What can you learn from a piece of tape?

I love NASCAR.  I know that it doesn’t seem to be the most cerebral of sports to some folks, but believe me when I say that there is a lot more to it than guys driving fast and turning left. 

This past Sunday I was down in the Sprint Cup garage area waiting to take my family and some friends to the pre-race chapel service for drivers and crew members.  We watched as the teams pushed their cars through the final technical inspection area before they would put them on the starting grid.  There was a slight mist falling but not so much that we were uncomfortable.

Several cars were in line including the cars of Hendrick Racing teammates Jimmy Johnson, Jeff Gordon, and Dale Earnhardt, Jr.

As we watched, my friend Gary Hogue noticed that Johnson’s car had a piece of tape covering the exhaust pipes that point out from under the side of the car.  Being an engineer by education, Gary surmised that the tape must have been placed there to prevent any moisture from entering the engine.  Gary also noticed that of all the cars in line, only Johnson’s car was taped in this fashion.  Not even his own teammates were taking this precaution.

If you follow NASCAR racing at all you know that Jimmy Johnson’s team has won the last 5 Sprint Cup championships in a row.

I thought about this for the next several hours.  (There ended up being a rain delay so I had plenty of time to think)  I came to several conclusions about that little piece of tape.

1)  The value of associating yourself with people with different views and perspectives is immense.  I’ve been attending NASCAR events since I was a boy, but I never would have noticed the tape or considered its purpose if I hadn’t been standing next to an engineer.  Nothing in my legal or seminary training had conditioned me to see things that way.  If we become too homogenous in the people we surround ourselves with we will necessarily miss out on some things.  Nobody sees everything.  A wise leader will understand where his blind spots are and seek out people to help him in those areas.

2)  It is cliché, but those who excel at the highest levels are those who pay attention to detail in ways that seem odd or obsessive to most of us. The chances of rain getting through those pipes and getting into the engine of that racecar were probably miniscule, but they weren’t taking any chances.  You have to wonder how many other things that Johnson’s team is doing on areas of the car that can’t be seen or in their shops away from the track that their competitors don’t do.  I bet it’s a lot more than putting a piece of tape over an exhaust pipe. Details make the difference.

3)  Don’t allow pride to cause you to become hard headed.   The most amazing thing to me in all of this was the failure of Johnson’s competitors to notice the tape and implement it themselves.  Johnson has won five consecutive championships.  You’d think his competitors would be studying him intensely given his success yet that didn’t seem to be the case.  Why would these other teams miss such an obvious thing?  It surely isn’t laziness or a lack of educated engineers.  Every NASCAR team works super hard and has lots of smart engineers.  The most reasonable explanation I could come up with is pride.  Sometimes smart folks with a lot of drive let pride and ambition cloud their minds.  It’s not just that we want to excel, but we want to do it our way.  We hold to doing things our way sometimes even though others around us are continually having better results doing it differently.  We don’t just want to win.  We want to be vindicated.  Pride can bias our vision and our judgment. Wise leaders will recognize and guard against this tendency.  It’s much better to be an adaptable winner than a hard headed loser.

Now, maybe I’m reading too much into a small piece of tape.  Or maybe I’m not.  After the race concluded Tuesday (it had to be rescheduled due to rain) there was a new driver leading the Sprint Cup point standings.  His name was Jimmy Johnson.  Go figure.

How you know you are winning an argument with a liberal

You ever have an argument with a liberal about some ridiculously wasteful piece of government spending?

The conversations all go the same way. You point out that the country is broke and we simply can't afford to spend money like a drunken sailor even if the program/spending seems like a worthy cause. If something is not part of a core function of government then we need to have a very suspect eye towards that spending. Maybe you throw in some cautionary words about how it's against our national security to keep borrowing from China in order to pay for things we don't need, and "X" is something we clearly don't need so it's got to go. All pretty straight forward stuff.

And how do your liberal friends respond?

1) that's just a drop in the bucket and not enough to make a difference.
2) Well look at all the money Republicans waste on (Insert something liberals are against like the war or corporate welfare)

Consider those arguments for a moment. Are our liberal friends really saying that they approve of wasteful government spending in small doses? A few million here and a few million there will add up to real money pretty quick if we get serious about trimming waste. When you point this out to liberals they usually come back with, "Well we should focus on the big things first." That's almost as ridiculous. How are we going to get to a bipartisan consensus on cutting big things like entitlements and Social Security if we can't come to a simple agreement on something that is obviously small and wasteful? It defies common sense. In cutting spending, as in everything else, you walk before you run.

The second response is even more ridiculous. I hesitate to even call it an argument because it basically cedes that the current item is indefensible on its own merit and just seeks to change the subject. Do wasteful practices by someone else or under someone else's watch really justify continued poor stewardship of taxpayer resources? I've found that liberals really don't like answering that question. I generally tell them that I'm glad they agree with me and that I'm even more glad that they have ideas about other places we can impose some fiscal discipline.

Bottom line is that if a liberal ever tells you either of these two things in an argument about government spending, you've won. Liberals don't have any substantive arguments to make on reducing government spending because for most of them there is nothing outside of the defense department that they want to cut.

The truth about liberals is that they would rather raise taxes and continue to allow government to grow at the expense of the private sector. Of course, this would be a lot easier to swallow if they didn't raise these ridiculous objections to defend every wasteful, pork barrel project on the books.