Settling for Mediocrity: Part I
What one adventure taught me about living in the space between those who achieved more and those who never started.
I thought I wanted to be a racing driver. I did want to be a racing driver. But I didn't want it enough. How do I know this? How can I tell how much I didn't want it? It's a simple matter of comparison.
When I went to racing school, there were instructors. These instructors also wanted to be professional racing drivers. And in a sense, they already were. They got paid some amount of money to teach other people the craft of racing. They made it further than me, but still hadn't "made it". One instructor made it as far as Indy Lights, which at the time was one step below the top level in America.
At the school, the instructors would often take a group of students in a regular passenger car around the track and talk through the nuances of the line, the strategy, and the logistics of racing. In one such ride, it came up in conversation that he spent half a season last year in Indy Lights. I asked him, "why not a full season?" Since I was still young and naive, I thought maybe some extenuating circumstances torpedoed his campaign. I was shocked by the stone-cold reality of his answer:
"Money."
As he hit the braking zone into turn 1, the conversation hushed. Maybe I shouldn’t have asked. It seemed I inadvertently surfaced the hard truth that we - and probably everyone we know - will never make it to the top of our mountains. We were being driven around by the best of the 5 incredible instructors there that weekend, a man who spent hundreds of hours on track including at the professional level, and even he couldn't conjure all the ingredients together to reach the goal. Maybe for him, more money would have been the tipping point. Up the ladder he would have gone until one day I'd be watching him spraying champagne on the podium and I'd turn to my kids and say, "See that guy? He used to teach me how to race."
I didn't progress beyond "racing student". I didn't want it enough. The instructors wanted it bad enough to push their careers harder in that direction, such that they became teachers of the craft they loved and practiced. Some stopped there. Others went on to race sports cars in various series' not considered part of the upper echelon, and maybe that was just fine with them.
I always grapple with the worthiness of my level. I didn't make it past the 2 racing school tiers I attended. Because "money", sure, but even with unlimited resources, my commitment wasn’t so absolute as to sacrifice everything else in my life. I wanted other things, too. I wanted to skip the gym. I wanted to eat cookies. I wanted the freedom to sleep in. I wanted a girlfriend, a wife, a family. I was too young to understand how refusing to sacrifice certain things instantly disqualified me from the pool of people who reach the top. Maybe if I understood, I wouldn’t have tried. But I did. I obsessed with the idea enough to attend racing school in the first place. But racing is just one in a long list of things where I achieved a level higher than 0 but didn't go much further. How do I feel about this? How should I feel about this?
"However I want" is one answer.
"However I choose" is more accurate.
I see the following advice everywhere: “Don't compare yourself to others.” It sounds good, and I'm sure it does wonders to tamp down unnecessary mismatches in expectations, not to mention quelling our inherent propensity for jealousy. But we're comparison machines. It's unrealistic to pretend we're not going to compare ourselves to our peers as well as those most publicly successful at the things at which we wish we were experts. But comparison is a two-step process involving the exercise and the aftermath. To me, the exercise is primal. We can avoid it as much as possible, but there's no eradicating it. The aftermath, however - what we do about the results of said comparison - falls under the realm our control. More on that later.
The third and final time I climbed into a single-seater was a matter of personal pride. I mentioned two tiers of racing school. The second tier didn't go well. The carpenter never blames his tools, so I'll blame myself for not asking for the pedals to be adjusted, but my foot kept slipping off the brake after the long straight at Road America and I ended up stuck in the gravel trap twice. It felt like a wasted opportunity and had me questioning everything. Remember, up to that point I thought I was on the path to becoming a racing driver - a truly kindergarten ambition, if I’m honest. But after being strapped to that Dodge Ram and towed out of the kitty litter again, self-doubt consumed me. Later that year, when the school offered a test day at the newly resurfaced Mont Tremblant circuit in Montreal, an opportunity to negate that experience arose.
Typically their test days were split into halves, so you could either sign up for a morning session or an afternoon session, but they offered this day as a double session for the same price. The school also didn't provide lap times for their half-day sessions. Drivers would show up and do as many laps as they could, getting some track-side instruction from the staff throughout. But on this day, all cars would get readouts of their lap times. After the disappointment and shame of my previous performance, I couldn't shake the desire to find out whether or not that was a fluke. Even if I never did another lap after this, I had to know. The track was about two hours northwest of Montreal, which was an 8-hour drive from my parent's house in New Jersey.
It was time for a little road trip.