“Wil, stop looking over the hood. You look over the hood with your peripheral vision, your eyes should be pointed out of the driver side window!”
Was kindly yelled at me again and again, by my driving instructor as I raced a few super cars around a mini track at Leguna Seca during my driving school.
It was fighting instinct…you are supposed to keep your eyes straight ahead right? WRONG!
My instructor Jeff, a burly man, with more broken bones from years racing bikes and cars had to repeat that several times to me, and in my 1 day it still didn’t sink in. I was fighting instinct, and 20+ years of driving.
I never actually got that right, but it did start to sink in on the way home. (note: if you go to a racing school and push cars to their absolute limits, have someone else drive you home, the cops wait right outside of the school and write tickets like mofos).
I digress.
What sank in is the metaphor, don’t look over the hood, see the hood in your peripheral, but keep your eyes looking out the drivers wide or passenger window. It rings over and over again like an echo in my head now. You need to trust your peripheral to see what is ahead, and use your eyes for what is coming up next in a split second, think 1-2 turns ahead and trust the car and your training to take you through this turn, but never keep your eyes off of the next one.
I’ve run the operations of my business looking over the hood, and the vision of my business with my peripherals. I spoke about this at LENGTH here in this video, the link starts at the right point to talk about mistakes I made in hiring too late or as my instructor Jeff would say, looking over the hood.
Are you looking over the hood of your business?
I’ve put my company through some sharp cornering we weren’t prepared for. I hired every position that would help SEER run better operationally (President, HR, IT, Finance) way too late. I realized that our clients were leveling up at a rate faster than my team was 18 months ago, leading to some rough patches, out of blind loyalty I worked with clients who I lost money on for months and months and months. All of that is looking over the hood with your eyes, not preparing for what was coming. I wasn’t looking far enough out to see processes that wouldn’t scale, I was getting through the “turns” just really slowly and with a lot of friction.
or
Are you looking through the drivers window?
See, when comment spam, keyword stuffing, link networks, and directories worked, I used my peripherals to rank well today (aka, did the least possible) with my eye 2-3 turns ahead (hiring journalists, direct marketers, web marketers, PR people, etc) as SEOs. It prepared us for the turns we knew were coming well before they were right on us. That meant we were accelerating out of the apex, not breaking because we took the wrong angle. Today that means that we’re the RCS company, heck people use RCS or real company shit/stuff as a terminology. RCS was looking out the side window, not over the hood. We that shifted, pivoted, saw the turns and got out of them a bit quicker, not much quicker but a bit. Remember winning a race is a matter of shaving ½ a second on 10 turns per lap, over 50 laps.
Today, when I see the Cooper Tires foot bridge at Leguna Seca I no longer see a straightaway…
I’ll always see a forgiving right turn (meaning I can get more aggressive) a little straightaway and a mildly sharp left, I’m still working on remembering the next one, but I’m getting better. Minds eye first, real eyes second. Thanks Jeff, that’s gonna stick with me.
Oh for those watching the video here is my slideshare too: