I hate driving.
There’s nothing quite like traveling at speeds your brain hasn’t evolved to understand, speeds that increase your risk of sudden death by orders of magnitude, speeds that shouldn’t be obtainable by a twenty-one-year-old college student dozing in and out of consciousness during an eight o’clock commute to creative writing class after having blacked out at three o’clock in the morning just five hours prior.
Let me guess…
You think you’re the best driver you know.
You’re not alone.
40% of Americans think they’re the best driver they know.
Get 10 people together in a room and 4 of them will think they’re better drivers than everyone else. In other words, 3 people in the room think they’re better drivers than they actually are. In other other words, 30% of the people you share the road with, traveling at speeds capable of deforming steel, think they’re capable of starring in a Fast & Furious movie. Just something to think about the next time you hit the highway.
I blame my father.
Like every middle-class family that lived in a state bordering the Atlantic Ocean, we vacationed at the beach every summer.
My dad drove us.
He hated driving.
He’d putt-putt down the highway in the slow lane. Our car was escorted by a blockade of eighteen-wheeler trucks for the duration of the trip. There was always one in front of us my dad was afraid to pass. There was always one beside us, passing us. There was always one behind us, tailgating us, waiting to pass us.
After eight hours of chest-pounding drama, eight hours of sustaining the heart rate of a man running in the New York City Marathon, we’d arrive at the beach and eat Grotto pizza until our kidneys stopped suffocating our bodies with adrenaline.
A few months ago, my wife wanted me to drive six hours across the state, as a result of a death in her family.
I’d never driven that far by myself.
I said no.
I don’t fit in my car. I’m 6’4”. I drive a 2010 Corolla. After an hour of driving, my left knee locks up. My right ankle is a mess, on account of breaking it in five places back in 2011. These are the types of things I told my wife, right after I told her I wasn’t going to go, right before she looked like she was going to Sub-Zero my esophagus from my neck and beat me with it.
I was the only one that could go. And I was the only one strong enough to move the boxes, beds, and bric-a-brac scattered across the (now abandoned) apartment. Everyone was counting on me. I had to go. The thought of letting them down was worse than the thought of turning into my father and being a slave to the slow lane.
If you struggle with motivation, then swallow the following stack of pancakes seriously:
If the only person you’re letting down on account of your inaction is yourself, then you’re in trouble. It’s easy to let yourself down when you have low self-esteem (if you’ve hated your body for as long as you can remember, you probably have low self-esteem) because you don’t care about disappointing yourself.
If your inaction hurts someone you care about disappointing, you'll have an easier time standing your ground.
There’s a cliché our modern self-help-obsessed world loves:
Don’t care about what others think.
I wouldn't recommend living by this if the “others” in question value you more than you value yourself.
May the Gains be with you,
Ant