The Smoke & The Wall

In case I don’t mention him by name enough, the podcast that I listen to the most is the Ed Mylett podcast. I start off with that because once again I am going to be pulling from something he said. I think I’ve said this before but when I read a book or listen to a podcast or anything else, my goal isn’t to take from the whole entire thing. If you read a good size book or listen to a longer podcast, you understand that it has a lot of filler things. A book has to be a certain length, and most people have podcasts that last the same amount of time every single time. So, my goal is to just find a small nugget from what I am reading or listening to. So, this is my nugget from one of the episodes of the Ed Mylett podcast last week. He said that he talked to someone who was a professional race car driver. He asked the driver, “What are the two biggest fears you have when racing”? He responded with this answer, when you see smoke, you have to just drive through it. If you hit the brakes, you will cause an accident. You have to trust that on the other end of the smoke it’s clear. The second thing you must worry about is focusing on the wall. If you focus on the wall, you will gravitate towards the wall and crash into it.

What is Your Smoke?

What in your life is your smoke? What is the thing in your life that when you see it, you stop or slow down instead of keeping your foot on the gas? My issue is that I probably have a lot of smoke in my life. The first thing you have to recognize is that smoke is way different than fire. Smoke is a warning sign; fire is a problem. Smoke for me is negativity from others. Smoke for me is people whose first reaction is the negative. Around twenty years ago I had a boss who described a co-worker this way, “You could give her a free car and she would complain that the car didn’t have power windows”. That has always stuck with me. You can never make a negative person happy. In the end, they will always go back to seeing only the negative. I feel like over the last few months I have been stopping to listen to these people. I need to start making sure that I just keep driving right past them. When I give them too much time, I find myself being negative and getting frustrated with things that never frustrated me before.

What is Your Wall?

What is something in your life that you keep spending too much time thinking about? This isn’t something positive, this is a situation that might not even happen, but you are so focused on it, that eventually it’s going to make you crash. For me, these are the situations in my life where I feel like I have been dealt a bad hand. When I look back on 2024, I feel like the whole year was one big bad hand. When I am at the top of my game and I get dealt a bad hand, I thrive on it. I look at it as a challenge. I convince myself that I am so awesome that dealing me a bad hand is the only way to make it fair for everyone else. But when I focus on those negative things in my life, I go crazy and start heading straight for the wall. Whenever the slightest thing happens, I start preparing myself for another bad hand. I had an issue come up last week that had me so crazy I was convinced that I would be spending the weekend in the hospital. I left work, went to go see my wife at work and the world was all good again. I was so focused on the wall that I drove straight at it. Why do I have moments when I don’t even see a wall and other times that all I can see is the wall?

What’s Next?

The first thing is recognizing the things in your life that are smoke and walls. What slows me down that shouldn’t and what do I focus on that I shouldn’t give my time to? Then ask yourself, what is my escape plan? For me, I need to know what keeps me positive. Maybe it’s a song or something I can read. When the negative hits me, can I walk away and go listen to something to get me back on track? When I find myself driving towards the wall, I need to be able to fall back on my plan for the day. The biggest way for me to not concentrate on the negative things is to get things done. If I keep crossing things off my list, I know nothing can stop me, full speed ahead this year! 

Originally posted on 1/6/2025