Stay ready, don't get ready.

Update from 8/13/20 at end of article

Not an original idea but a powerful one. While this mantra has it's origin in sport, the message rings true across many facets of life. Finance, career readiness (hello pandemic economy), and skills improvement. This is true when talking about personal development or finding true love!

But there's a reason that this phrase is most often associated with our sports heroes. Sport perfectly illustrates the importance of staying ready so you don't have to get ready when you're called upon and I can't think of a better example than what has recently happened with German Formula 1 driver Nico Hulkenberg.

Before we get too far, I need to give a bit of background. When the COVID-19 pandemic caused all sports (rightly) to be shut down I was, like most people, yearning for that sport itch to be scratched. I missed the things we all love about watching sports, the feeling of normalcy and routine, the drama, the competition, the storylines, and having something to look forward to throughout the week. I meandered around the channels a bit, watching old Chicago Cubs games from the late 80's (and a few games from 2016 of course), some vintage FC Barcelona games, old Champions League matches, but nothing that I watched gave me that sense of excitement and drama. First, I already knew what had happened in most cases. Second, if I didn't know what happened in the individual game, I was missing out on the context the complete season.

Enter Formula 1. F1 first caught my eye (or ear) through a podcast that talked about how the sport is the most technologically advanced on offer right now. Not just from the cars and drivers but from the fan experience as well. I threw myself into learning everything I could about F1. Aided by YouTube and a 30 day free trial of F1TV (brilliant marketing move), I found myself staying up until the wee hours of the morning learning about the history, rules, drivers, teams, and strategies within the race. All the things I love about sports that I've been a fan of for years, I had found again! I blew through the 2018 and 2019 seasons with the same amount of excitement as if they were happening live. A new fan was born.

There's a lot of things that make Formula 1 exciting, too many to mention here. If drivers making adjustments on the fly with a steering wheel that looks like the love child of a Rubik's Cube and a Nintendo DS while traveling in excess of 200mph isn't enough... you have a race in a new country every week and the high stakes of one small mistake by either driver or team putting an entire race week down the toilet. Not to mention, there are only ten F1 teams with two drivers each. 20 seats in the whole sport! It's an elite crew that makes the free agency and the transfer windows quite interesting.

This brings us back to our friend Nico Hulkenberg. In 2019 he drove well but his team didn't re-sign him. At the end of 2019, he found himself without a coveted racing seat for 2020. While this can be discouraging for any driver, it's not unheard of for drivers to miss out on a season or two and then be brought back in when a seat opens up during the offseason with a new team.

But this is 2020. The F1 season started anew at the beginning of July with strict COVID protocols in place for protecting teams and drivers from getting or spreading the virus. Still, Racing Point driver Sergio Perez tested positive for COVID-19 on Thursday afternoon. That is to say less than 24 hours before race weekend was to get underway at Silverstone raceway in the U.K. This left Racing Point directors an impossibly small window to find a new driver and get them fitted to the car and registered for the first of three official practice sessions on Friday morning. To make matters worse, their reserve driver was racing at a different location and unavailable. Team bosses decided to call Nico and offer him the seat. One problem, when Nico answered, he had just landed in Germany for a sportscar test.

I'm sure the next 24 hours felt like they were flying by faster than a Formu... I'm sure they felt fast.

After having been out of an F1 car for more than 6 months, Nico was ready to jump back in at literally a moment's notice. He stayed physically and mentally in shape, stayed competitive, and stayed ready.

You never know when your phone is going to ring with that opportunity to jump back into the driver's seat. Even more important but less obvious is that you never know when your phone is going to ring and it's going to be someone taking that seat away from you. We don't know when our window will close and we don't know how long it will stay that way. These are things we can't control. Just like pandemics, and economic downturns, and tragedy, and strokes of good luck. What we can control is how ready we are to jump back behind the wheel.

When uncertainty comes our way remember, preparation over panic. Stay ready so you don't have to get ready.

If you ever want to talk about preparation, adversity, or more life lessons from Formula 1, let me know.

p.s. Hulkenberg placed the 7th fastest lap of the day on Friday. He's got one more practice session and a qualifying session on Saturday before the Grand Prix on Sunday morning.

p.p.s. Netflix has a great series called Drive to Survive if you're looking to dip your toe into the Formula 1 world. In typical Netflix fashion, it has excellent production value while still being very accessible if you know nothing of F1.

Aaaand here's a fun video that demonstrates just how impossible these cars are to drive.

UPDATE: Racing Point was unable to get the car started for Hulkenberg's first race back. However, a second positive test from Perez gave Hulkenberg another opportunity with Racing Point at the 70th Anniversary Grand Prix at Silverstone on 8/9/20. The second race in as many weeks at the same circuit allowed Nico another crack and he was able to improve on his pace (qualifying in P3 behind the two championship Mercedes) and finishing the race in 7th place after an exciting and difficult race due to track temperatures. Of course, a podium would have been a story for the history books but, coming back after being out of the sport for multiple months and finishing his first race in the top 10 is an incredible achievement. More importantly, it makes a very strong case for Hulkenberg as an elite driver, and deserving of a seat for the 2021 season.

Thanks a lot, Cody Parkey. I really mean it.

Thanks a lot Cody Parkey. But hear me out, I really mean it. It’s been nearly two weeks since the infamous Double Doink of 2019. The moment that our beloved Bears were weighed and found wanting. Growing up in Chicago, I learned early on that thick skin and unwavering optimism are the only things that will help you survive the very real, very angry winter weather on the Lake Shore (summer will come again). This same thick skin and unwavering optimism help us survive the long emotional winters that our sports teams insist we endure (there will be a next year). We say it often, often we say it early, and boy do we mean it! Up until 2016, as a Cubs fan, I’ve been known to fight off the nightmares by soothing myself to sleep with this phrase as early as mid-May.

The Bears haven’t been much better recently with mathematical elimination coming early in the season. I’ll never forget watching one of the last games of 2016, a classic Bears vs. Packers match up at Soldier Field with a -18℉ temperature. The decal was literally knocked off of Ka’Deem Carey’s helmet by Joe Thomas. If that’s not a picture of our season I don’t know what is, even our logo didn’t wanna stick around.

But that’s the Bears of the past. Come to the 2018 season and we are full of excitement and promise. A young promising quarterback, a young promising coach, the best defense in the league (don’t @ me), and a city that was once again fully behind the Monsters of the Midway.

Every downtown building that had lights was lit up in blue and orange, “Bear Down” shining over LSD on the Blue Cross Blue Shield building. The entire week before the game the city was buzzing. Then the kick happened. Clean snap, good hold, barely tipped, then the upright, then the crossbar, and out. The Pony Inn which moments before was the loudest place I’d been for a game in a long time, was now completely hushed. Season over, the Bears and Cody Parkey leave the field to boos and shouts of much worse.

This is what it feels like to be a Bears fan, welcome to Chicago.

Can you blame the initial reaction, though? So much expectation so quickly dashed and in such a cruel way. I’ll admit it, I vented to my wife on the way home about how Parkey, “got into his own head with all the times he’d hit the uprights this year”, and “Of course this would be the way our season ended”, and, “This is what it feels like to be a Bears fan, welcome to Chicago”.

When I first said them, I meant those things as pretty big bummers. But as the last two weeks have unfolded, my words have come back to me with a much different sentiment attached to them, pride. I’m sure you’ve seen the highlights of the kick so I’m not going to post it, but if you haven’t watched Cody Parkey’s post-game interview, you owe yourself and him a favor. Take 2 minutes right now to check it out:

What you just watched was an example of a person taking ownership of what they did at possibly the most crucial moment in his career up to this point. Clearly and unequivocally owning the circumstance for better, or in this case, worse. Being comfortable with other people holding him accountable for his actions because he holds himself accountable first.

And it didn’t stop there, as the days went on, many Bears teammates stood up for Cody, owned their piece of the defeat, and pointed to the new task at hand: building on what’s been accomplished and preparing for the next opportunity. It’s clear that Matt Nagy created a really special culture with this Bears team. One that obviously pursues excellence and is results driven but one that equally promotes ownership, healthy accountability, and trust in each others effort and ability. We still have to wait and see how successful this team is on the field, but in the darkest moment of their season, they showed that they’ve got some really important things already sorted out.

"You have one job to do."

Filling the kicking cleats of someone like Robbie Gould in a city like Chicago is a big task, especially in a position where the game often hangs on your foot and you're seen as having "one job to do.” Sure, Cody had one job to do but I don’t see it as making field goals. It’s the same job that anyone who hopes to reach the pinnacle of their field has; prepare, perform, and represent personal excellence. He did that incredibly well in the face of incredible scrutiny. That’s someone I would want on my team, something I hope to do when scrutiny comes my way, and something I hope to teach my kids someday.

So, I’ll say it again but with a lot more pride than I originally meant it.

This is what it feels like to be a Bears fan. Thanks a lot, Cody Parkey.

-Adam

P.S. as a bonus, here's a bunch of Chicagoans attempting that 43 yard field goal. Spoiler alert, it's not good.

Racing, Mistakes, and Leading

Making mistakes is a great equalizer, it happens to everyone with regularity. The great separator is in how we handle ourselves after mistakes. A few months back, what I believe to be the benchmark for how to balance the inevitable blunders we all face was demonstrated by Aussie Formula 1 driver, Daniel Ricciardo.

A short background with some context before we dive in too deeply. In F1, each team has two drivers in essentially identical cars, save for some upgrades or test parts. That means that the main differentiator in a driver's success is the combination of the race strategy the team has them on and their own driving skill. This is also the reason why drivers are most often compared directly to their teammates: equal machines, who can get the most out of it? This also means that sometimes, it's in the best interest of the team to allow the faster driver to pass the other so that the faster car can get on with catching other teams instead of being stuck in a civil war, battling it out amongst themselves.

The great separator is in how we handle ourselves after mistakes.

A few months back at the Sochi Grand Prix, French F1 team Renault found themselves in such a situation. Ricciardo was finding much more pace than his teammate, Esteban Ocon who was immediately in front of him. The team ordered a swap, allowing Ricciardo to freely pass Ocon and concentrate on moving up the pack for the rest of the race. Here is where we find our Formula 1 faux pas.

Now, before we move on I have to stick up for Daniel a bit. When terms like "freely pass" are thrown around, I'm afraid it paints a picture of a nice Sunday drive through the neighborhood where passing is as simple as a turn signal and a little acceleration. Let me assure you this is not the case. These are still the fastest race cars on the planet, reaching speeds in excess of 200mph with no anti-lock brakes and no traction control. However, a whoopsie daisy is still a whoopsie daisy.

On lap 25, while overtaking Ocon into the particularly quick second turn, Ricciardo exceeded the limits of the track, earning himself a 5-second penalty. A few seconds later, his helmet radio beeps and his racing engineer informs him "You do have a 5-second penalty for the Turn 2 incident." With the gap between each driver's fastest lap being barely more than 4 seconds, a 5-second penalty has the potential to devastate a driver's race.

This is exactly the moment that Ricciardo demonstrated a strength of character, in the heat of a race, to which we all can aspire. Watch his response below:

He could have been frustrated with the stewards for the decision, he could have blamed his teammate for not giving him a better line into the corner, he could have blamed the team strategy for asking him to overtake in a difficult spot. "OK. I'll drive faster." Those were the first words out of his mouth followed immediately by, "Yeah, that's my bad."

"OK. I'll drive faster."

There are two takeaways that make this the gold-standard of handling mistakes in my mind and incredibly practical to all of us, even if you're not one of the 20 fastest drivers in the world.

1. Accept responsibility.

2. Immediately orient towards a solution.

Applying these principles (in any order) is an incredibly mature and productive way to manage a mistake, mitigate the fallout, and make progress away from a misstep. What's more, is that being able to comfortably operate in this way makes for an incredibly good teammate and someone that others learn to trust. This is not only who I aspire to be as a team member, but it's also what I look for when hiring new members to my team. No one is perfect, errors are inevitable, it's how we handle the errors that allow us to rise above the rest.

There's another hidden lesson in this situation specifically for leaders. Did you miss it? The golden example of leadership and accountability is the manner of response from his racing engineer. Go back and watch the clip again paying attention to how his engineer responds, "Cheers buddy."

No one is perfect, errors are inevitable, it's how we handle the errors that allow us to rise above the rest.

That's it. Two words that communicated trust, acknowledgment, and freedom for Ricciardo to get after it. That's a relationship and team culture that was established well before this incident. That's what I want to be as a leader, pursuant to mutual trust with my team and granting freedom for them to do what they do best, even when they make mistakes.

Besides, it's only a matter of time before it's my turn to say, "That's my bad. I'll drive faster."

p.s. Are you wondering if Ricciardo did in fact, drive faster? The answer is, yes. If you're a data nerd you can see his lap chart below or read the full article from F1 here.

p.p.s. Ricciardo is known for being one of the most fun-loving and easy-going drivers on grid, typical Aussie. Check this out if you're in for a chuckle at some of his antics.

p.p.p.s. Check out these awesome sport blunders!