Читать книгу Optimum Drive - Paul F. Gerrard - Страница 16

Chapter 2

The Myth of the “Natural” Talent

Yes, I am saying natural talent is a myth. It appears to be real, but actually, when you dig into their history a bit, you may occasionally find they have never driven a race car before, but they have “driven” something. The love of speed starts really early in life. Even if you’re in your “Autumn,” I would venture that the itch you’re scratching came from your childhood. Raise your hand if you ever did anything risky and dumb as a kid just for the thrill of it. OK, now everybody put your hands down! This is where the seed is planted, and some continue to do “risky dumb stuff” throughout their youth and (if they survive) refine and up the ante (careful not saying upping the risk, because their growing knowledge mitigates the risk increase at each step), and grow comfortable visualizing, planning, executing, analyzing, and refining. Then one day they get a chance to jump in a kart or even a race car – and they fly. They come in and astonished observers ask the most magnificent question that their ego has had the pleasure of hearing: “You sure you’ve never driven one of these before!?!” May I present to you an amazing “natural” talent. Not everyone grew up in an environment that allowed this very useful experimentation that (while they thought they were just playing) gave them a balanced real feel for how they interact with the natural world and ingrained a process that will help them succeed at just about anything they tackle. You see, learning ability is the real talent.

There are other characteristics that differentiate people as well. It’s not just as simple as you’ve either spent your childhood being a daredevil on a Big Wheel or a bike or not. Along with all that is the very real possibility that it went really wrong one day with that plywood ramp or rope swing and you got seriously hurt. Physically you’ve healed, but deep down the psychological scarring remains, and it has a real and negative effect on you at the exact moment you need clarity, not a triggered panic reflex. I have seen this countless times, and it is especially obvious with a student driving and me riding (on a skid pad usually) or when I am giving a hot lap. The instant the car slides, you see the panic attack; some get over it and gain some semblance of control a second or so later, some do not and simply can’t. I would estimate half the population has the sort of trauma-triggered panic buried within that will affect their ability to ever do anything that is risky very well.

There is also the physiological response your body has to fear stimuli that is independent of the trauma you may or may not have had in your past. This is a large variable, and studies and my own experiences have shown that only 10% of the population has the proper “chemical cocktail” that is released during high risk situations to naturally have the ability to think clearly and not panic in “fight or flight” situations. This is a natural dispersion of these risk taker genes that has always occurred in human beings. The 10% are the fighters who protect the village, the warriors (the opposite, ironically, of the “worriers”). The 90% think the 10% are crazy adrenaline junkies, and the 10% think the 90% are boring and live in fear. They are both right; relatively, the 10% have a lot more fun (kids that never grow up), but the 90% tend to be more pragmatic and therefore on the average live a lot longer. Funny enough, due to the influence of the nurture side on us, 90% of people think they are in the 10% and vice versa. There are infinite combinations of these traits, and they have a very large influence on how we learn and what strategy will work best for us.

Now, of course, you are wondering which one you are? Or actually, maybe you already have it pegged. Before we choose teams, you should know that both types have won World Championships (but their personal journeys are vastly different). So, here’s the test: Do you literally laugh at fear? That’s it, are you one of the “adrenaline junkies” who actually have a pleasant response to being scared? Does your “chemical cocktail” allow you to retain cognitive clarity (aka grace under pressure) at precisely those dangerous moments when you should panic, but don’t panic? Do people think of you as brave? Remember, it’s only 10% of the population (and it varies culturally and geographically). However, those 10% are drawn to these types of books and activities so the crosscut of those of you reading is probably more up towards 50/50 and maybe more. Then again, real “fly by the seat of your pants” types don’t like reading about doing stuff, they like doing stuff, and to heck with the instructions. We are if anything interesting.

So, what are the plusses and minuses of each type? It might seem like the “10 percenters” have all the advantages. Driving a race car without being scared – how ridiculously liberating, right!? Well yes, but that can be the issue, they tend to immediately be relatively fast, but… (and you’ve guessed it by now), they tend to crash a lot. Crashing is expensive (so they better have deep pockets), oh, and it is risky so they can get hurt (with physical, financial, and physiological trauma as a result). They get a great majority of the press and attention, so they also get most of the available sponsorship (but don’t kid yourself… still mostly self-funding along the way), but also need lots of second chances as they test everyone’s patience hoping they “mature” before the money runs out or they have a career-ending crash.

The 90%, on the other hand, tend to be very methodical and analytical, much more concerned with everything because they have to take the time to rationalize and mitigate the risk along the way to progress. No “leaps of faith” here. Not very exciting, especially in the formative years, but they steadily grow and can end up being as fast (and seeming as “fearless”) as anyone else. They have crashed a lot less cars along the way, but have had a hard time getting sponsorship, so they were probably self-funded for the long ride to the top (as a paid pro). Most don’t have the financial wherewithal to make it to the top, and many more actually can’t get over the fear to be able to be truly fast. In other words, it’s tough for anyone, there is no defined and set path; we are all unique in our struggle for greatness.

Then there are the select few that become true greats. A level above the best that somehow goes above what the very best 10% or 90% could ever achieve, what would that take? Obviously, it is incredibly rare, this is Bernt Rosemeyer, Tazio Nuvolari, Juan Manuel Fangio, Sterling Moss, Phil Hill, John Surtees, Jimmy Clark, Dan Gurney, AJ Foyt, Mario Andretti, Jackie Stewart, Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost, Michael Shumacher, Sebastian Vettel, Lewis Hamilton, Sebastian Loeb, and on a motorcycle, Valentino Rossi.

As you might imagine, they have somehow fully developed the positive traits of both the “brave” camp and the “methodical” camp and become analytical adrenaline junkies. They started one way by nature but developed skills that were at first unnatural to them. They became complete drivers. They don’t just climb out of the car, throw their helmet to the ground, and proclaim “the car is sheet!” (a foreign accent really helps here!) and they never waste precious laps getting up to speed. They are confidently “on it” and hyper aware at all times in the car or in the paddock. The point is, no matter how good you become as a natural 10% or 90% driver, you can never be great without building step by agonizing step the same level of proficiency on the other side.

For example, let’s say someone is the worlds’ best 10% person but never developed the methodical thinking side. That would mean speed comes relatively easy, and therefore that person may not naturally be very hard working in a relative sense. It’s like someone who is good at visualizing math, so they can skip doing the homework and still get B’s. They wouldn’t develop the mindset to analyze and to learn the car so that they understand speed from the team engineer’s perspective. They think the car’s speed is not their problem; it becomes an unproductively polarized us vs. them atmosphere within their team. No one wins.

The real defining characteristic of a championship effort is efficient communication between the team engineers and the driver. You can buy the best car and have the best mechanics, engineers, and drivers, but if those entities that make up “a team” don’t take action or communicate efficiently, then they simply will not be able to win consistently or perhaps at all. No joke, almost all pro teams even up to F1 have some form of this dysfunction, it is everywhere. It takes humbleness, intelligence, patience, money, and a large dose of serendipity to put the magic combination together, yet if it is ever achieved, it is unstoppable because it is likely that they are the only team operating at that efficiency level in the entire paddock.

This holistic approach really works, whether you’re a one-person operation club racing or auto crossing or driving F1. On every level of Motorsports greatness can and does exist; this is a very reassuring truth. Don’t worry, I’m not contradicting myself, it does occur in club racing, it just doesn’t usually stay, as I earlier stated.

You might ask yourself, “why doesn’t every driver strive to become more complete?” This all seems like common sense, right? Well, again, it falls back to human nature. We don’t really associate being more complete with the goal, we strive to be better. They are two distinct paradigms. Let me explain…

It comes from us and other people throughout our lives trying to continuously categorize us, we end up telling ourselves, “I’m good at this” and “I’m not very good at that” throughout our whole lives. We usually do this quite superficially without much real analysis. Think… a whole life of this.

A fun aside to this is how wrong we can be about our REAL strengths and weaknesses: because we don’t really think about all the reasons why this “thing” rubbed us the wrong way. An easy example could be from school, you might be the next Albert Einstein, but because you had a string of bad teachers in math and physics you never developed that love for something that unbeknownst to you, you could have been brilliant at. You’ll go your whole life intentionally avoiding anything that even mildly sounds anything like science, always steering away from it. If anyone asks, you genuinely believe you’re not good at it, and as you say that you believe that, you make it true (perception is reality) … and you’re completely wrong.

So, we end up with two columns, stuff we think we’re good at and stuff we think we’re not good at. It’s not quite as black and white as that, but for the sake of making a point, let’s pretend it’s absolute. So, we have two lists, and what our ego does next is discard/bury the negative list so we can feel good about ourselves. Now we want to make ourselves “better”; what do you think we work on? We should go straight to the top of our weakness list, but we don’t – we can’t even find it! – we go straight to our strengths, making us even more out of balance as a driver. We hate dealing with our weaknesses and would rather spend time hanging out where our fragile precious egos are happy (stay positive right?) …keep building those strengths and watch how you plateau as a driver no matter how hard you try. This relates to what I mentioned earlier as a warning about how we naturally filter what we are learning to emphasize what our egos find acceptable. All of it done without a single conscious thought.

We all have to work if we want to be great, and working hard and having gritty determination means we are willing to charge at full speed headfirst at our grimmest, most buried fears. If we spend our time focused on eradicating weaknesses, we get amazing efficient return on our time. If we keep hammering at our strengths, we only eke out tiny gains, due to the law of diminishing returns. We think that it for us, I’ve reached my potential because I’ve gone as far as I can with my strengths and developed my best possible work-arounds for my weaknesses… that’s as good as I can ever be, right? Do you see how flawed our natural logic is?

You see, “great” driving is not consistently sustainable, just like great anything else. Everybody has slumps due to the complexity of greatness. You are dealing with so many factors, from team dynamics to how good the car is that year to your own house being in order. Each of these items individually is fantastically complex on its own; having them all in order is rare, but when you manage to align them…wow. The drivers listed above managed to consistently slip into greatness, which takes amazing composure and complete dedication. They are the type of people who would excel at anything they had tried, because they had nailed down the process of greatness to such an extent that it all became second nature to them; then the puzzle was solved, the mystery revealed.