Life Is Like a Fast Car
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About this ebook
This book was inspired by a 3,900-mile trip taken with my Father in the spring of 2018. My father has always been “a car guy.” He bought his first one at fourteen, then proceeded to drive it following his parents as they returned home to Kansas after a decade in California where his parents had settled during the “Okie” Migration of the Great Depression.
Scott Patrick Erwin
Scott Patrick Erwin is a writer and observer of life who is inspired by the life lessons available through seemingly ordinary activities. His ambition is to help others observe those lessons, learn from them, and grow through them to achieve their ambitions in life. He is the author of the Blog, Vlog, and Podcast Life is Like Us. (www.lifeislike.us) and the book Life is a Ballet. He is a former financial professional and business school graduate of Pepperdine University and California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo.
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Life Is Like a Fast Car - Scott Patrick Erwin
Dedication
To my Dad,
Donald D. Erwin
and all the cars.
Acknowledgment
I want to acknowledge my father and his editorial assistance. I also want to thank him for purchasing a beautiful ruby red 2018 Ford Mustang GT for himself on his 85th birthday and letting me join him on a 3,900-mile cross country journey back to his hometown in Kansas. Without that trip, the inspiration for this book may not have happened.
About the Author
Scott Patrick Erwin is a writer, performer, and observer of life who is inspired by the life lessons available through seemingly ordinary activities. His ambition is to help others observe those lessons, learn from them, and grow to achieve their goals in life.
Scott was born and raised in Central California. He is a business school graduate of California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo (BS) and Pepperdine University (MBA).
Preface
This book was inspired by a 3,900-mile trip taken with my Father in the spring of 2018. My father has always been a car guy.
He bought his first one at fourteen, then proceeded to drive it following his parents as they returned home to Kansas after a decade in California where his parents had settled during the Okie
Migration of the Great Depression.
On the occasion of his 85th birthday, he told me he was going to buy himself a brand-new Ford Mustang GT. With the new car purchased, he began planning a trip back to his hometown in Kansas from Central California where he lived most of his adult life and had retired. We had a great time traveling The Mother Road,
the term used for Route 66 by many of the Okie migrants of the 1930’s Dust Bowl era. We visited family, saw his old home outside of Neodesha, Kansas, stopped by Laura Ingalls Wilder’s little house on the prairie
just a few miles from there, and enjoyed miles and miles of open road with the 460 horsepower in the Mustang GT. It was a wonderful trip.
The book that follows is the largely a result of that trip. The perspectives are written as observations about life. I have tried to keep them as brief and clear as possible to make them an interesting read. I hope that you enjoy them, and they inspire you to consider some of the life lessons that you can have while driving a fast car.
Contents
Dedication
Acknowledgment
About the Author
Preface
Introduction
Perspective 1- Slow Down to Speed Up
Perspective 2- Speed Up to Slow Down
Perspective 3- Making Quick Decisions
Perspective 4- Sometimes You Have to Get in, Sit Down, Shut Up, and Enjoy the Ride
Perspective 5- Take the Risk!
Perspective 6- You Have to Push Yourself Beyond Your Comfortable Speed to Grow
Perspective 7- Look for the Opening
Perspective 8- It is Always Nice to Drive a Nice Car. You Get to Live, Pick a Good Life.
Perspective 9- Take Care of the Car
Perspective 10- Rides are Always Better with Family and Friends
Perspective 11- Something in Motion Tends to Stay in Motion
Perspective 12- Speed Limits
Perspective 13- It is Good to Hold the Wheel
Perspective 14- Feed the Beast. Accept the Cost
Perspective 15- Value the Vehicle. You Only Have One
Perspective 16- Always be Looking for the Next Car. Trade-up in Life Mentally
Perspective 17- Fast Cars Are Better with Music
Perspective 18- Getting Stuck in Traffic Sucks
Perspective 19- Change Lanes
Perspective 20- Trust the Car. It was Built for Driving
Perspective 21- Use Your Turn Signals - Communicate
Perspective 22- When the Storms Come, Use the Wipers
Perspective 23- Check your systems and observe the warning signs
Perspective 24- Speed Limits are there for a reason. Observe the rules but know that occasionally you will need to break them
Perspective 25- The accelerator should be explored once in a while
Perspective 26- Set the cruise control once in a while
Perspective 27- Autopilot/Driver Assistance
Perspective 28- It is not the paint job, but what is under the hood that matters
Perspective 29- Not everyone is going to like your car
Perspective 30- Sometimes the car crashes
Perspective 31- Near misses
Perspective 32- Don’t drive drunk
Perspective 33- Take the route less traveled
Perspective 34- When in doubt, go right
Perspective 35- Lay some rubber
Perspective 36- Road signs
Perspective 37- Breakdowns happen
Perspective 38- Respect the car, use its power wisely
Perspective 39- Stay within the lines
Perspective 40- When it is dark, use the High beams
Perspective 41- Learning to drive takes patience
Perspective 42- Corners
Perspective 43- Contemplation
Perspective 44- Forgive yourself
Perspective 45- Lights and Sirens
Perspective 46- Breathe
Perspective 47- Release the tension
Perspective 48- Sliding
Perspective 49- Compass
Perspective 50- Down shift
Perspective 51- Help those broken down
Perspective 52- Test yourself
Perspective 53- Fast cars are not practical
Perspective 54- Wash the car
Perspective 55- Forget the road behind.
Perspective 56- Driving a fast car requires a little madness
Perspective 57- Race to the end
Perspective 58- The end of the ride eventually comes
Perspective 59- Expect resistance
Perspective 60- Find your racing tribe
Perspective 61- Focus on the finish line Keep going.
Perspective 62- Once you have gone fast, it's hard to settle for less
Perspective 63- Face the fear!
Perspective 64- Road trips are an adventure
Perspective 65- It takes confidence, not arrogance
Perspective 66- Nobody else is driving your car
Perspective 67- We all have a different set of skills
Perspective 68- Any moment in a fast car is a dangerous situation. So is life.
Perspective 69- Win Baby
Perspective 70- Don’t quit
Perspective 71- Persistence
Perspective 72- The fastest driver is the one everyone is gunning for
Perspective 73- Fast cars can be a spiritual experience
Perspective 74- Driving a fast car, like life, is close to the edge, but still on the road
Perspective 75- Keep dreaming about the next car
Perspective 76- Sometimes the drive leads to inspiration
Perspective 77- Not every ride is going to make sense
Perspective 78- Improve your driving ability
Perspective 79- Find the road you want to drive
Perspective 80- Disappointment
Perspective 81- Drive the car that you want
Perspective 82- Murphy’s Law
Perspective 83- Find the car you need to drive.
Perspective 84- Anger is a distraction
Perspective 85- The only way to learn to drive, is to drive
Perspective 86- Visualize the road ahead
Perspective 87- Don’t look back, you are not going that way
Perspective 88- Pick your destination. Have an ambition.
Perspective 89- Coodiwomple
Perspective 90- Listen to the car. Trust your intuition.
Perspective 91- Fill your tank
Perspective 92- Brakes
Perspective 93- Keys
Conclusion Hitting the road
Page Left Blank Intentionally
Introduction
Life is like a fast car. In order to navigate a fast car at a high speed successfully, you must tune in with your conscious mind and use that focused mind to train your unconscious mind to perform at a higher level. Only when we are focused on the present moment and the actions required in it are we driving our life at its full potential. You must focus, assess, make decisions, take actions, and assess the results for any changes needed, and then F#@KING PUNCH IT!
- Scott Patrick Erwin
If we really think about the process of driving, the subconscious mind does most of the work – in the act of driving. Think about it. I mean really think about it. The seamless shifting of gears, the slight press of the accelerator, the anticipation of a curve in the road up ahead, all of this and more is analyzed by the subconscious mind. We are propelling ourselves down the road in a small metal box at terminal speeds while we are consciously thinking about everything else but the act of driving.
I am no expert on the matter, but I have heard it say that about 95% of the time while we are driving, we are consciously thinking about something else. This ‘something else’ could be anything... the talk you had with your spouse in the morning before heading out the door, the music on the radio, the workday ahead, the grocery list, the next red light, or the car ahead of you moving at the speed of a snail in the fast lane.
In a way, if you really think about it, driving happens while you are doing something else. So, why do we trust cars and our driving so much? The car is being driven by the unconscious mind...a mind thinking about everything else BUT the stretch of road ahead. Why? The answer is simple...because the unconscious mind already does most of the work in life, so it is the same when we are driving!
The vast majority of our actions in life are, in a manner of speaking, unconscious. Obviously, this makes a lot of sense if you think about it...do you have to make a conscious decision to get your heart beating? Or your kidneys to filter our bodies, or your stomach to digest food? No! Most of the time, we do not even consciously breathe, although now you will probably spend the next few seconds very consciously remembering to breathe. Got you?
L.J.K. Setright, the great English motoring journalist and author once wrote that he would occasionally drive with his feet crossed on the pedals, operating the accelerator with his left foot and the brake with his right. This was done to ensure that his driving was an act of conscious behavior. Judging from this, we come to the truth of the matter which is we depend on certain actions to be unconscious when we drive. If you spent conscious time thinking about every single motion performed with your feet and hands behind the wheel, you would be effectively indistinguishable from a student taking a driver’s education class.
So how can we be in the moment instead of thinking of everything else BUT the joy of driving? Think back to the first time you drove an automobile, every motion performed was fully conscious, arrived at after some thought and consideration. Think of the feeling and of how dangerous your first drive felt! The act of driving is the same as living life every day.
The best racing drivers perform at the absolute limit almost unconsciously, so that their conscious mental horsepower can be devoted to planning and overtaking the other racers while at the same time devising a race strategy. It was common for Michael Schumacher, seven-time Formula One Champion, to chat about the position and current lap time of various drivers racing around the circuit even as he himself was running at a qualifying pace!
How was this possible? Well for Schumacher, the process of driving at the limit had become so automatic, effectively an unconscious action, that he was able to treat