Scott Duffy learned a lesson in a Ferrari from a race instructor: keep your eyes on the horizon, not the wall rushing toward you. The same applies to business. When things speed up, leaders fixate on immediate problems and jerk the wheel, crashing the company. Instead, stay focused ahead and make slow, graceful moves.
A few years ago, I had the opportunity to take race car driving lessons. And I was so excited. And I remember I flew out to the track with best selling author and speaker Greg Reed. We both got in our cars and I got all strapped into this incredible Ferrari Modena, and I had an instructor who was sitting right next to me in the passenger seat. And the first thing he said was, when I got that car on the course was this. Scott, I want you to keep your eyes up and on the horizon. Real simple. Find the place that you want to go, stay focused on that one thing, and let's take the car there. And it's interesting because when you're going 5 miles an hour, 10 miles an hour, 50 miles an hour, it is so easy to keep your eyes up and focused on the horizon. But here's what happens. The faster things go in your business, the faster life comes at you. What happens is we tend to take our eyes off of where we want to go and drop them to what's right in front of us. Now, as a race car driver, what that means is you start to look right over the edge of your hood. Right over the edge. If you're a skier, you call this looking over the tips of your skis. And so what happens, you notice every single pebble on the road, every drop of water, and you start to make these real fast, quick, quirky adjustments. Now, going five miles an hour, that isn't really those quick, fast adjustments, that's not going to do anything. But here's the thing. When you're going 150 miles an hour, one of those fast, quick, sharp, quirky adjustments can take you right into the wall. So the second thing that you learn how to do is you learn how to crash. And this is really cool. So in my instructor. So what happened with me is this, is that as I was cruising along the track and the instructor saw that I was getting real comfortable in my seat, what he did is he took his hand, which had been outstretched and kind of resting near my steering wheel, in case he needed to make an adjustment. What he did is he grabbed the wheel when I least expected it and tugged.
Now, let me ask you a question. I felt completely out of control. And what's the first thing that most of us do when we feel out of control? Well, we do this. We focus on the thing that we fear most. And for most of us, or for a race car driver, that thing is the wall. If you can picture this, what happens is our eyes instantly go to the wall. And what that does is pull our head towards the wall, which pulls our shoulder, which takes our hand and turns the wheel and takes us right towards a crash. And so the instructor has only one job, one thing that they're supposed to do, and it's this. As soon as your head goes towards the wall, they take their hand and they put it and they rest it real gently right against your helmet, and they just push, just a little bit, your head back towards the track. What happens instantly is this, is that your eyes go right to the track, and what that does is it pulls your head, which pulls your shoulders, which turns your hands and gets you out of a crash.
You see, here's the thing. In our life and in our business, sometimes things are going to come at us fast, they're going to come quickly. And so the key is this. Again, keep your eyes up and on the horizon, no matter what's going on, because what that enables you to do is anticipate and make real slow and graceful movement towards your goal.
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