What I Learned From Teaching Motorcycle Racing

David recognizes more than a few parallels between his passion for motorcycle racing and the work being done in creative and marketing agencies.

Links

“What I Learned from the Race Track” by David C. Baker for punctuation.com

Transcript

Blair Enns: David, I guess we're taking a week off of 2Bobs, and instead of talking about business issues, we're going to talk about one of your hobbies. Is that correct?

David C. Baker: Yes. It's about time, too. I'm so tired of this business nonsense.

Blair Enns: Which one do you want to talk about?

David C. Baker: Do you want to talk about photography? Do you want to talk about flying, long-distance shooting, sniper, woodworking?

Blair Enns: Let's talk about motorcycle racing. Your post is titled, "What I Learned From Teaching Motorcycle Racing." How do I say this? I was open to the topic when I started reading it, and then I quickly fell hard for it. I think this is a great idea. We've been talking about metaphors a little bit. It's a great learning this from that. I was shocked at how much material you were able to plumb from this topic.

David C. Baker: All the stuff I made up. I outdid myself, yes.

Blair Enns: You did, yes. What was the impetus for this? You've been writing recently?

David C. Baker: Not anymore. I actually started this article about three years ago, and I'm getting ready to go on a big motorcycle trip with a bunch of friends up in Wisconsin at the Driftless Area, it's called. I finished another track day and I thought, "Okay, I want to write this. I've got some really good pictures. Only people who are interested in writing will care about the pictures, but I've got some good pictures. I think I'll just finish this article." Then I started writing out in my little outliner thing. I use Workflowy. Everybody else uses Notion, I think. I use Workflowy. As thoughts came to me, like, "What are the parallels here?" I was surprised at how many of them there were and it was just fun.

Blair Enns: You don't just write, but you teach as well. It's another thing, when you understand something well enough to teach it, then obviously you're breaking it down into the component parts, and you can see the comparisons between how you're getting other people to think about writing and how you're getting other people to think about their business.

David C. Baker: Yes. Not to take too much credit for this, I was a good teacher because a teacher taught me how to teach. I really just borrowed this from the Superbike School where I was one of their paid teachers, fly around the world and teach at racetracks. There's some other smaller points in here, too. I started the article by talking about why we choose certain hobbies. There's somebody in our family that puts big jigsaw puzzles together. I'm always curious more about what is it about that hobby that really interests you.

The hobbies that I tend to choose, they require a certain level of mastery and they require a certain level of danger to force me to not think about work. This is a personal weakness. If it's a relaxing hobby, I'm probably going to be thinking about work. I tend to gravitate towards ones that force work out, sadly.

Blair Enns: It's funny, I just came from a long swim and I go to the beach and it's beautiful weather, I get in the water and not think about work. When I get into a long swim, when I'm in the groove, I find I start thinking about work. I remember just a few minutes ago being in the middle of this wonderful groove and my mind's drifting to work. Literally drifting to work. Not enough danger in my hobby. You rode bikes at a very young age, right?

David C. Baker: Yes. I grew up in a very remote part of Guatemala where there weren't many roads. Motorcycles and horses were how we got around, and my parents would order a course for me every year from Calvert School and then later the University of Nebraska Extension. I would just guide myself through this. My parents didn't help. I could finish my schoolwork instead of a whole year, or nine months at a typical school, you'd finish it in two or three months, and then you had the rest of the year just to have fun. I would spend the rest of that time just riding around the country.

They were a big part of my life. Then I dropped them when our kids were young. By "dropped them", I don't mean I dropped the motorcycle, I mean I dropped the hobby. Then, later, I don't remember at what age, I thought, "Oh, I really miss this." I just went and bought one. Then just rode hundreds of thousands of miles to most states and owned a large motorcycle discussion board, the largest BMW one in the world for five years. I don't anymore. Made all kinds of friends, and then started teaching, and just it's been a part of my life. I just love it.

Blair Enns: You've got 11 lessons from high-performance riding. Where do you want to start?

David C. Baker: Yes, we don't necessarily have to go through all these. If people are interested in detail, they can find the article at punctuation.com. Some of these are really fascinating. The first one is that your vision controls everything. When you are first teaching a student, you know what they're going to do by watching where their helmet is pointed. You're riding behind them, watching them. If somebody goes wide, it's because they were looking at the wrong spot. If they start to get all shaky, it's because they're not looking far enough ahead.

The whole point is that-- I'm trying to draw parallels here. This parallel is you've got to focus on the right things. This is the second one to scanning without target fixation. When you're nervous about something on a racetrack or on a public road, and you stare at it, then bad things happen because you lose the bigger picture in things. Instead, you need to acknowledge this obstacle or this danger, and then look to where you want to go because your body follows wherever your vision is.

I couldn't help thinking of AI right now. People are just locked on the dangers of AI, and they're not keeping it in context. It's like, "People, AI is a wonderful tool. This is not going to destroy your world." It's that's target fixation. I guess that's two things out of the 11. Vision controls everything and scan without target fixation.

Blair Enns: Yes, I don't ride motorcycles, but I see the parallel in downhill mountain biking, and you see people who are pretty new at it. They're looking at the obstacle that's very, very close to them when they should be looking past it to the rest of the trail and just glide over the obstacle. The AI parallel, that's fascinating to me because everybody is pretty fixated on it, but it's like it's there. It's on the track, to keep the metaphor. You need to be aware of it, but if you're completely fixed on it, you're probably headed for a crash.

David C. Baker: Yes, exactly. If you're not sure what I'm talking about, just pop over to LinkedIn. It's like a fourth of all the posts in my feed anyway seem to be about AI, and most of them are overreacting, one way or the other, at least in my estimation, I don't necessarily know what overreacting is because I'm learning too, but it's like, "People, let's not be lemmings. It's AI now. What are we going to be just locked onto next year?" Maybe it'll be some different Google algorithm or something. It's like, "Okay, just acknowledge the threat and then take your eyes off it and think about it carefully and don't overreact."

Blair Enns: Your vision controls everything is the first lesson, and scanning without target fixation, which is be aware of everything, but don't fixate on a particular danger. Is that right?

David C. Baker: Right. Yes. This third one may be my favorite. The notion is to slow down to speed up. If you really want to make time on a racetrack, you have to drive really hard out of an exit. To do that, you have to enter that turn at a very controlled speed. You can't be bouncing all over the place, and at the edge of traction control. You have to be really entering that curve at a slow enough pace so that you can get turned and then get upright and then exit with all the power you have. I love this metaphor because it tells me that uncontrolled growth, which is what a new student does, they just fly into a corner and they try to control the bike, and then they're bouncing all over on the thing while an expert rider is just shooting past them out of the corner.

Taking things really, really fast is not always the fastest way to get there. Sometimes it's better just to slow down, plan it carefully, and then execute it perfectly. We're not really good at that. We tend to get these opportunities that are handed to us. We don't know how to control them. They just come to us, and we feel like we have to latch onto them and fly into this corner and take advantage of it instead of slowing down, planning, being strategic, and then accelerating, driving out of that corner. It's just such an amazing feeling.

Blair Enns: Incomplete control.

David C. Baker: Yes. Incomplete control. I was teaching, I was sponsored by Kawasaki when I was doing it, and I was on a 600cc bike, and there were people, students there with 1000cc bikes, and it wasn't hard to beat them all the time because they didn't understand exactly how to enter a corner and then accelerate under control out of it. I think we could learn a lot from that.

Blair Enns: Yes, that's a great metaphor. It doesn't take more power. It takes more control. I've never really been coached swimming, but I've swum with some people who are actually swimmers. I remember being told that, too.

David C. Baker: Oh, really?

Blair Enns: They slow down to speed up, and they have slower strokes, and they're swimming faster than me.

David C. Baker: Wow. Number four, what gets measured gets managed. I've always disliked this quote.

Blair Enns: I have, too.

David C. Baker: It's true, but it's not necessarily a good thing. It's largely good, I suppose.

Blair Enns: Yes, and there's a lot of things that are important that I don't think you can measure very well, like attitude, like helpfulness, like cooperation. I almost didn't put this in here, but there had to be something in here about timing. My best time at Barber Motorsports Park, which is a big racetrack down in the south, is a minute and 46. That's with a stock bike, not a race bike. The world record on a race bike is a minute 22. I'm 24 seconds off of that.

I would never have improved my times-- Started out at two and a half minutes. I never would have improved my times unless I was measuring. The parallel I want to make is more around financial measurement. There are some things that you just really need to know about your firm, profitability, how much money you're making, what your margins are for individual service offerings, how productive people are, and so on. I don't think we need to go overboard like Drucker did here, but I do think there is value in some measurement, and racing is absolutely about some measurement.

I watched the F1 car races last week, it was in Canada, and God, they measure everything. They know exactly who's fastest in this turn, and they know exactly how to change the line to get faster. I don't think we need to go overboard with measurement, but I do think we ought to measure the right things.

David C. Baker: Let's skip over the deep breathing is calming. I like that one, but we've got a lot to get through here. Constant steering corrections are essential.

Blair Enns: Yes, constant, as opposed to big, massive ones that unsettle the bike and get you in trouble. To me, it's about leadership, and I've been writing about leadership a lot these days because people are struggling with leadership. They feel there's more chaos around them, there's more fog around what the right thing to do is. I keep saying, "Listen, your job as a leader is to make decisions. Your job as a leader is not to make correct decisions, it's to make decisions." That's the same thing with steering inputs, lots of little steering inputs.

If you get it wrong, you'll see it and you'll fix it, but you've got to do that. You have to be in control. This bike is designed to listen to you. It does not have a mind of its own. It only does what you tell it to do, and your business is the same way. Lot's of constant steering corrections.

David C. Baker: One of my hobbies, as you know, is collecting answers to the question, "What is strategy?" I've heard lots of different answers to that question, and I've heard maybe only four or five that I really like. One of them, and I've heard it expressed two different ways, and I forget the exact language, but it begins with strategies is a series of decisions. When that was shared with me by mutual friends of ours who got it from Harvard Business School, what I was really struck by was that it was the first definition of strategy I had encountered where strategy could only be deduced in hindsight by the decisions you end up making in the real world. That reminds me of this, everybody's got a plan. How well you execute really comes down to how well you do at a series of often quite small decisions.

Blair Enns: Then you have the after-action review. Remember that podcast episode where I interviewed you about that, to learn from the decisions that you've made so that you don't waste those lessons.

David C. Baker: Yes. Everybody's got a plan till they get punched in the face. I know that doesn't translate to motorcycle racing, but this idea that you've got to make a lot of little decisions, and in the end, it's about how you handle those decisions.

Blair Enns: Yes. Higher speed creates more danger.

David C. Baker: Yes. Not a lot to say here. Just the very obvious point that when you're growing fast, that's when the decisions that you're making are really, really critical. The smallest bad decision or lack of decision can really hurt you. High growth rates at your firm can create quite a bit of danger, just like high growth rates on a motorcycle create more danger and opportunity for the wrong decision as well. That's all I meant by that one.

Blair Enns: Now, this is an interesting piece of advice. Number eight, stay loose in the bars.

David C. Baker: Yes. You didn't catch that. Oh, in the bars. That's plan B. If this doesn't go well, then you go to the bar and stay loose. No, stay loose on the bars. If you take a bicycle and you hold it by the seat and you just push it forward, the bicycle will stay upright until it runs out of speed. The steering head angle on a bicycle and a motorcycle are the same. They're designed to be self-correcting, just like an airplane. It's called a dihedral in an airplane.

The bike that you're riding, the motorcycle you're riding, it wants to stay upright. When you get nervous, you lock on the bars, and all of a sudden, the bike cannot move underneath you. You need to let the bike bounce around and self-correct itself. If you get too tight, you get to be a control freak, bad things happen. When I was teaching, I would say, "Okay, take a glass of water in each hand, keep this left hand outstretched, keep your right hand locked against your body, and now walk."

The water is going to spill out of the right hand because you don't have that shock absorber. You have it locked against your body while you're walking. Same thing is true for a motorcycle. You need to let it bounce around. You can't be a control freak worrying about every little thing. Just be loose and intentional on the bars. People that don't ride motorcycles may not get that, but it applies to bicycles, too.

Blair Enns: There's a corollary to canoeing, too, where it's the same thing, but it's your hips. When you're in wavy water, the saying is loose hips, no tips. You let the boat rock back and forth, and you stay upright. If you get all rigid, you're more likely to swamp. Now, what's the equivalent in business of-- You said the bike wants to go, basically it wants to stay upright. What does the business want to do there?

David C. Baker: This applies mainly in my thinking to your team. Your team generally wants to do the right thing. Don't try to control everything they do. Let them impact the business.

Blair Enns: This one was for me, wasn't it? [laughs] Number nine. I love this. Physics don't care about your feelings. The rules of gravity are rules.

David C. Baker: The rules of gravity are as binding as the rules of bankruptcy I have in here. This is just a pet peeve of mine. You meet up with some friends for a ride over the weekend, and somebody says, "Hey, I brought Rhonda. This is my new motorcycle." It's like, "Do not name your motorcycles because then you think Rhonda loves you and Rhonda does not love you. Rhonda hates you. Rhonda would kill you with no problem, and it wouldn't hurt Rhonda's feelings."

Physics don't care about your feelings. Don't anthropomorphize your vehicle. The same thing is true about, if you're a purpose-driven firm, that doesn't ease the rules of finance. It's like gravity still applies to you. Bankruptcy still applies to you. Physics just don't care about your feelings. It's just weird how we anthropomorphize things, and we say it's so sad that the business went under because we were doing so much good. We were purpose-driven. Yes. Sorry.

Blair Enns: Yes. [laughs]

David C. Baker: Oh, we're having too much fun here.

Blair Enns: Yes. Number 10, book knowledge isn't a substitute for hands-on knowledge.

David C. Baker: Yes. There's only so much learning you can do. You can have orientation for three days with your new people, but at some point, you're going to have to turn them loose. You're going to have to let them make mistakes. Part of teaching is letting a student go as close to killing themselves without doing it as possible, because if you step in too quickly, then they never understand the implications of a bad decision. It's just like hands-on knowledge. Take people on sales calls. Talk to them right after. When somebody says something that isn't appropriate, pull them aside later. Talk about it. Book knowledge is really useful, but it's no substitute for hands-on knowledge.

Blair Enns: Part of this is letting people make mistakes as long as they're not existential and then having the conversation afterwards, treating that as a learning moment. That's something I know intellectually, but I still don't bring myself to let go enough to let people do it.

David C. Baker: It's like the value conversation. You model that with people, which is very different than just telling them what it's like.

Blair Enns: Yes. I think the founder of Sandler's Sales Institute, or whatever the full name of the Sandler Sales Training Program is, and I forget his first name, the title of his book was You Can't Teach a Kid to Ride a Bicycle in a Seminar or something like that. This idea of there's implicit knowledge and tacit knowledge, and some things you just have to learn by doing and having the realization about something. It's a realization you're not going to get from the book knowledge. The last one you have here, your instincts aren't always best. What are you talking about?

David C. Baker: I'm talking specifically about yours, Mr. Enns. It wasn't too long ago when we were swinging from vines in the jungle. Now we're riding a motorcycle 185 miles an hour. Our eyes and the way we process information have not kept up with what we can do technologically. In racing, you have to retrain your instincts. When you see an obstacle, you would tend to focus on it too long and tighten up, and both of those instincts are wrong.

We have instincts in business that are wrong as well, and we need to retrain them. There's a great episode of a podcast I listened to where the interviewer was talking with this lady who trains horses, and she said mainly horse training is basically reworking their instincts. It's teaching the horse that it's okay to have a bit in their mouth. It's okay when somebody is on top of their back riding. The same thing is true of business. We need to retrain some of our instincts. Some of them are not good. Some of them are good.

Blair Enns: Yes. I get that. It makes perfect sense. You've got some thinking here on systems thinking. Great quote from a guy named Kevin Richardson. Do you want to speak to that?

David C. Baker: Yes. I found this really fascinating because he's a motorcycle rider, but he's also a UX researcher. I won't read the whole thing. It's in the article if you're interested. At the end of the quote, he says, "Systems thinking 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."

You said to me in an earlier conversation that some things that look really dangerous are not all that dangerous when you have a system for them, like maybe a sales call. [laughs] There's all kinds of things. It's just fascinating to me that we need to understand these things as systems. Every firm has a different system, but most every firm could benefit from articulating that system so that they can tell other people, they can tell the team members, how is it that they operate and how to think about that, how to process issues that come up. I just found it fascinating.

Blair Enns: Yes. I made the point that some of the sports that look dangerous from the outside, once you're on the inside playing them, they're not nearly as dangerous as people think, because it's just what's changed. Your perspective, you have an understanding. You see it as a system. You see how everything works together. You see what you should focus on. You do, in your words, retrain your instincts to focus on the things that you should focus on.

There's an interesting corollary there to business, especially creative businesses. Creativity is the ability to see, the ability to bring novel perspective to a problem. Therefore, creative people are constantly exploring new and different ways. They don't like to be hemmed in by systems, typically. That's a bit of a generalization, but I think it's largely true. I've long observed that I think a lot of the challenges, sales challenges in particular, but other business challenges in a creative profession, stem from the fact that the person at the head of the business has this really high need for variety. If you have a really high need for variety, you don't like to be hemmed in by systems, you don't get the benefit of working from a system. Does that make sense to you?

David C. Baker: Yes. It's almost like systems are not antithetical to great creative work. Creativity happens really well within a system, which almost doesn't make sense, but I think it does.

Blair Enns: Yes. It can't be a rigid system. Loose on the bars. Loose on the bars.

David C. Baker: Yes. There you go. Yes.

Blair Enns: The equivalent in sales is somebody was saying, in the Win Without Pitching Academy, "Will my people get scripts?" I said, "You don't want your people to have scripts." At one end of the spectrum, there's the rigid system. Here's exactly what you should say. At the other end of the spectrum, there's the creative person feeling their way through a sale. In the middle is this idea of frameworks.

David C. Baker: Yes. The last point I make in here is maybe my favorite. There were four levels. If I would get a level four student, by the end of the day, I might be able to shave 15 seconds off their time if they were a new student around a lap. Then if we kept everyday teaching, then the second day, it might just be four seconds. The third day, it might just be two seconds. The effort that it takes for perfection, it's not really perfection, but closer to perfection, is just enormous. I couldn't help but think of all the extra effort we put in to perfecting something that a client is not paying for and won't even notice. I say, save the pursuit of perfection for your personal life, where it doesn't matter.

[laughter]

Blair Enns: Go spend your resources on that intractable problem in a domain where, whatever.

David C. Baker: Yes. My best hobbies combine art and science, and I love perfecting something, say, in woodworking, which nobody else will ever see. There's just this inner sense of satisfaction. We need that as humans, but I don't know that we need to scratch that itch with every client project, especially when they don't even notice the difference. Save the pursuit of perfection for your personal life, where it doesn't matter.

Blair Enns: The topic was what I learned from teaching motorcycle lessons, and you list 11 lessons from high-performance riding. Each of them has a corollary to the business world. I will not list them here, but you can read this post if you go to punctuation.com, follow the link in the show notes. Great topic, David. Thank you for sharing.

David C. Baker: Thanks, Blair.