to connect with more subject matter experts to learn how they approached challenging situations. If you haven’t signed up for Lunchclub, I highly recommend it.

One of the biggest goals I have set for myself over the last three years has been to listen more, ask better questions, and get access to the people who know more than I do. It’s a work in progress.

10. Keep going

No matter what happens, the show goes on. Through the good, the bad and the challenging, the world keeps moving. Sitting on the sidelines won’t change that fact. You won’t get better by not trying. Every time I get hung up I remind myself that someone less capable is doing the thing I want to do.

So, keep going.

Keep learning, executing, and trying the things that scare you.

Keep being okay being bad at something.

Keep asking for help.

Keep helping others when you have the tools to help.

While along the way it may get difficult, just keep going.

If you managed to make it this far and still have free time, here are a few laps around VIR