Under Pressure; Steve Sims
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How do you respond under pressure? You see, for any of those people that are watching this video and are not just listening to it on the podcast, I’m actually here in my garage and behind me is a Ducati V4R race bike. It’s one of the fastest production motorcycles in the world, around about 250 brake horsepower, and it’s scary as sin. I take this onto the race track. Now I’ve got a lot of friends that have got super cars, sports cars, hyper cars, and the same with motorbikes. They’ve got some fantastic machinery in their vehicles and they don’t use it on the race track.
In fact, a lot of them have actually said, I’m never going to take that on a race track and monetarily, I can understand why. A lot of them don’t want to take a half a million dollar car on a race track in case something goes wrong. That’s fine, but you can drive a Ferrari down to the local supermarket and you can pick up your loaf of bread and your milk and drive home, but don’t think you’re driving a Ferrari for what it was created for. You see, and I know we’re talking about motorcycles, but it is going to get back to you so please bear with me for a second.
You see, when I take a motorcycle on the track, I get faster and faster and faster. I learn where the braking powers are. I learn how it heats up. I’ve noticed, and you can ask anyone that goes on a race track or anyone knows about any kind of sports machinery at all, they come alive around 6,000 RPM plus. I can run this bike up to 16,000 RPM, okay? It’s a race machine. It comes alive. If I’m pooling around the canyons of 4,000 revs, it can still take me around. It sounds good, it looks good, but is it really doing what it was supposed to be built for? The answer’s no.
You see, it gets there once pressure’s exerted on it. Once the RPMs start getting up, once it starts getting hot, once the tires start getting sticky and warm, everything that a lot of people try to avoid, it comes alive when that actually happens. It’s got spoilers and foils on there so as the faster you go, it puts weight on the front end, sticks the front end down. You run into a corner to accelerate it from 160, 140, 120, attacking that corner and bursting out of it, again at about 85, the other side because it was meant to do that. Now, you’re not going to see how good this machinery is until you do that. I’ve said to a lot of my friends who have got this stuff, “Look, you’ve got this beautiful vehicle and I understand you don’t want to crash it. You don’t have to go and try and race someone, but get out on the track and understand what it was meant to do, what it was built for.” My question quite simply, what are you built for?
You see, there’s a saying that always used to bother me that when the going gets tough, the entrepreneurs get going. I’m not sure that’s actually accurate, but I do understand what it means. We work under pressure, no matter what the pressure is, political, pandemic, recession. We come alive. Why? Because we’re being forced to and we accept it and we react. How many times has something happened to you that you could roll over and cry about, but you decided not to? You decided to do something about it. Hey, you may have rolled over and cried once you’ve actually got it done, but how many times have you actually come out the other side and you worked and you won and you’ve gone, “I don’t know how I got away with that.”
Well, I do, because you work well under pressure. The good thing is that when I go out on a race track and I come off a straight at 160 and I hit a corner and pull out of it again, I now know I can do 160 and bury my front end into a corner at 90 miles an hour and I’m good. It’s my new normal. We’re in a pandemic. We’ve got a political change coming up as well. We’ve got a lot of things that are going to make us uncomfortable, but you know what happens when you get comfortable with being uncomfortable? You relax and that becomes your new normal. I’m asking you to put pressure on you. See what you’re capable of. Don’t be a garage princess. Don’t be scared to just get it scratched. We’ve all got scratches. We’ve all got scars. That’s what makes us so colorful.
Please put yourself under a little bit of extra. Pressure take on that extra client that’s maybe pushing things a little bit too much. Accept that contract that maybe is going to make you work a few extra hours. It’s not until we see the pressure and what we’re capable of, that we actually start to feel empowered. I know you bunch are empowered so go out there, put yourself under pressure, be proud, stretch yourself and if it scares you, do it twice as hard.
This is Steve Sims, The Art of Making Things Happen. Look forward to chatting with you in the future.
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