It was the summer of 2016. I was in Oregon with my family, including my youngest brother and his own family. I had sold him on the merits of mountain biking. I am a low key mountain biker; I enjoy green courses and blue floats. That is to say that, I enjoy things that I don't have to get too technical or ever go in the air. Or climb too much. But within those boundaries, I enjoy downhill biking immensely. Mount Hood had seemed the perfect place. I knew it had gorgeous views. And it had a lift assist. And from my experience at Whistler and other places, this was an ideal situation.
When we arrived and looked at the rental options, they were limited. We had brought my own hybrid bikes to lend, as we weren’t planning on doing anything crazy that would necessitate “proper” mountain bikes. However, we were told that our bikes were insufficient for the course. This was surprising. I had been to a few bike parks in Washington, Duthie Hill among them with its enjoyable but approachable green and blue float courses. They are a breeze to do on a hybrid bike with minimal shocks. We were told by our guides, unfortunately, that all the trails were very rocky and that that was the nature of the terrain. I had heard this before. Stevens Pass has similar warnings. The rocks they explained were simply too large and our tires would not be allowed with them. I offered to ride the hybrid bike and offered them the use of slightly more durable mountain bikes
The trail itself was rocky as promised, and also mostly steep, not as promised, in fact, it had been explained as a low grade forest. This method essentially everyone was riding their breaks down a very rocky hill: bumpy, rocky, technical (only by way of being rocky) descents that didn’t offer much for the effort. Of particular frustration was my youngest son, whose bike would continually ride up to my back tire. As I was in the lead. I would insist that he needed to stay back, and he would immediately retort that he couldn't because we were going too slow. And yet he never passed; simply insisted several times until I angrily retorted that he needed to redefine zero.
When we hit zero, or some similar terminal point. specific mechanics and behaviors kick in. In this case, it was hitting the brakes sufficiently to not pass. It was clear that this was *possible* as he never actually passed me. His behavior at “zero” ensured that he remained behind me, which he knew he was expected to do. But without a clear example of distance, he routinely waited until he was upon me to apply that level of braking. Had he simply redefined zero and brake to that point when he was saying 10 or 15 feet back, he never would have approached that close in the first place. But he needed to engage the critical mechanic (braking) well before actually reaching the threshold that necessitated it (my front line). He needed to redefine zero.
During my high school and post college dropout years when I wasn't working in tech, I was working in restaurants. I adore the service industry, customer service, the mechanical flow of a good kitchen, and he camaraderie of the team at peak efficiency and peak business flow. In recent months, I have departed a long and financially rewarding career in tech to return to service. In particular, as I've generally worked lines like fast sub shops or concession booths, the goal is to move the line as fast as possible. If the line is moving, you are pushing product out the door and you are making sales very, very quickly. If you have food generally prepared, this is a matter of assembly and handoff. And the customer can have their order in mere seconds. The moment that you have exhausted your prepared items, the customer is waiting on real time preparation, and this tends to take considerably longer, and be more disruptive to the operation. Your monetization goes down significantly. I am fairly obsessed with efficiency and scalability and so, finding ways to increase the continual flow of customers and service is a paramount interest.
When you have “hit zero” in your preparation/service game, your mechanics change from preparing food to preparing ingredients for food. If we are serving floats, for example, and you have 100 cups of ice cream scooped already, all you need to do is grab a float cup, a can of soda, and empty the can into the cup. This whole process can take less than ten seconds. However, if you have exhausted your supply of pre-scooped float cups, you will need to perform several additional steps: find the ice cream container that contains the ice cream; ensure that it is not in use by other people scooping for other orders. Ensure that you have found a cup and scoop, add two scoops of ice cream, then deposit the scoop accordingly.
Although this may only take seconds. It can take two to three times the amount of time to prepare floats from scratch rather than being provided a prepared float cup. In addition the context switching from scooping ice cream to pouring soda loses efficiency. If a person’s only job is scooping ice cream into cups, the rate of production increases significantly. For the restaurant industry, this is known as staging. Staging is how many prepared or semi prepared items are available for immediate use. At a hamburger restaurant, one may have plenty of hamburgers and some extra patties, ready to go at a moment's notice. They can't hold for very long, but if your orders are coming continuously, they don't need to. They only sit in the staging area for a minute or two before moving to their final destination. This tends to be one person’s job, and their sole responsibility is to keep everything prepared and staged so that service can continue unimpeded. They redefine zero.
I've had a long and complicated relationship with finance between gifts, privilege, and a ruthless curiosity to capitalize on those things. I sold computers in the late 80s and early 90s In high school making very good money in the sort of pre gig gig economy. This allowed me to spend extravagantly but within my means, because my social circles were what they were. Rather than doing fancier things for myself, I just did more of the things I already did, and included more people, and sold a few more computers when I ran out of funds to do that. This would lead me down a very familiar path of running on empty or regularly draining bank accounts down to zero before filling them up again. I know that I’m not unique in this; whether full-time or in the gig economy, the pattern of living “paycheck to paycheck” is a frustratingly common one in America.
My youngest son, his inability to keep his distance aside, is a talented budding pilot, taking flying lessons on and off for a couple of years. Part of the flight training is to practice landing. Given the nature of failure, “hitting zero” (the ground) is a very dangerous line. Missing or overshooting it when you're learning can have disastrous consequences. To counter this, trainers will take the plane up to a safe altitude and then define a specific, lower, altitude to treat as the runway. They will practice all of their maneuvers at an altitude several thousand feet above the actual ground. This enables them to fly carefully with their instruments, which should be a key guide to flying in the first place, and understand very clearly how the plane moves up and down, particularly down, and how it can recover with minimal consequences. “Hitting zero”, rather than creating an impact, simply lets a noise indicator know that your approach “needs work”. Flight Instructors redefined zero.
In my mid 30s my third attempt and growing up I wanted to buy a house and understood the savings required to do this. My software of choice at the time, Microsoft Money had a wonderful feature that, given your budget, allowed you to visualize your cash flow over time. This enabled me to understand that the combination of timing of my income and expenses left an effective low point at $5,000 at any given time. That meant if I looked at my bank account, and saw $5,000 it was possible that that 5000 was already spent. My bills at the time did not really afford for that number to be any larger. If I saw $6,000, I definitely knew that I had at least $1,000 in cash actually available. To buy a house, I locked down all finances and frivolous spending to raise enough capital to qualify for it. Once that was taken care of in my career now providing stepping more income again, I didn't raise our living standard. Again, I didn't do considerably more expensive things; I still drove the same car and lived in the same house before my income “went vertical”. And because of this level of financial padding and relatively modest lifestyle, I avoided the hard work of actually locking down my finances. Instead, I was able to redefine my zero to five figures. If I ever saw myself nearing less than five fingers, I engaged my “we are out of money” mechanics until I was back on track. Admittedly this is not an ideal path of financial maturity. But for someone trapped in the cycle of spending paycheck to paycheck it can be a life changing behavior. It doesn't ultimately mean doing with less than you did before. It just means changing the point in time that you spend less. Once you've saved up enough to have a “comfortable zero”, your lifestyle can continue as before, with the knowledge that if you think you are running out of money, you actually have some safety net behind you.
Did this week's message resonate with you? Are there other examples in your life? Every defined secret to your success or detriment? Please let me know in the comments below.
Good night, *campers* and do not forget to *enjoy* the *sauce*!
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