The Perfect Lap
“Michael, 5K means 5 kilometers, not 5,000 miles.”
That’s one of my favorite lines from The Office (U.S.) episode “Fun Run.”
In Ford v Ferrari, the 24 Hours of Le Mans sports car race is center stage.
Without going into the film’s plot, the race is indeed 24 hours and (used to) feature two (alternating) drivers per car.
Because, you know, driving very fast for 24 hours straight is dangerous.
Since 1923, Le Mans has been a test of endurance and efficiency.
The winner is not the first to cross the finish line, but the one car that travels the farthest in 24 hours.
If all of 2019 was the track at Le Mans, then we’d be around hour 22.
Those who receive a holiday bonus at work are estimating how the money may or may not be covered by this Friday and next Monday’s shopping.
Maybe a performance review will have an impact on the dollars and cents.
Shane Parrish on his Farnam Street blog made a point to have us look inward versus outward to better improve professionally:
“If you must grade performances, do it against the past. Is she learning? Is he improving? How can we increase the rate of progress and development? Empower people to help and learn from each other. The range of skills in an organization is often an untapped resource.
Organizations today are often grappling with significant corporate culture issues. It can be the one thing that differentiates you from your competitors. Comparing people against their past selves instead of each other is one of the most effective ways to build a culture in which everyone wants to give their best.”
The villain in Ford v Ferrari, if you’re American, may not have been the Italian carmaker, but corporate hierarchy.
Morgan Housel started his blog post today by remembering Colombian airline Avianca flight 052:
“Then they crashed. On January 25th, 1990, flight 052 ran out of fuel, killing 65 of its 149 passengers.
Malcolm Gladwell tells this story in his book Outliers as an example of the dangers of blind deference to hierarchical authority.
If you are piloting a plane that’s about to run out of gas and air traffic control asks if it’s OK for you to keep flying, the correct response is, ‘No, we’re landing now.’
But if you’re accustomed to a culture that strictly adheres to the commands of superiors, you respond, ‘I guess so. Thank you very much,’ and turn to your coworkers and admit you’re all about to die.”
The polar opposite of being a yes man or being a yes ma’am might be how Paul Graham illustrated following one’s own deep interest:
“An obsessive interest will even bring you luck, to the extent anything can. Chance, as Pasteur said, favors the prepared mind, and if there’s one thing an obsessed mind is, it’s prepared.
The disinterestedness of this kind of obsession is its most important feature. Not just because it’s a filter for earnestness, but because it helps you discover new ideas.
The paths that lead to new ideas tend to look unpromising. If they looked promising, other people would already have explored them. How do the people who do great work discover these paths that others overlook? The popular story is that they simply have a better vision: because they’re so talented, they see paths that others miss. But if you look at the way great discoveries are made, that’s not what happens. Darwin didn’t pay closer attention to individual species than other people because he saw that this would lead to great discoveries, and they didn’t. He was just really, really interested in such things.
Darwin couldn’t turn it off. Neither could Ramanujan. They didn’t discover the hidden paths that they did because they seemed promising, but because they couldn’t help it. That’s what allowed them to follow paths that someone who was merely ambitious would have ignored.”
New Year’s Eve of 2019 is no finish line for anyone, even if it ends the decade.
Television didn’t warp people’s brains in the 1960s.
Personal computers didn’t fry people’s brains in the 1990s.
The next smartphones won’t manipulate people’s brains in the 2020s.
That is, of course, as Tyler Cowen points out if you stay in the right lanes:
“Consider people who love to consume information, or, as I have labeled them, infovores. They can stay at home every night and read Wikipedia, scan Twitter, click on links, browse through Amazon reviews and search YouTube — all for free. Thirty years ago there was nothing comparable.
Of course, most people don’t have those tastes. But for the minority who do, it is a new paradise of plenty. These infovores — a group that includes some academics, a lot of internet nerds and many journalists — have experienced radical deflation.”
You have the green light.
