It Won't Kill You Till It Can; Steve Sims

Hey, welcome back to another episode of ‎The Art of Making Things Happen podcast and video cast, I suppose, for those people watching this in the Sims distillery and on the Steve D. Sims Facebook page. I’m going to talk about motorbikes. Now you know I like motorcycles, but I don’t want you to turn off because what I’m about to talk about within this motorbike story can impact you, if you’re not careful. You see, I like to collect motorcycles. I am phenomenal at buying them. I am shit terrible at selling them. So I have a collection of motorcycles, but every single bike that I have goes through the exact same thing. I’ve run it in, I prep it, I tweak it to my personal standards like anyone would have a tailor made suit or dress and then I take it onto the racetrack. Because a lot of these thoroughbreds, you only can see what they’re capable of doing when you’re actually flying around corners and doing these wonderful things.

And I had a problem with one of them. I’m not going to mention the brand or make, but I get beautiful motorcycles. And sometimes because they’re hand built or they’re hand tweaked or they’re engineered a specific way, they can get a bit temperamental. One of these motorcycles failed to have a neutral light. Now a neutral light is when you are not in gear, little light comes up. You have it in a car, you have one on a motorcycle. Now for me, it’s as an experienced motorcyclist and for most people, to be honest with you, when you in neutral, you have no power. You rev the engine, goes varoom. You realize you’re not in gear. That’s fine. Pretty easy for most of us to understand. On a race track, you don’t really need neutral. You’re on neutral when you’re on the grid, you get up into first gear. You don’t want to see neutral again until that bike goes into the garage.

So for me, it’s one of those things you don’t really care about. But the neutral light wouldn’t come on. It was a funny little thing that was creeping around in the back of my head as to why this was, but I didn’t care. Then I had to get the bike serviced. And I went along to my friend who looks after all of my bikes. I don’t do my own mechanics. As I’ve said to you all before, find a who, not a how. This guy’s brilliant at what he does. I can earn more money by doing what I do than trying to do that. So I have him look after it. It also makes him accountable that everything is right. And he contacted me and he said, “Hey Steve, you’ve got no neutral light”.

And I said, “Yeah, I’m not too worried about it”. He said, “Well, let’s find out why”. Good, that’s why I pay him. So he went through the whole process and he checked and that it was the electrics and he went through all the usual things that it could have been. There was no [recording 00:02:30] a green light that come up on my dash. And then one day he contacted me. He said, “Steve, I found the problem”. And he sounded very upset. And I said, “Okay, what is it?”. He said, “It’s in your gear casing”. He said, “There is a tiny, tiny…” And for anyone watching video, you’ll see this. It is less than my thumbnail. It’s less than one of my fingernails. It is a tiny little piece of metal that when you engage in neutral, it sticks into an electric switch and bang turns the green light on. It had fallen out into my gear casing.

So it’s actually being ground up by all the cogs of my gears. Let me take it a little step further. As I’m doing 105 mile an hour rounding a corner, there is this little piece of metal bouncing around inside my gear cogs. It could have gotten into one of the cogs, which would have immediately jammed the engine. Now you imagine coming to a stop at 105 mile an hour, even when you’re going around a corner. Now, if you lose the chain on a bike, you lose power. If the tire goes flat, it goes flat. Not instantly, over a few seconds. Any of these other things could have been good. This would have stopped the engine immediately, like someone shoving a stick in a spoked wheel when you’re driving down the road. I would have been propelled straight off of that bike and I would have died.

Now the bike’s worth about $45,000. And it’s got a lot of handmade machinery in it, but this tiny little thing would have been the thing that killed me. Now when you think about your business, most of the big things that you spend money on are not going to be the things that kill you. It’s going to be a bad review, it’s going to be a upset past employee, it’s going to be a disgruntled client that got the wrong end of the stick. It’s going to be one of those small things that trip you up. You very, very rarely as the old saying goes, no one’s ever been bit by an elephant. They’ve been bit by bees and tiny little things. It’s the little things that bite us. This little thing could have killed me. Had I not paid attention to it, which let’s be blunt from the story, I didn’t. Tony did, my mechanic.

This would have been the thing that would have killed me. Not the wheels, not the engine, not blowing up in flames. This getting jammed in the cogs. It was a very much of an opening moment. And for me, quite simply, I put the phone down and I was like, that was close. Someone upstairs was looking after me at that time. Look at your business though. What are the little things in there that could trip you up? What are the little things that could kill you? Do you have all your database backed up on a regular? Do you have a cloud storage system that in case of your laptop going in the lake, you’ve got all of that backed up there? Where are the tiny little things that could trip you up? Not kill you, I hope not, but stop you doing your business.

Where are those tiny little things? Fix those. Focus on the little things. The big things will look after themselves. I’m safe because I had a who, not a how and he was accountable and he took it on his shoulders to investigate why the little green light didn’t come on. And that little green light wasn’t coming on because it was waiting here to bounce me over the handlebars at 105 mile an hour. I don’t want you to have that risk in your life. I want you to focus on what are the little things that could kill you, remove them and go a little bit safer.

Anyway, it’s a motorcycle analogy that I hope got through to you that you need to focus on the small things, not the big ones. I want you to be productive. I want you to grow. I want you to be safe. I want you to be productive. I hope these podcasts help. If you want me to discuss a certain subject that’s going on within my life and how I’ve got over it or get hold of one of my expert friends who can answer that. Send me an email at askstevedsims.com and we’ll put a podcast episode just for you. Anyway, that’s my out. Don’t let the small things bite you in the ass or do worse, and I’ll speak with you on the next podcast. Chat soon. Bye.

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