Not long ago, I was standing in the kitchen, leaning up against the counter talking to my youngest daughter, who’s fast approaching eighteen. We were talking about driving — we’re looking at buying her a car. I told her about the first car I ever drove. It was a manual transmission. She said she was “so glad” she didn’t have to deal with a stick shift. I laughed.
“Yeah, well, when I learned to drive, I didn’t have a choice. It was the only car we had, so if I wanted to drive, I had to learn.”
That’s when a funny, old memory surfaced.
I was sixteen and had been driving for about six or seven months. My brother and I shared a junky, dark gray Hyundai with old, dirty seats and a clutch that was about as forgiving as a drill sergeant. On school mornings, one of us would drive. I only drove if I could find the keys first and get into the driver’s seat before my brother got to the car. On one particular morning, I’d won the race and was sitting behind the wheel.
There was this hill on the way to school, steep and narrowed to just one lane in each direction because the road at the bottom of the hill ran under a train bridge. There was a stoplight east of the train bridge but nothing for almost a mile west of the hill. Traffic was always backed up there — still gets that way today thirty years later. My brother was sitting in the passenger seat, chewing on his fingernails. I had a bad habit as a teenager of riding too close to the bumper of other cars. I think my driving made my brother nervous, but he was generally quiet about it.
We inched up the hill, and I kept doing what I’d always done: pop the car into neutral every time we stopped. I don’t know how I reasoned that as safer; like I had less chance of lurching forward or doing something dumb.
Eventually, just two cars were ahead of us waiting to turn left. Traffic finally cleared with a gap big enough for three or four cars to go. The cars ahead of me turned quickly, I put the car in gear, gave it some gas, slowly released the clutch, and the engine died. I tried again and it died again. And again.
Horns. My brother yelling. My heart racing. Sweat forming instantly on my forehead.
I tried one more time, and the car jerked forward maybe six inches before it stalled. That’s when my brother snapped, “Get out. Get out now!”
There we were, on a busy morning, cars stacking up behind us with their horns blaring, and we did the most humiliating thing possible for teenagers: we switched seats in the middle of the road.
He jumped in, slammed the door, turned the key, and instantly looked down at the stick.
“You’ve been in third gear!” He shouted at me.
That little car was a gutless wonder. My brother slammed the car into first gear and screeched the tires as he raced up the hill. It was an impressive maneuver for that car.
That whole time, I thought I was doing everything right. I knew the mechanics of driving that car. Clutch in. A bit of gas. Stay calm. Let the clutch out slowly.
But I was in the wrong gear! And no amount of effort was going to fix that.
We rarely get to choose the moments that define us. For years, recalling that story ramped up my anxiety. It was a heavy reminder of a significant failure. At least, that’s how I saw it.
Telling that story always came with some kind of apology. I was nervous. I was inexperienced. The car was crappy.
As I’ve gotten older, though, that story has become a hilarious reminder of a failure that came even though I was 100% confident in my ability to do something.
Even more recently, it’s come back to me for a different reason. Because I’ve had a few too many mornings in adulthood that felt just like that one.
I’ve woken up with the pressure of providing, parenting, leading, solving — and despite all the motion, all the energy — I’ve stalled. Not because I wasn’t trying hard enough, but because I didn’t realize I was in the wrong gear.
There’s a pervasive idea among most of the men I know that if you’re strong enough, focused enough, and committed enough, then you can push through anything. That failure is an actual personal defect. That stress means you just haven’t figured it out yet. That if you’re stuck, it’s because you’re weak. Or worse — lazy.
Then, when life stops moving forward, we blame ourselves first. We hit the gas harder. We grit our teeth and grip the steering wheel. We tell ourselves to suck it up. The world, or at least our perception of it, honks behind us. Our inner critic yells louder than any older brother ever could. And still — nothing moves.
Because maybe the problem isn’t you. Maybe it’s the gear you’re in.
I look back at times in my life when I was convinced I just wasn’t strong enough to push through:
- When a project I poured two years into failed to meet its goals.
- When a job I thought would provide security turned into a maze of unclear expectations and moral compromise.
- When my marriage hit a stretch where we weren’t really talking, just taking turns managing chaos.
- When I kept trying to prove I could handle everything alone — and resented the people who didn’t notice how hard I was trying.
In every one of those seasons, I believed my failure to “move forward” was about effort. Or focus. Or lack of some intangible willpower I was supposed to have but clearly didn’t.
Now, thankfully, I’m starting to see things differently.
We’re rarely stuck due to lack of effort. We’re stuck because we’re trying from the wrong place. We’ve made the wrong assumptions. We’re measuring the wrong metrics. We’re starting in the wrong gear.
I grew up believing responsibility meant doing it all yourself. That leadership meant never needing help. That manhood meant holding your emotions tightly enough that they’d never spill into someone else’s lap.
And that worked. Until it didn’t.
Until I was the one stalling. Until I was the one honking at myself. Until I realized that being “in control” wasn’t the same as being steady. That powering through wasn’t always progress. That sometimes the most responsible thing you can do is check the gear before you hit the gas.
It’s not always obvious when something needs to, well, shift.
You can spend years thinking you’re just a few steps away from getting it all figured out. You can tell yourself, “It’ll make sense once I get through this month,” or “Once we have enough savings,” or “Once this project launches,” or “Once the kids are older.”
But what if the breakthrough isn’t on the other side of more effort? What if it’s on the other side of changing the way you define progress?
What if you’ve got the key, and you’re going through all the right motions, but you’re still stalled? What if something you never thought to question is quietly holding you back?
That’s been the slow unfolding lesson of the last eight or nine months for me. So many of the things I thought were strengths were actually survival tactics.
The lesson is that sometimes, I’m not stuck because I’m broken. I’m stuck because I’m still operating under rules that don’t serve me anymore.
There’s a beautiful and somewhat brutal truth in that. No one’s going to shift gears for me. No one’s going to climb in the driver’s seat and fix the way forward.
Not anymore.
That’s on me.
The key is in my hand. It always was.
These days, when I talk to my kids about driving, about college, about careers and relationships and heartbreak and the craziness in the world, I try not to give them advice that sounds too much like certainty. I don’t pretend to have it all figured out. But I do tell them this:
If you feel like you’re doing everything right and still not going anywhere — check the gear.
It’s okay to question the tasks you’re doing and the beliefs behind them.
What’s actually driving you?
Does it still matter to you?
That morning on the hill, I wasn’t a bad driver. I just didn’t know what I didn’t know. I’d never learned to feel the difference between first and third gear. I hadn’t failed because I lacked effort. I’d failed because I didn’t realize where I was starting from.
That lesson stuck.
And now, all these years later, I still go back to that moment. To the horns. The panic. The slow, humiliating walk around the car. And the quiet realization, once the shouting stopped, that I could’ve figured it out — if I’d only paused long enough to check.
I didn’t need a new car. Or a new set of rules. I just needed to understand what was actually happening.
And that is enough.
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