Come here and hold the light! (Pt.2)

Our guests, brothers Chris (top; Senior Director for Grid Dynamics) & Nat Bongiovanni (bottom; CIO/CTO of NTT Data Federal) have a similar set of garage stories surrounding a yellow AMC Gremlin, some of which shaped their careers in Business and Information Technology. And we welcome them to Break/Fix to explore how these “garage moments” can effect change in your life, and pass on some fatherly advice.

• Going back to the ‘Ol Yellow Gremlin’. Sounds like it was your father’s terrible answer to high gas prices in the early 1970’s. Even though it probably didn’t help much on fuel costs, it does sound like you have fond memories of it. Let’s talk about some of those earliest lessons about life and work that you learned from your Dad… and the Gremlin. 
• How does this relate to our professional life?
• “It is important to listen to what people say, but it is far more important to watch what people do”. This is Far and away the best advice my dad ever gave me.” – Chris. Do you think your dad was suggesting more, in the sense of different types of learning?
• Reviewing the 7 types of Learning.
• The core of continuous improvement is continuous listening.
• Lots of complex engineering projects, especially cars, and including Business and IT are a series of operations with very specific combinations of components. If you learn the order in which items are assembled, you can fix/build anything. (hence the name of this show) how does this apply to our business lives?

and much, much more!

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Gran Touring Motorsports podcast, break Fix, where we’re always fixing the break into something motorsports related. There have been several times as I look back over my childhood, that I recall vivid experiences in the garage that were actually critical learning moments. If you’d asked me 10 years ago, I probably would’ve said my father wasn’t the most learned man.

Never finished college, but he was a smart guy. He did spend 30 years as a mainframe programmer, but he wasn’t into what he would’ve considered the softer sciences, like psychology. If you asked him, he was an engineer and a bit of a MacGyver. Inevitably, this meant countless hours spent under the hoods of cars and each one of those encounters starting with the same beck and call, Hey, I need you to come here and hold the light.

Our guest tonight, brothers, Chris and Nat Bongiovanni have a similar set of garage stories surrounding a yellow A M C gremlin, some of which shape their careers in business and information technology, and we [00:01:00] welcome them to break fix, to explore how these garage moments can affect change in your life and pass on some fatherly advice.

So welcome to Break Fix. Hey Eric. How’s it going? Thanks, Eric. The reason we’re having this discussion tonight is that I was really taken aback by a LinkedIn post by Chris, but before we get into that specific post and we dive into all the fun shop talk that goes along with that, let’s talk about your roles in business so we can better frame how these two worlds, the motorsport and car enthusiast world intersect.

Nat, why don’t you go ahead. Sure. So I’m the Chief Technology Officer and Chief Information Officer for N TT Data Federal. I have two great teams that work for me, one that’s really focused on business development and sales of our system integrator services. The other is an IT department that makes sure that we meet all of the federal government’s security requirements, which are very, very abundant.

And I am senior director at Grid Dynamics. Uh, what I do each and every day is [00:02:00] help clients design and implement IT, programs that support digital transformation and modernization initiatives when inside the Fortune 1000. I’ve got a, a few different teams working all around the world, ringing all of this together, and it, I find it to be always an interesting thing that all of my father’s children wound up in it.

So we’ll have, certainly have to cover that point. It’s somewhere along the line here and this apple doesn’t fall far from that tree either. As you guys know, I intersect this world as well. My day job is Batman. I support the IT industry as well, and I’m podcast host by night. For me. I’ve always seen it and cars go hand in hand.

It’s always kind of funny the number of petrol heads I meet across a boardroom table. So that always spawns some good stories. So speaking of good stories and going back to yield gremlin, it sounds like your father’s. Terrible answer to high gas prices in the early seventies. Was this particular yellow gremlin that you referenced on LinkedIn, even though it didn’t help with fuel costs, it sounds like you have some pretty fond memories.

Yeah. [00:03:00] That car was just abysmal, right? Not our finest moment of engineering here in the us It’s probably the car. I believe that, cause I think it was a 73 gremlin is my, is my recollection. And then so it’s, it’s about as old as I am. If it’s still out there, my first memories were of that car or in that car, and so that’s kind of where that post came.

Each and every day you have all these observations about what goes on in life and then you think about how you process that. What did this event, or what did this person say something? What did all that mean? It always goes back to those early life moments where. You go, oh yeah, that’s right. That’s where I learned that, that single piece, and in this circumstances it was really around the difference between what people say and what people do.

So Nat, you have a different set of memories for the Gremlin? Yeah, so it’s interesting too because Chris was born 10 years after me, some of those rides, and at Gremlin, he was riding with me, I was driving, [00:04:00] now he’s probably forgetting all the times. The car broke down on the side of the road and we were fixing it.

Do you remember you driving that car? I only remember breaking down in the 68 Chevelle. I don’t remember breaking down in the gremlin. Wait, wait, wait, wait. You guys had a 68 Chevelle? Yeah. Convertible. No. Wait. Is that what you gave up for Gremlin? No, no, no. That was my older brother’s car and he totaled it.

Oh, okay. Well, all right. And that’s a, a whole different story. Yeah, that’s a very different story. And so he’s, he’s actually our stepbrother. My mother had a child before she married my father. He’s the one that’s not in the family that didn’t go into it. That’s it. That probably the best way to describe that.

So my father was much more of a fix it when it was broken than doing the preventive maintenance. Like people would do all the time. You know, he would change the oil on a car every 60,000 miles, whether it needed it or not. Um, and so by the [00:05:00] time I got that car and I got that car on my like 17th birthday, the car had been sitting on the side of my grandmother’s house for about a year waiting for me to turn 17.

So the first thing I had to do was use all of the hard earned money. I had to go buy a battery so I could start it up. And then once I got it started, I was constantly kind of figuring out ways to keep it running. So you know, it’s, have a job so that you could afford gas and you could afford parts to keep your car running.

That’s what I did pretty much for the second half of my junior year in high school, or my entire senior year in high school. Actually not quite my entire senior year for that particular car because I blew up the engine and that car got. Taken to the junkyard. I threw a rod about 14 months or so after I got it.

Part of that was the oil not being in the car caused incredible amount of damage. Those motors are pretty notorious for burning. You didn’t have to change it if you just kept adding it. Right. It was always clean. Well, I, you you did. I sound like our dad talking. [00:06:00] Yeah, that’s exactly what, then you had to pull the spark plugs about every thousand miles to clean the carbon off of the spark plugs.

Oh, that foul ’em up, huh? So, but you know, going to Chris’s point though, you know, one of the things that you learn when you have something that is so incredibly unreliable, always having a backup player, always making sure that you’re not caught stranded somewhere where the nearest phone is a two mile walk on a lonely stretch of road.

And by the way, I’ve done that two mile walk on a lonely stretch of road more than one time. You brought up something really important though, and it’s true in the world of racing as well. There’s two schools of thought. There’s the, I’ll run it till it’s broken, and then I know what broke and then we’ll fix it.

Right? Kinda the premise behind break fix in a lot of ways. There’s also, I gotta keep all the spares on the truck because I have an idea what’s gonna break. You know, is it wheel bearings, is it axles, is it this and the other? Or there’s the guy that, probably his other hobby is, you know, being an airline pilot or something because they got these [00:07:00] checklists and they’re meticulous about making sure that everything has been replaced before, every event that they go to.

So who’s right? I don’t know. It kind of comes down to total cost of ownership at that point. Depends on what it is. If it was a Miata, I’d say yeah, just send it until it breaks. Who cares? You know, the parts are 10 bucks, but in this case, when it’s your daily driver, yes you have to, you maybe you have to straddle the line, right?

You gotta make a decision there. So that goes back to something that Chris said earlier is about these early life lessons and something you mentioned that about working on the car, you know, working with your dad, getting, you know, having that plan B, you know, plan Bs are the answer to all it problems as well, right?

It’s always having that backup plan, cuz nothing ever is never true, is never square, never goes according to plan. So let’s talk about some of those early life lessons that you guys learned in the garage working under the hood. The interesting part, and I’m sure Chris was gonna bring this up, is that. It wasn’t just fixing cars, it was fixing everything.

We learned how to do electrical work in houses. We learned how to do plumbing. I learned how to sweat pipes cause my [00:08:00] dad owned apartments and to this day, I don’t ever wanna be a landlord because my dad owned apartments. A lot of times it was, you know, when you were a gopher, you worked with dad and Dad said, go get this.

Go get that. It’s pretty amazing. You get really good. So that even today I can look and say, oh, that’s a five eight socket you need for that one. It was something we did so frequently and you got to the point where you could figure it out yourself. Obviously watching my father fix things, one of the things that he did that I learned was to always keep track of the parts that you were taking off and where they were so that you could put it back together.

Because most of the time he didn’t have a good manual. You wanna add to that? Corey knew how to read manuals. I think that was kind of outside of his religious experience, is that why would I need a manual? Yeah. You know, it is interesting and I remember doing the roof and learning, Hey, here’s what decking looks like, the paper shingles, et cetera.

I remember doing that. The roof, you know, one of the roofs on one of the houses there. So I agree with you now, that is exactly who he was [00:09:00] and the way that we learned. But you know, the interesting thing about this is that our dad was a philosophical dude, right? He read a lot. You know, not only did he wrench on stuff, but he read a lot.

And, uh, and especially remember that I, I’m the accident at the end, as I always say. So he retired when I was 13. I had this experience with him. We spent a lot of time reading books together cuz he would read a book and then he’d hand it off to me and I would read the book and we would talk about it in the car when we would be talking about these things that morning, you know that driving down to our uncle lived in the house that our grandfather built when they came across from Sicily.

And the apartment buildings that Nat referred to earlier were right across the street. Our grandfather was a Mason by trade, also a very interesting guy, you know. So every Saturday morning I’d get in the car with the old man and we would drive down Highway 27 in that ugly yellow gremlin. We would talk about things.

He was always a guy that wanted to have a conversation about [00:10:00] things because we were, hey, hold the flashlight while we changed the brakes out and here’s how a brake caliper works. Now, it wasn’t that. Beautiful. Hey, let me show you how the piston works and all the pieces and parts. You know, he’s got a sea clamp, a piece of scrap wood and MacGyvering his way through getting that caliper all the way open so that you can get the new shoes in and get it on back on the disc.

It was never a formal lesson. It was always this kind of, these off THEC cuff experiences, at least in my memory of where I picked that stuff up along the way. You know, he inspires this mechanical intelligence, you know, and Eric, you and I have kind of talked about that multiple intelligence piece. You know, it really woke that up along the way, you know?

Now whether or not that would’ve showed up had I been somewhere else, I. I can’t tell you, but I know that he inspired me to wanna understand how things work. That instinct, that skill led me to it, and it led me to business. Yeah. I have to [00:11:00] agree in some of those instances, you know, you’re talking about holding the light and all that.

I, I look back on those and especially when I was really young, I used to just begrudgingly find my way to the garage going, oh God, here I am. And I used to walk away from every experience going, all I learned today was the constant, you know, new expletives and point the light where I’m looking, not where you’re looking.

Right. So, and I find myself, I, I hate to say, I find myself saying that to my daughters as well because they, they’re the same habit. They’re like, oh, what’s he doing? What’s he looking? I’m like, that’s totally useless to me, point the light where I’m working. You know, that kind of thing. Like you guys, I would spend countless hours.

In the garage with my dad. He was a little more quiet and reserved and like you guys being immigrants, being Italians. We had that classic roll em up tenacity where it was like, well, we’re not gonna pay to have it done. We’re gonna do it ourselves, right? Come hell or high water, we’re gonna figure it out.

So we did all of our own work, but that was also part of the car culture at that time. It’s different now. Cars are so complicated. We have to take ’em in because you have to be an IT specialist to diagnose what the electrical [00:12:00] issue is. And it’s more electrical now than it is mechanical. Cause I think we’ve solved a lot of the mechanical problems.

Uh, some of that was due to shoddy, you know, manufacturing and tolerances and everything else. As I looked back, as I got older and those experience were, were still frequent. You know, come here and hold the light. Turned into secretly this son, it’s the time I show you how this works. And even though words weren’t spoken, I tell you what, without knowing it, I absorbed so much.

And I wonder if my dad knew that. We’ll, we’ll pick up on different ways about learning and things as we progress in the conversation. But I think he saw that in me gonna touch a d d, right? So he is like, if I put you to work and get you to use your hands, right? They’re not idle and you can take something apart to NA’s point without breaking it, you can put it back together.

So those became really important centerpieces for me as I reached my teenage years. And if you don’t mind me adding just a little anecdote to this, when I got my first car, there were two in a bag of wrenches, and the only statement that was said was Make one outta two. I’m like, what? But at that point, I already knew a lot.[00:13:00]

I just needed to roll up my sleeves and get it done. So your experience was kind of like mine. You just, you know, Hey, at grandma’s house there’s a gremlin. You can go get it. I’ll drive you down. By the way, the battery’s gonna cost 25 bucks, so you gotta go buy the battery first. Yeah, right. Get the battery and it’s completely dead.

But you’re on your own. You’re on your own to get home. Actually, you know what, I was on my own to get home and I had my first accident. Oh. Um, on the way home cuz it was snowing. It slid the gremlin probably going about two miles an hour into the bumper of a truck. Ooh. Uh, like, I mean, a, not a 18 wheeler, but like a big box truck.

And the guy driving the box truck said, yeah, there’s no harm, no foul. He’ll get off the road before you hurt somebody. Uh, you know, it’s interesting you bring up the learning cells and I, and Chris, you hadn’t really thought about this, but our, so our dad was reading all the time and he read a lot of science fiction, science fiction stuff was all over the house.

And so I remember growing up reading like, just about everything that Isaac [00:14:00] Ov ever wrote. I know he wrote more after I went left home and went into the Navy. But I read a whole bunch and then years later I’m in a philosophy course. And I realized that Isaac Asimov had stolen everything from philosophers.

It wasn’t like any of his ideas were new, they were just applied to robots. And that was an interesting learning experience that said, wow, there’s just ideas that get applied to something totally different that you’d never expect, and they work. And I think that was something else that both my parents would do.

It’s like, well, Why do you have to do it that way? Go do it this other way instead. Which by the way, in the IT world, that is really beneficial. So we’re gonna expand on that. Yeah, that’s a really good point. And I think that’s also the premise behind the book. What is it? The Hero of A Thousand Faces, where it basically states that there’s really only seven major storylines that have ever been created and everything is just a derivative of those, you know, but whether they be fables or religious or otherwise, you brought it up it.

Let’s dive back into Chris’s LinkedIn post and talk more about [00:15:00] how this vehicle world intersects with his professional life and the lessons that he learned from your dad. And you know, what he’s been talking about recently on LinkedIn. It’s interesting, right? The nature of my job. I get to a watch a lot of people come together and I, you know, it’s funny, I spent some time as chief technology officer and I was really nose down in the technology and then I transitioned to running a business unit for a consulting company, knowing that we had, you know, literally dozens of teams running at all given time.

Some of them small, 3, 5, 7 people, some of them 60, 80 people watching those people machines work and understanding, okay, what is going to happen in these circumstances under this set of conditions? What’s the team likely to do? Because you could start to predict it after a while. And it really drew me kind of a little bit away from the nuts and bolts of the technology of actually building technology and really focusing in on the dynamics of.

[00:16:00] How these people come together. And I think that’s really where that LinkedIn post came from. Watching that and having some experiences with it, wanting to communicate it not well in a way that was constructive, right? Because so much of our observations turn into vent or ramps, especially in the modern, you know, in the in, in recent times.

You gotta kind of start to pull the emotion out of it and start to say what are the mechanics that are governing this? And what are the roots, if you will, of the dysfunction that you’re observing or the excellence that you’re observing? Because the both things happen, right? You can, you see the best and worst of humanity each and every day if you go looking for it.

You know? So I’ve made an art out of that based on, you know, these just basic mechanical principles, right? You know, as they really kind of look at it and go. What is the mover here? What’s causing the energy and how is it impacting the, the parts around? Very much like the, you know, the explosion inside that cylinder head.

It [00:17:00] causes a lot of things to start moving. So Nat, you manage large teams. Anything additional there on top of Chris’s statement that you’ve observed as well? Well, you know, it’s interesting cuz Chris was bringing up this understanding the dynamics of people, and it wasn’t just our father that taught us.

Our mother was really good at creating teams. One of the things that my mother taught us was that there’s no such thing as a job that’s too small. Every job is important. Every job needs to be done. It doesn’t matter whether it’s sweeping the floor, cleaning the tools or what, whatever it is, they’re all important.

They all have to be done. And that everybody who’s doing a job, Is important and needs to be done. And I think Chris is right. You can go look at any team and you can find everything that’s wrong with it and you can also find everything that’s right with it. And I think the art, and this is really the art, is finding a way to get people to think through so that they don’t do the wrong things and they do the right things.

In fact, I think our entire family, all of my father’s children learned that really well. And that’s one of the reasons why we’re all successful is [00:18:00] because not only can we understand these, Really complicated things like how to fix spark plugs on a gremlin. It’s a dying art. Dying art. Cause I wasn’t gonna buy new ones.

I mean, that was not enough money for that. By the same token, it was how do we get to bring out the best in people all the time? I said early on, I have two excellent teams. That wasn’t chance. That was something that had to be built. And it’s not by just choosing the right people, it’s by mentoring and bringing those people along.

So that they can understand how their work and their energy fits into the grand toll and to make the entire team work better. Also explaining to them is, if you’re not good at something, ask for help or let’s find somebody who’s good at it that can do it. So that we’re always has a team. We’re working really, really exceptionally well, and we’re not relying all on one person.

There’s one other lesson that I think that we derived, and this is a real contrast in our parents. [00:19:00] Uh, our father was, I think, the ultimate utilitarian in this respect. Right. You know, just, it only got done if it had to be done right. So that’s point about the car. But my mother was an excellence freak. It had to be perfect.

You know, the thing that you strive for with teams is finding balance between those polarities, right? Because the, you know, you do have a team that’s like, okay, you start to, you know, engage them. You realize that, okay, they’re good at the reactive and they’re good at just responding to stimuli that’s coming their way.

Then you have to infuse through nurturing, through a lot of work and a lot of conversation. In my case, That idea of what does excellence look like and, and how do we get one step closer, right? Because we’re never gonna get there. My mother spent her life pursuing excellence in everything that she did, and I can still look at the quilts that she made and go, wow, there are very few flaws in these things.

Right? She spent [00:20:00] a lot of time on the detail, but. In business and in and in. You know? And in it we don’t always get a lot of times, so sometimes we have to drift a little closer to that utilitarian side of the spectrum and just balance those two things. Always working towards excellence, but recognizing the constraints and being utilitarian when we run into it.

And the three guiding principles I lived by for, and I still do as I’ve come up through my IT career, were what they call the three Cs, communication, collaboration, and cooperation. That’s what causes a team to function at maximum efficiency, regardless of all those external outliers, right? If you can satisfy those three things, Open the lines of communication, get people to cooperate and collaborate.

You can move forward as a unit. You see this all the time. It’s not just in it, it’s how the military functions. It’s also how race teams function. Everybody has their swim lane, their responsibility. The tire guy is just as important as the data guy, as the head engineer, as the guy [00:21:00] that’s putting the fuel in the car, right?

When they come in for a pit stop. But if one of those pieces in the machine, the big Rue Goldberg machine that we’ve created fails, then we all fail together, right? So it’s imperative, as the Japanese say, rising tides lift all ships. We all work together towards success, towards excellence, as you’re saying.

But there’s something else hidden in what you said, and I wanna relate this to the listeners that are thinking about this from a driving perspective. You talked about the reactive, you know, utilitarian only do it when it’s broken versus the striving for excellence. When we as coaches go in for training and we get reevaluated every year, those are the two major.

Types of students that they will quantify in the exercises. They call them the timid student, like the overanalyzing engineer that cares about their lap time and wants to make everything precise. And then you have this rambunctious drive by the seat of their pants completely just by feel. And when you compare the two, they perform the same and one thinks they’re better than the other, that they’re doing it right.

Neither one is [00:22:00] wrong. Neither one is right. But you have to meet in the middle to achieve maximum efficiency, and that’s when you can go faster. But that’s also where all of us, whether we’re in the professional space or let’s say in the motor sports space, as guides, as instructors, as coaches are there to learn about our students or our personnel or our team and help foster how they grow and how they hit that maximum efficiency.

That’s That’s spot on. It is spot on. It’s a revelation as you start to work with your team and you know, as they get comfortable, you start to see who they really are. Right? Are they that rambunctious driver or are they this very calculated driver? And it’s always interesting. To watch the interaction between the two types because, you know, we’ve got ’em on every team, right?

We have those varieties on every team and helping them learn a, you know, Hey, here’s where your swim lane is, and B, here’s what tolerance looks like. Cuz you know it’s not your way, it’s not, it’s never your a hundred percent your way. And so you have to learn [00:23:00] to go, I’m okay with it. I’m meeting in the middle here because we can do something more remarkable than if we do it alone.

I have a a saying about how do you create a high performing team? And I said, well, you, you start with smart people. You start with good people, you make sure you know about them, you know what makes them go, what makes them tick, and you understand how they operate. You align what they’re really great at, with what needs to be done, and then you ask for a lot.

And it works because people are willing to actually perform and do a lot more of things that they know they’re doing well, or areas where they know they’re growing. Also, they need to know what the goal is, what the vision is, because sometimes you’ll get people that are divergent goals. It goes back to that utilitarian versus.

Excellence. I don’t know how many times I’ve talked teams out of the gold plated solution. You know the solution that’s gonna cost. And you can do this with cars too, you know, it’s like, oh well in fact, I remember talking to you about this Eric, with tires on how you do your race cars. Like, oh, you know, [00:24:00] you could spend a thousand dollars on tires or you could spend $300 on tires.

The $300 tires probably won’t last as long, but if you only need ’em for three races, that’s what it’s for. And then, and the flip side is I’ve also had to say to people, you know, do you think that’s enough? You know, the solution is so utilitarian. It’s like this HTML page kind of looks a little bit trapped.

We might want to get somebody who actually knows graphics in involved. That is the Achilles heel of all IT organizations right there. And that is that. Well, why do we need a graphics person followed by the age old answer to everything? It depends

if your answer to objection handling is, it depends. A little bit more work to do. You could work in it. Yeah. Right. That being said, yeah. I think the underlying tone of something Matt said, and I believe this to be true, if you remember like Star Trek, you know, the multidimensional chess set, the professional world and racing are very much like that.

You’re not playing a [00:25:00] standard game of checkers. You’re playing three or four games at once, whether it’s coaching the team, driving towards a mission, uh, what are you doing in the racing world? Are you trying to jockey for position? Are you trying to survive the season and hope that you score more points by attrition than anything else?

Or are you targeting fastest lap time, all this kinda stuff. So to your point, having the mission, having a goal, setting those goals and getting the team on board is super important because otherwise people are going in 10 different directions and nothing’s getting done. And that is so wildly pronounced in large organizations today, and, and it seems to me that fractioning or fragmentation of, of the vision has gotten more pronounced post pandemic than before.

The pandemic. I don’t know if it’s because of the virtual working world or what is brought about it, but I work with large organizations just like Nat does. It is overwhelmingly obvious that not everybody’s on the same page and leadership must do more to get [00:26:00] people on the same page. And I think that’s a great way for us to segue into the next part of our discussion, which we’ve hinted at a couple of times already, which is talking about the way people learn because I think that’s at the key of how they perform.

Cuz if they don’t learn well, they can’t operate well. As I mentioned, we see this all the time as instructors and coaches, right? You get people that, you know, they bought their expensive sports car and they wanna come to the track and they wanna learn how to drive and they think, Hey, I’ve been driving for 20 years, I know what I need to do.

Left turn goes left at 90 miles an hour. It’s a different kind of left turn. I do wanna go back to something we were talking about early on about those garage stories. I came to realize very quickly like you guys did, you know, my dad read a lot, although he didn’t toss the book to me say, Hey, read this.

But you know, after he passed away, I had rediscovered a bunch of boxes that I had literally been moving around my shop going, what the hell’s in these boxes? I’ll deal with it one day, blah, blah, blah. And I crack ’em open and I’m like, There’s a whole bunch of psychology textbooks in here, and I flipped through it and things are dogeared and highlighted and whatever, and I started to kind of put two and two together and one [00:27:00] of his focuses was learning how people learned.

And this was before I was born, and I was like, well, that’s really interesting. So I kind of dove into that myself, and I think it really helped shape me as a coach because I had this desire to understand how people understand, like you used to say in the rush hour movies, do you understand the words that are coming outta my mouth?

Nine times outta 10, the answer’s no. And it’s too long. Didn’t read. But those are different types of learning. So I wanna dive into a little bit more about that. But I also want to quote from your LinkedIn post, Chris, where you mentioned, cause I think this is important because you mentioned it’s very important to listen to what people say, but it’s far more important to watch what people do.

This is far and away the best advice my dad ever gave me, and it got me thinking outside of the larger context that you were driving towards, do you think your dad was suggesting more? Do you think he was suggesting that you take an interest in how people learn? Oh, absolutely. I, in that statement, you know, I was very young, Eric.

I was [00:28:00] five, six years old. I think in that particular event, he always was. Be a student of human nature, right? And human nature is a highly buried event. Human nature is different from person to person. It is different for a person almost day to day, or certainly throughout their life. I’m certainly coming to points, you know, stages of my life where I go, wow, I feel profoundly different, and react differently to things as I, you know, as I age.

I do think that he was absolutely on the, uh, always on watching what people do, learn from them, learn how they are responding, you know, good, bad, or indifferent, right? Yeah. Good, bad or indifferent, it doesn’t really matter, right? Your ability to interact with people successfully. Is largely based upon your ability to predict their reaction to something.

You can predict how they’re going to react. You can intervene and say, you know what? They’re gonna react extraordinarily negatively to this event. How do we mitigate that? How do we slow that down? How do we change that [00:29:00] course? It all comes down to this basic idea, and I think these two things are related as empathy, right?

You know, this all comes down to this basic understanding of people and understanding how they’re going to react to things, how they feel about things, how they think about things. Yeah. And I, and I absolutely think that that was at the core of what my father was trying to instill in me and and in my siblings and anyone he spent a lot of time speaking with.

So I wanna ask Nat this. To jump on top of this idea, because you’ve gone through an H P D E, a high performance driver’s education event, knowing yourself better than anybody, and your personality, what was the experience like having an instructor in the right seat? Were you receptive to the input? Did he have to adjust to the way you took in the information?

Was it being delivered incorrectly? What was that like for you? It’s interesting cuz I think you hit on it. It’s people think they know how to drive until they get on a [00:30:00] track and very quickly you realize, no, no, what I was doing was pedestrian. It’s not professional. Even as an amateur doing it, it’s much, much harder to do.

There’s so much that can go wrong and that you have to keep in mind while you’re driving. I think the instructor that I had that day that I went through that high performance driving course, I think he did a good job. Although I think he was yelling at me as much as talking to me because invariably it was turn here, turn here, hippie accelerator, no hit.

Don’t hit the brake yet. It’s not. It’s too soon. We gotta give you a little leeway. You were in a car you were completely unfamiliar with too, so I mean, had props on that, right? That’s true, but it was a better car than if I had drew on my own because the reality was that bmw, I only had to use two gears second and third, and that was it on the track.

I didn’t get into third very often. That was mostly in second. The car had so much power that. I could [00:31:00] accelerate most of the time. And of course it was the track too. You know, 17 turns and two and a half miles. There’s a lot of turning to do. And so that also meant that the instructor was hoarse at the end of a course.

That brings up a really good point, but I remember you telling me that breaking was one of the hardest things. We’re so accustomed to stopping for a traffic light or a stop sign, but breaking for a corner and maintaining speed and balance is extremely challenging. The first time I went for a ride, and I think it was with you, Eric, it might have been your tt, and we’re on the track and I’m watching, you know, I like to and in the passenger seat, and we’re headed towards this curve, and you must have been doing about 110 going towards the curve.

Going towards the curve. We’re not, we’re getting closer and closer and closer, and you’re not slowing down. You’re full on acceleration. Until we were like maybe 70, 60, 70 feet from that curve. And then we’re decelerating as fast, as faster than the car. The pressure on your chest as you, you know, got pressed against the, uh, five point seat [00:32:00] belts was greater than the pressure that you ever felt going in the back of the seat because we were slowing down so fast.

And then halfway into that turn, every single time you were accelerating again. Now, I’d like to say that I did one third, maybe one quarter as well as you did. But the reality is when I was driving, it was like, um, it was somebody yelling at me. No, accelerate. Now accelerate. It’s, it is overwhelming. I think a lot of people begin to discover as they progress in the hobby, which I think is relevant in the professional world too, is it goes from learning and reacting and calculating.

To becoming risk mitigation. Finding that upper limit, finding how far you can go before, you know, you throw a rod through the block or you miss the breaking zone and inevitably go off in the grass or whatever, and you work backwards from there. It’s a little daring, it’s a little adventurous, I guess you could say.

But that’s, I unfortunately, part of the game. The same is true of startups and new technology. If you don’t go out over your skis and try a half-baked [00:33:00] idea and see if it sticks, then what are we doing? We’re selling the same old stuff over and over again. Right. So, uh, there’s two things that you just said that I really, really agree with, and that is the people that are really good in I it, that really get things done are the ones that understand how to do risk mitigation.

Right? Because what they’re doing isn’t saying, oh, I, well, I see risk mitigation done wrong all the time, where you’re way too restrictive and there’s just not enough allowed. For an organization to perform at its optimum. So what you’ve gotta do is find a way to push to the limit, but still remain within the safe boundary that you’re supposed to be in.

Using the car example and my time going around the track, I only spun it in a circle once. Uh, probably was a little bit too conservative in my approach on driving it cause I probably should have spun out a car around multiple times. But in our business, uh, I’ll use an example. Six years ago, N NT T data merged with Dell Services [00:34:00] and the entire Dell Services federal group got put under N T T data.

And I told the team there almost all of their infrastructure was on-prem. And I said, you know, in five years, all of the stuff’s gonna be in the cloud. And they looked at me like I was talking in foreign language. They just could not believe that that would happen yet. I can tell you right now, 98% of our environment right now is in the cloud.

And the only things that aren’t in the cloud are things that we’re working on migrating. It goes back to your point, it’s if you’re really gonna do this right, You need to figure out what are the risk mitigation strategies, and then you just gotta push forward, push forward, push forward. So I mentioned we were gonna talk about learning and Chris has been waiting patiently.

Oh, no, no, no. It’s good. It’s good. I want people to understand what we’ve been hinting at. There are seven different swim lanes when it comes to learning, and I’m just gonna go over them really quickly and then we can talk about, you know, some of our experiences with people that think in this way and learn in this way.

So first of all, we have visual or spatial learners. They prefer using pictures, images, and spatial understanding. They see [00:35:00] it. Auditory. They prefer sound and music. They have to hear it. These are the folks that, you know, they love their books on tape. They’re not gonna sit around and read, but they absorb all that information from sound, music and all that.

You have verbal people, linguistic folks prefer using words both in speech and in writing. You’ve got the physical, also known as the kinesthetic learners. They like using their bodies, their hands, you know, the working with their hands, learning, like we were talking about, like taking things apart and putting them back together.

Logical or mathematical. They prefer to use logic, reasoning, and systems to learn things. You have social, you prefer to learn in groups. I personally never excelled at, you know, at teams when I was a child. But now, you know, you’re forced to as an adult and it works out. I, I’ve learned my lesson. And then you have the solitary or interpersonal learner who prefers to work alone using self-study.

Every one of us falls into not just one of these categories, probably multiple of these categories, and it’s the way we learn different things. Not everything can be learned by reading a book. It’d be very difficult to learn how to drive a car. If you don’t get behind the wheel. In the motorsports world, as [00:36:00] coaches, we have to quickly identify and adapt to all of these different types of learners.

It makes it extremely challenging and we also believe that it does apply in the business world when dealing with customers, prospects, and all the requirements that we face with these larger projects. And the one thing I take away from all of this, and I gotta tip my hat to the Marines and I’ve been working with the D O D for a long time, is one of their just very simple slogans, which is adapt.

And overcome. And I hold that to be true even above the three Cs that we talked about earlier. When I’m working with, you know, the race team or I’m working with my students or whatever, I’m always adapting. I’m adapting to them. It’s not about me. It’s a very selfless thing. I don’t want to superimpose my understanding.

I need to work with their capability and then again, raise them up and get them to their maximum potential. And I think that rings true in the professional world. Yeah, it it absolutely does. And the important part to remember about this is that you’re absolutely right in that everybody processes the learning experience for [00:37:00] them.

Is going to be varied. It’s just biased, right? It will bias towards visual, it will bias towards verbal, it will bias towards kinesthetic or what have you. You what I have found over the years is the broader I can create a palette where more, more of those is used, the greater the likelihood the student is going to absorb or the team members going to absorb.

So if I give them an opportunity to read about it, hear about it, see it, and do it, they’re a lot more likely to learn it rather than just one of those modalities. And I see this a lot in modern organizations where we’re becoming very dependent upon web-based learning. And we think that that is a panacea.

Your learners are going to get, you know, on average 15 20% of content if best. And what they retain is going to be much smaller than that. So, you know when you’re building teams up and you’re giving people those. Growth opportunities because Nats [00:38:00] absolutely right, at least in my experience of find what people do really well, figure out where they take it to the next level and then ask a lot of them is a great management approach and you’ll find that your team members are very grateful for it, making sure that they’ve got the diversity of opportunity.

To learn things and learn things through different channels or different mediums, makes all the difference. Again, with my teams are all around the world. Many of them don’t have the cultural sensitivities of working with US managers, but they’re brilliant. And you go, okay, wait a minute. How do we make sure?

How do we get this person up the next level? Sometimes it’s. Bringing them the work right alongside of those US managers for a period of time. Sometimes it’s for a couple of months, sometimes it is giving them a book, right? You know, I’m a big Jim Collins fan. I am a, you know, an acolyte of his library, if you will.

Having them go through it, if they’re that type of learner, to [00:39:00] be able to pull out, oh, wait a minute, these were the gaps that he was talking about. These were the things I need to know to more successfully navigate these difficult situations that we face. A lot of times, and this is especially true with really smart technical people, they get into comfort zones and you have to challenge ’em to go further.

Learning styles are really important in figuring out, okay, well, if I can understand how this person learns and what drives them, then I can actually challenge them to go beyond, go further, and I can also point them in the right direction. I don’t know how many times when I’ve been working with a team and say, well, I don’t know how to do that, and I said, well, have you tried going to look at YouTube and see if there’s anything out there already on somebody doing it?

I’ve worked with a lot of people who are definitely the type of people that learn from reading a book or from something that’s written, and they really need that to be able to move forward. What’s interesting is that often we are in situations where there is no book, especially in the technical. One of the [00:40:00] first steps is that same person who can learn, who learns really well by reading, becomes a resource for saying, okay, well then let’s find a way to document what we do now so that we can build on it.

There are many ways that people learn, no doubt. And, and the seven that you’ve brought up are probably the best summary of them that I’ve seen in a long time. Often it’s getting them to be moving beyond their comfort zone so that, that they can become better at what they’re doing. And by the way, that’s not just the people that work for us or the people that we’re mentoring our coaching, it’s ourselves.

Interestingly, when I was growing up, my father always read the science fiction books and, and I, and I ended up reading, you know, Hein Asthma Tolkien, and I go on and on just a whole bunch of different books. But as an adult, when I started reading as a lot of books on how people function, how do emotions actually work?

Great book by c s Lewis called The Four Loves. That talks about in Ancient Greek or maybe it’s current Greek, there’s four different words for love that really kind of go from friendship, [00:41:00] romantic love, brotherly love to self-sacrificial love, and how those different types of emotions play out in everybody’s relationships with everybody else and understanding where they are and and where they stand.

It’s constantly sharpening the saw, probably is the best way to describe it, by the way. Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Great book. Ways to increase not only your team’s ability to accomplish their missions, but their ability to lead better lives. Because often I’ll ask people, well, what do you really wanna achieve?

What is your objective? Then they’ll just spout back out, oh, well we’re trying to do this and say, no, no, no. What are you trying to achieve? What is it that you want to be? And you know what’s funny? When we’re trained as high performance driving instructors, that’s the first question we’re supposed to ask our students.

Why are you here today? What is your goal? What’s your objective? What is it that you wanna learn? We frame the whole day around that for that particular client or person. Two things there, and I think Chris hit upon it with, you know, talking about the C B T or web training. The downside to all of that training is testing.

I’m a terrible test [00:42:00] taker. I’m really good at proficiency exams because I’m mechanical. I wanna take things apart. I wanna put my hands on them, et cetera. Give me a written test. Yeah, forget it. We’re done. So I think that’s always the downside of learning too, is create these glass ceilings. Like you have to be tested on what you’ve learned, and I think people then dive into their insecurities and it makes them underperform, things like that.

That’s a whole discussion for another day. But there’s something underlying in here, which comes from another post that Chris put out, which has to do with a lot in my world, which we call C I C D, which is continuous improvement, continuous development. He mentions the core of continuous improvement is continuous listening.

Yeah, it was one of these ideas that struck me and one of the things that I think that is interesting about the IT industry today, we talk a lot about AI or the cloud or all these novel new technologies that are going to enable us to do things that we haven’t been able to do before, and they are super cool.

However, [00:43:00] without great execution, none of those things manifest their possibility. They fall short, terribly short in many organizations because of what? Because of execution when you start to tear execution apart, right? This is the study of management fundamental and I, and it is really in our discipline, in our trade.

Guys, this is one of the things that I see the most frequently overlooked piece is that we promote technical prowess, not managerial excellence. That is a sure fire way for technology to fall short of its potential for an organization if people who are leading teams can’t manage and what is management, but listening, listening and driving improvement, facilitating improvement, that’s where that statement came from.

And I talk with clients as well, and we’ll talk about some new AI initiative or some new, some kind of augmented [00:44:00] decision making, uh, infrastructure or something along these lines. You know, they’ll just look at you and go, can we just work on execution for a bit? Because it’s really important and we don’t do it that well.

And it’s profound to hear senior executives, these are CIOs and SVPs of large organizations, go, we need to work on execution. You wanna work on execution, start listening to what’s going on, and then you can start to improve it. You can improve it if you don’t understand what’s going on. So it’s a very valid point you bring up.

And it’s part of the way I teach my students, which I think is unique to a lot of other people. And I can’t take a hundred percent credit for it cuz I learned it from Sir Jackie Stewart. Cause there’s a name from the past. But one of the things that he does, and I adopted this philosophy, is maybe my first session out with you.

I am talking the whole time cuz I’m trying to get you safely around the track. As Nat knows there’s a lot of things going on, especially in a more complex road course. And I have to be consistent in the way I approach that cuz execution needs to not necessarily be perfect, but it needs to not be too [00:45:00] variable, that it can’t be kept under control.

What I usually do later in the day is I will turn to my student and say, now you get to talk, talk me through the track. And they’re like, wait, what? There’s a couple different facets to this and the reason I do it is a, I wanna learn what they’ve learned, how they’ve learned it, the verbiage that they’re using, cuz now I will emulate and mimic their syntax.

Cuz if they didn’t learn apex, but they learned some other word instead, you know, oh, there’s the the corner or whatever, I’m gonna use that because that’s how I communicate with them. The other thing too is I get them to slow down, especially if they’re nervous or the other way, overly anxious. When you have to do that process of talking and driving and all of these kinds of things.

Why we tell people, don’t be on your phone. Your brain has to slow down for a second and go, I need to do multiple operations in parallel. Talking and driving and making sure I don’t kill anybody or whatever. And then it starts to sink in. And the third part, the reason it sinks in, just like when you wanted to recite a poem or a speech in school, the more you said it [00:46:00] to yourself, the more it got ingrained in your head.

And usually the student will walk away and go, man, I really feel like I know the track now. You did it yourself. You taught yourself how to do it. I just gave you the tools to get there. Yeah. All the data points are in your brain. You’ve already absorbed those. The problem is the neural pathways, right? Yep.

Getting to the data and mechanizing the process, whether it be speaking, writing, building a, any of those things are going to more firmly establish those pathways between those data points. Right. And allows you to put it together. So when you start to understand Exactly, and this kind of goes back to your thesis, Eric, around how people learn.

If you can identify, okay, this is how they learn, we’re giving them the opportunity to learn it in the way they learn best, and then giving them the opportunity to, to execute it and manifest it, study it thereafter, then you can start to build this continuous improvement loop. Exactly. It’s interesting you were saying about the [00:47:00] continuous learning and uh, you know, I, I love what you just said, Chris, about people actually know the answer already.

They just have to think it out. Really early in my career, after I got out of the Navy, I was working as a transportation company, distributed packages all over southeast Missouri of all places. That’s a long story, different day, but they would make mistakes and then they would do nothing. And so I eventually put a sign up in the, the kind of the break room where everybody came before they went out on their routes.

And I said, when all else fails, think And cuz really what I wanted ’em to do is that when they have a problem, don’t do nothing. Think, and this was the time before, cell phones, before all these communications, it was really tr trying to say, you know, you’re 50 miles, 60 miles from home base and you’ve got a problem.

Now. Either you can go find a phone and call the manager or you can say, okay, well I know how to resolve this problem, but I’m just gonna go do it. I think that’s also part of that learning process. It’s, and I, I think Chris has hit the nail on the head with effective management requires [00:48:00] continuous listening.

Can’t be talking all the time. I love the fact that you brought up machine learning and AI because nine times outta 10, when I talk to somebody about those particular types of technologies, they’re applying them completely wrong. They really don’t know what they’re trying to do with the technologies or how the technologies actually work.

And then when you start talking to them about what they are real problems are, there might be ways to automate it, there might be ways to make it so that it’s much, much more efficient. But it probably doesn’t involve AI or ml. Not to say that there aren’t a lot of really good applications for AI and ml, it’s just that they’re buzzwords and people say, oh, well we’re gonna just use AI to fix this.

It’s like, no, you don’t have enough data. Well, the buzzword always seem to last on a five year cycle. Right? What was the last set was before AI and ml. Yeah, it will Cloud. Cloud. Yeah. I was gonna say cloud was the last buzz before AI and ml, so who knows what the next one will be. Yeah, well cybersecurity would be the next one.

We’ve covered a lot of territory [00:49:00] here. And looking back, you know, we have a lot of fond memories of being under the hood, but now that we’re in the positions of maybe giving fatherly advice and maybe not from under the hood of our cars, cuz our cars are a lot more modern than, you know, a 1973 gremlin and you know, we’re not turning as wrenches as often as we used to.

Are there some go-to parables? Are there things that you’ve passed on to your kids, to your family that you’d like to share? One of the parables that I passed on to my kids is there’s no such thing as a job that’s too small. There is a need for you to always respect other individuals all the time. You don’t get the option of saying some job or some person isn’t important and therefore doesn’t have to be respected.

Because the key part of listening, of building teams, of having a collaborative society. Is that we all listen to each other and understand each other. And by the way, that doesn’t mean yelling at each other. That means having a conversation and really understanding what’s going on. I would also say that every complex problem, there’s almost [00:50:00] always a whole bunch of smaller, simpler problems.

Try to figure out, I have this complex problem, but what are the simpler components? And something I learned with that gremlin. Start with the easiest thing to fix first and work your way towards the hardest thing. It might just need a second gear synchro, not an entire transmission. Right. But you gotta work your way towards that.

Exactly. My first experience with going into the the motor world was not really cars. I did worked on the cars with our dad, but I discovered motorcycles early on and that’s really where I had to start learning the wrench because my mother wouldn’t let us have a motorcycle. That was a no-fly zone in our house.

But nonetheless, I think every one of us owned one and we just kept them at other friends’ houses and so on. And mine were definitely pieces of junk. Right. I would buy ’em for 50 bucks or 75 bucks because inevitably I could get them running, you know? I think that was where I kind of started on that. And, you know, when you guys were talking about this story, I remember, uh, I had a buddy that had this, you know, had [00:51:00] had a dirt bike and top of a hill and he wanted to get going.

Actually, the police had come up because we weren’t supposed to be riding in this particular area. He went down the hill, kicked it in the gear, and it didn’t start. Just turned over, turned over, turned over, and didn’t start. He’s sitting there kicking it as a police officer walking nearby, and we’re at a distance away so we can watch this whole thing and not have not risked being caught.

Well, police officer caught him impounded his motorcycle for 30 days. He finally figured out when he got the motorcycle back, why it wouldn’t start. He had turned fuel petcock off, uh, when we were sitting there. And so he put this sticker on his gas tank so that it would never happen again. Turn the gas on, dummy and that that sat there.

And so when that went into that simplest thing to fix first is where you begin trying to fix the problem, right? Don’t go to the hardest part. Go to the simplest thing. I always think of that day. I can’t help but laugh about it. I think we call that [00:52:00] user error, right? We call that definitely user error.

But you know, the, the funny thing about it is, or what’s different, you know, about my, my life is that. My kids are a lot more in tune with, I think, emotionality than a, than a lot of kids are because we have a severely autistic child in the house. And their degree of empathy for people who are different is stellar.

And I watch how their friends interact with ’em as well. I think about how much further along they are, you know, than when we were kids and how a, a kid like Carter would’ve been treated then versus how they, how kids treat him now. So every time I watch that, Eric, I feel like there is cause for celebration because despite all of the yelling, we are making some progress on humility.

And the other piece of it that I think that, you know, the big lesson that I, you know, talk to my kids about regularly is that your work ethic is going to carry so much for you. It tells a lot about who you are and how much you [00:53:00] care about something. If you care about something, don’t hesitate to put the extra energy in it.

It pays off in dividends. I take to heart two things that I pass on to my girls, right? And raising girls, raising boys. You know, my wife and I decided a long time ago, it’s really no different, but there are some special caveats that, right? Confidence and esteem and things like that you need to be mindful of.

There’s something really important that I’ve always said. You know, I see my daughter’s struggle. She’s got a, you know, a touch of a d d and things like that. She gives up and I’m like, don’t give up. Never retire from something. And it came up recently on a discussion where somebody said, well, I’m gonna get done with racing and I’m gonna retire as an instructor.

And I actually took offense to that. And I said, no, you don’t understand. Then you don’t understand the whole point at all of becoming an instructor. This is where your learning begins. You are learning from your students more in some cases than they’re learning from you. You see all their bad habits, it corrects your habits, you’re adapting, you’re growing as a person.

So it goes back to that continuous improvement, continuous development conversation. And that’s why I tell my girls, Don’t give up, go back, [00:54:00] re-look at it, approach the problem from a different angle. Again, adapt and overcome to the problem. And I think that’ll benefit them in the long run. And the other one that I feel applies to both the automotive and the business world, and to your point about humility, is something that it took me a while to understand in my own fiery Italian fueled passion that I have for things I get, you know, I get excited about things.

I get invested in things was learning patience. Knowing the answer to your point from before ahead of time isn’t necessarily always the best thing. It’s how do we all come to the answer together? So I remind my daughters that patience. Is practicing waiting. You already know. You don’t have to show off that, you know, but let’s get everybody there together again, rising tides, lift all ships, right?

Let’s work as a team. Let’s speak together in unison. Let’s all come to consensus. So I think that’s really important. Going into meetings, dealing with customers, and also being quiet, I’ve learned causes people to break the silence. They start to tell you things that maybe if you [00:55:00] asked a question, they would’ve gotten on the defensive.

So those are other techniques that are in there maybe when you’re, you know, sitting at a conference room table. Those are really good observations, Eric. I think that those are good lessons to pass along. So normally in closing, on every break Fixx episode, I usually ask people any shoutouts promotions or anything else you’d like to share that we didn’t cover in the episode.

And I think there’s one thing that we didn’t talk about. It’s why did you get to Gremlin and B, what did it replace? And c what replaced it? I guess that’s targeted to me cuz I’m the one that got the gremlin. I think I answered to that. It was my father had gotten a new car, I don’t remember, I think it was a Chrysler.

They had the, that Plymouth Horizon and, oh man, Plymouth Horizon came the Dodge Marata Dodge Marta. So my dad got the Dodge. It’s from a timeline perspective for you. So my father, I later got that Marata and then he took it away from me when he figured out I was a speed demon. So, but that’s a story actually.

And [00:56:00] actually I think what happened is my mother got the Marata and my father got the Har Horizon. The gremlin got parked next to Grandma’s garage. Yep. And then I got the Gremlin and I drove the gremlin until I killed it. Just so you know, I was in second gear when that engine blew up. Hadn’t gotten a third yet, and it was a three speed.

I went three months without a car at all. It was just terrible, awful. In my senior year of high school, I had no transportation. It was very depressing period for me. Eventually I got a job, I had to take a bus to the nearest town, which was Princeton, New Jersey, and I got a job working as a short order cook, saved up my money, and I bought the ghost.

The ghost, the ghost. And so I bought a 1968 Chevy Bel Air that was painted with house paint, white with rollers, with the roller. Yeah, the orange peel on. That must have been amazing, and it had a chalky sort of surface to it. The the reason it got the name the ghost [00:57:00] is that at night when you were driving it underneath the street light, it glowed.

Oh, it just had this sort of glow to it. And so it wasn’t me who gave it that name. It was one of my friends who said, wow, your car looks like a ghost. And from that point on it was the ghost. The ghost. That’s awesome. And you could land a Cessna on that hood, right? Like, I mean, nothing giant. Yeah. I can tell you with no, that without any reservation, that is very easy to just fall asleep in the backseat all the way across.

Cause it was wide enough for a person to just lie down on the backseat. So what did the gremlin replace? What did your dad have that was such a gas guzzler that caused him to buy this gremlin? So in 73, I wasn’t sure it was a 73 or 72, but 73, I think what it replaced was a, the 1968 Chrysler Newport. It’s a big car, which which didn’t die.

It was given to somebody else. They were sold to somebody else in the early, in the mid seventies. Those Chrysler Newports were everywhere. I don’t know how many of those they sold, but they were everywhere. And they [00:58:00] had that 3 83 big block engine. They were awful on gas. I think they got like 10 miles to the gallon, maybe 10 gallons to the mile, but it was probably about that.

But they were a fun car. That’s what got replaced was that Chrysler Newport. Well, that said, we can’t paint all of these childhood memories arose, especially if you too, were a gremlin owner. Some of them are unrepeatable and full of expletives. But I will say there are some key parenting and business ideologies to take away from all of these experiences.

Intended or not. I personally learned that I needed to make sure that my kids were part of my life and not the other way around. And by the way, this is the only piece of advice I ever give to new parents if I’m asked. Reframing this in the context of business. Every moment is often a learning moment, a moment of growth.

And if you are part of a corporate culture that walks the walk on change or just talks the talk, you need to figure that out for yourself. Take a deep look introspectively and figure out what’s happening [00:59:00] by listening more than engaging. To quote Chris, life is short and you are more than a minion. And if you want to catch up with Chris and Nat, please by all means, look them up on LinkedIn and look out for more inspirational tips.

Nat and Chris, I cannot thank you guys enough for coming on the show. I think this has been a lot of fun. It’s a step away from what we normally talk about, but I think it brought two worlds together and people can take away from this what they choose. But if you’re out there as a business leader, I.

Maybe newly minted manager or you’re looking to go into the world of high performance instructing, there’s something here for all of you to take away as you cross that threshold. Uh, I had a great time with this, Eric, so thank you for the invitation. It really, it is really entertaining. I think this second podcast I’ve done and, and doing one with Nat is even more fun cuz we don’t get enough time to talk one another.

So this was a, a good way to stroll down memory lane and talk about what we’ve learned, you know, so thank you very much for the opportunity. I, I wanted to say the same thing. And the other thing is that you ended up prodding [01:00:00] us in ways in which both of us could have really positive memories of our parents that were really great to bring up.

Cuz you know, not, not every memory of your parents positive as with anything else, sometimes you can focus on the negative or focus on the positive. And it’s been really good focusing on the positive. Yeah, agreed.

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We’d love to hear from you. Hey everybody, crew Chief Eric here. We really hope you enjoyed this episode of Break Fix, and we wanted to remind you that G T M remains a no annual fees organization, and our goal is to continue to bring you quality episodes like this [01:01:00] one at no charge. As a loyal listener, please consider subscribing to our Patreon for bonus and behind the scenes content, extra goodies and GTM swag.

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