Fit and (Don't) Finish

This is not an excuse to pull a DNF and give up on a project. Anyone who's been following this saga knows there have been plenty of opportunities to do that and occasionally motivation, too.

Instead, this is a rap on not being an optimist. That sounds dreary; let me try again: This is a rap on how to be a callused rivet-tough realist. They say that an optimist has more fun, but a pessimist is more often right. I've found both to be true, but a pessimist can't attack a project of any scale by starting with, "It's all gonna burn someday." You'll never get out of bed if you start there.

By the same token, the optimist also goes by the title 'cheap dreamer' and the DIY crowd is FULL of them. As a recovering cheap dreamer, I can tell you exactly what that looks like: All you see are the stars, all you smell is the sizzle, all you hear is the roar of the crowd. It is just as bad as the pessimist, but you usually spend a lot more money and still fail to achieve your goal...because your goal was either an unattainable utopia or a mislaid motive in the first place.

My restoration of a 1972-1/2 1302 Super Beetle was such a thing. I started with the idea of fixing up an old lump, dented and dinged, but mostly in moderate running condition and in the end had dumped well over $8000 and eight years into the utopian dream of creating an objet d'art which was a PERFECT reference restoration of exactly how the vehicle looked when it was delivered to the Anderson Family of Redwood City, California in May of 1972. It was perfect. Really, amazingly perfect. But I had lost the plot: This was no longer a vehicle I could drive for fun, it was an objet d'art fit for displaying at the Stiftung Auto Museum in Wolfsburg, Germany not for driving around and taking wear like a real car does.

I let my goal get away from me and realized in the end that my utopia wasn't sustainable. All that effort to fulfill a dream that hadn't been what I'd really wanted to do: I wanted to drive.

So while I'm clear-eyed on the subject, I though I'd comment on what twenty-five years in the hobby has taught me about fiddling with old cars on a budget. This is for someone who is a realist, or wants to be. The pessimist will stop reading now, "because it doesn't matter, 'cause everything goes wrong." The starry-eyed optimist will stop reading now, because they might not like the taste of the truth to follow. The courageous realist will suck it up and see if there's something worth learning.

First, what is your goal? I let my goal drift on that Beetle and made myself and my wife miserable as I chased a unicorn. We'd have been having fun driving it for many years if I'd just tuned up and sorted the few bum items. If you don't have a clear goal in mind, you're going to waste a lot of money and a lot of time and maybe not get what you want in the end.

So after you've defined your goal and nailed it to the barn, you've got to measure your resources: physical, financial, psychological, and your most un-replenishable resource, time. Having looked those four goons in the eye, the realist can then decide with the cold cash-register heart of a banker what he's really capable of accomplishing.

I'm going to be really brutal here:

You have four buckets in your life that resources flow into and out of: Physical, Emotional, Time, and Money. Almost everyone understands the money one: If you spend more than you earn, pretty soon you're out on the street. If you have a deficit in physical resources (such as, you're disabled) then you're going to constantly be taking from the other three buckets to make up for it. (It will be hard on you emotionally, everything takes more time for you, and it costs more just to get by.)

If you have good friends who can offer moral support, that can sometimes make up for a lack of financial resources. "I'm poor, but I have friends, so I'm ok." This is where it gets real: You've got to have a reasonable balance of all of these resources to succeed in your project...any project. If you throw everything in all four buckets into your business, even if you become successful (refilling the time and money buckets) there's a good chance that you have ruined your health and broken your own ability to maintain relationships. How many stories do we hear about dying young with all the money, bodies and relationships wrecked? The 27 Club?

I'm not saying I like this. Frankly, I hate it. I want to do what I want to do, and to hell with everything else. (Said by me at my most selfish, and by every punk 14 year old.) But that isn't the budget we have in life. The buckets are. You replenish and draw from each at need, and the person who "doesn't worry about one kind of bucket" isn't free, they're crazy. Think about that for a minute: its true.

The pessimist quits before they begin: they're a hoarder of their resources. The 'cheap dreamer' assumes that all of the buckets are bottomless, and gets jolted by a sudden stop when they hit the bottom of one or more buckets and there is no more.

Be a realist. Consider what your buckets really look like and then spend your resources wisely.