Episode 47: Enjoy the Gear You Are In

Transcript

I learned to drive stick shift at a pretty late point in time, I suppose.
Now, I know that by today's standards, the vast majority of people don't even learn to drive stick shift.
And in reality, it's kind of an outdated skill, right?
Electric vehicles don't have it.
The world is moving in that direction, albeit somewhat slowly.
So, there's not a huge need for it.
But when I was growing up, there was still a decent number of stick shifts around.
I wouldn't bump into them super frequently, you know, when using friends' cars and things.
But they were out there.
My parents never owned or drove a stick shift car in my lifetime.
Evidently, you know, my dad did drive stick shift back when he was driving at a younger age.
But the whole time, at least unless he had one when I was, whatever, a year or two old, my entire lifetime, they were automatic cars.
I learned to drive on an automatic car.
At no point did I pick up stick shift in my learning to drive phase of things.
Where I eventually did learn to drive stick, and I'm using learn in pretty big quotation marks right here.
But eventually, I started working at a trucking company.
Not as a trucker, but as like sort of a, well, originally they brought me in as kind of like a landscaper, groundskeeper, odd job kind of person.
And then eventually, I ended up being something of a mechanic there as well.
But there were yard trucks, because the yard end-to-end was, I don't know exactly how long, but at least half a mile.
If you wanted to go from one end to the other or something like that, maybe a little more.
So, and you'd have to cart things around and whatever.
So, they had a couple of yard trucks, a couple of old pickup trucks.
One of which was a stick shift.
Eventually, the day came to pass where the automatic yard truck was broken down or something.
And I had to go pick something up where I needed a truck for the yard.
And so, they were like, well, go hop in the white truck, which was a manual vehicle.
Go hop in the white truck and go grab it.
So, this was not the type of culture where you would tell the other guys like, oh, I don't know how to drive stick, right?
That was not how this went down.
So, I was like, sure.
And I went and I hopped in.
And I had some, I don't know where I picked it up, but I had some very basic concept of what it meant to drive stick.
And what it basically came down to in my head was you had this clutch pedal over on the left.
You had your regular accelerator.
And in some way, you had to balance those things in order to get moving.
I had no real concept of how to shift gears or when.
That didn't really matter on the yard because you really weren't leaving the first or second gear anyway.
But to get the truck moving, that was my general idea.
It was like, oh, I'm going to give it some gas and kind of let off on the clutch a little bit.
And we're just going to see where that goes.
So, I proceeded to stall over and over and over again, eventually learning that the emergency brake was on.
But anyway, that's sort of how I, that my first introduction to these things.
And as I stayed there for a few years, I got a little bit better with that.
Again, I never took it out on a road or anything.
But around the yard, you know, I could function driving a stick shift vehicle.
I also got a little bit used to occasionally driving the big rig trucks around the yard as well, which was kind of a different experience.
Anyway, years later, when I was staring down no longer working at the shop, which was a job that I very much enjoyed doing the summers, I was looking to get a project vehicle.
So, that, because I was kind of entering a world where it was unlikely I was going to be doing a bunch of mechanical work as like, at the time I was working through a psychology master's degree or something.
So, I was like, I want a project truck.
I want to be able to have something mechanical that I can kind of mess around with and whatever.
So, I ended up buying an old, not an old, old, but a late 80s Ford Bronco that was also stick shift.
I had to go out and pick this vehicle up from the guy I was buying it from.
I hadn't driven stick on a road before.
So, I kind of, I took a buddy with me and I drove around like this guy's neighborhood a few times just to get a feel for it.
Then I got out on the road and I started driving and like it, it went reasonably well.
I only stalled once or twice.
I did get stuck on a big hill that was, that was, that was an interesting experience.
Like, in the rain, very steep hill, just getting used to this vehicle.
Haven't really driven stick before on a road, but we got through it.
The, the, if you've ever driven a late 80s Ford Bronco or F-150, because they're about the same.
They're very similar in terms of how they behave.
The first couple of gears you really kind of pound through.
I learned years later, actually, that the, that what I thought was first gear was actually like a rock crawling granny gear kind of thing for like off-roading purposes.
But the whole time I owned the truck, I treated it as first gear.
So, you would be in first gear for like a quarter of a second off of like a stoplight.
And then you'd be into second.
Second didn't last very long.
You'd be into third.
And you kind of like, because of how much this engine roared as it got anywhere near, even like 2,500 RPM, like it was a loud V8 engine.
And the, the vehicle itself was so bare bones that you heard everything, right?
So, when, when you would, coming off of automatic transmissions, you know, they're a good bit quieter and they shift you at often much lower RPMs.
I would get up to 2,500 RPM and I would slam into the next gear because I'm like, oh my God, I'm going to break this engine.
Looking back, that was not the case.
Like I could have definitely taken that engine much, much higher in my shifts.
It would have been fine.
But at the time, that was just, you know, learning to do it basically.
So, I really got into the habit of really just slamming through gears, right?
I don't mean from a, I don't mean like aggressively in terms of knocking the gears around.
Like I wasn't damaging the gears.
I just mean I was very quickly shifting through them, right?
It would be one, two, three, four.
Like I would almost race to get myself into fourth gear, particularly around town.
And then there was a fifth gear, like an overdrive gear for if you ever went on the highway with it.
But generally around town, you didn't ever go into the fifth.
You'd just sit in four.
And so, I got used to getting to fourth gear as quickly as possible.
The reasons for this were really, one, it was comfortable to coast in.
Gears one and two, forget about it.
But even gear three, if you tried to coast in that, it felt like your car was dragging.
Like you felt, it felt like there was resistance, right?
If you let off, if you're on the gas and you're moving forward and you're accelerating, it felt fine.
But as soon as you started coming off the gas, it felt like, you know, for those of you who have driven a stick shift car,
the lower gears feel like they are resisting you if you try to coast in them, particularly at any kind of RPM.
So, fourth was a comfortable coasting gear.
Like it felt comfortable to take my foot off of the gas.
I could kind of coast around in it, that sort of thing.
So, I would often almost race to get into fourth gear.
I had that truck for, I don't know, two, three, four years, something like that.
Eventually, it rusted out from under me.
I let it sit too long.
I missed that truck.
I really loved that truck.
But I let it sit for too long outside of a garage.
It just kind of rusted out.
It was going to probably cost thousands and thousands of dollars to get it back on the road.
So, I scrapped it.
Fast forward to 2022.
The new Ford Bronco has been released as of 2021.
So, I go out and search of a stick shift new Bronco, the sixth generation Bronco.
But they looked really cool.
But I wanted to drive one.
I wanted to check it out.
Found one at a dealership, in stick, bought it.
And then, as I started driving it, now, it shifted very differently, right?
It still felt good.
But it definitely was a very different shifting experience than something from 89.
Things have progressed a long way since then.
The gears didn't drag as much.
Like, obviously, gear one and even gear two to a certain extent.
But by the time you got to the third gear, you could comfortably kind of coast around a little bit in third.
And fourth was very comfortable.
And it's actually a seven-speed manual.
But typically, around town, you're usually in gears one through four, sometimes one through five, right?
But by the time you're in third gear, if you're, you know, on some curvy roads and whatever, it was a comfortable way to kind of coast around.
But the more I've driven with this truck, or with this type, the new Bronco in stick, the more I grew to appreciate each gear.
You know, maybe after first gear, because first gear is just like, let's get off the stoplight or whatever.
But all the rest of them kind of have their place, which was something that, so then I look back at my old one.
And I wonder to myself, did I need to pound through those gears to get to fourth?
Probably not.
Like, I'm betting I could have spent a lot more comfortable time in gears, you know, at least gear three.
I didn't need to feel the rush to get to four all the time.
And it just kind of gets me thinking a little bit.
And this is a long diatribe about driving a stick shift car.
But it gets me thinking about how we live our lives.
And I've started to just kind of have this phrase in the back of my head.
And it's, enjoy the gear you're in.
You're in life.
There are many gears, right?
And they mean all sorts of different things.
And, you know, forgive the metaphor here.
But, you know, at some times you're coming up through school.
Sometimes you have no job and no income, and you want a job.
And other times you have a job, but you hate it, and you want to leave it.
And sometimes you're not working, but you don't really want to be working, but you want to do some other stuff.
And sometimes you're short on money, and sometimes you have money.
And sometimes you live here, and sometimes you live there.
And sometimes you have these people in your life, and sometimes you have other people in your life.
to one extent or another, I imagine most people can frame this in a way that makes sense within
the context of their life. And so often, speaking for myself at least, if I know where I'm trying
to get, if I know that my goal is to, I don't know, achieve a degree and get a job, I rush through
the steps that get me to the end point. I'm so focused on that end point. And I think societally,
we are taught to do this. You're taught that there's some end goal that you should be always
pushing towards. And so if you're trying to get there, you're never going to appreciate the things
that you're doing before you get there or the precursors or the prerequisites to get there.
Because they are their own phases. They're their own gears. You know, what would it be like
to really enjoy every step of the way getting to wherever you're trying to go? You know, maybe you
want to end up with a family and a kid. You know, like a wife, kid, family kind of situation. Maybe
that's where you're trying to go. But to get there, there might be school and meeting someone and
meeting different people and dating one or another. And, you know, maybe periods of time
where you're not dating anybody. And, you know, maybe there's a period of time where you're married,
but you're not going to have the kid yet. And those are all really good gears to appreciate.
And I think you can take that with anything, right? Take it professionally. It's great to want to be the
executive who oversees everything. But leading up to that, there's a whole collection of gears
that you go through to learn the skills that eventually will make you good at that. Whereas
if you rush it, if you just shoot for it, if you don't appreciate anything and you just blow through
it, you end up just a hollow empty suit in the end, right? And then you might get there and find
that you don't like it anyway. And that's usually the worst case is when you get to the thing you've
been rushing to go to and it's not what you thought it was cracked up to be. And you realize that you
skipped all the gears along the way or rush through them. So this is my reminder framed in a way that
makes sense to me. You know, it's not a lot different than saying appreciate the moment or
live in the moment or whatever. But to me, it's a little different. It's not just live in the moment,
but identify what phase, what gear you are in and enjoy that gear until it's time to naturally shift
to the next one. Don't just rush to get to the end of the box.