Today’s email has absolutely nothing to do with presentation tips. If you’re here for presentation tips, sorry, come back next time. As the kids say these days, I’m just putting this out there in case anyone needs to see it (plus there’s kinda-sorta a life lesson in the last couple paragraphs)…

When I was in my mid-20s, I had the crappiest car of my entire life. We’re not talking a little bit crappy — we’re talking a lot crappy, as in, it had grass growing inside it.

It also had many other signs of completely unacceptable crappiness that would immediately disqualify it from use, except in the eyes of a very nerdy kid who considered something near death a great way to learn about life, and didn’t have a girlfriend or anyone else who could pressure him into adopting normal human standards. 😉

It was a brown 1976 Toyota Corolla hatchback, and this was in 1995, which means the car was 19 years old. For my entire 20s I preferred cars which were, as I diplomatically referred to them, “fully depreciated,” which, in normal human speak, would be referred to as “junk.”

Strangely, although, come to think of it, it wasn’t strange at all, being that a car like that would not stand out at all in those circumstances, the car was stolen from me, not once, but twice. The first time, it was stolen by someone who used it to pick up a friend from jail. I know this because when I picked the car up from the tow truck yard, on the front seat was a slip of paper with “King County Detention System — Inmate Release Form” at the top. But anyway, on to the story…

First of all, a little background on the workings of a car engine. If you already know this, you’ll be like, “Duh, Matt, tell me something I don’t already know,” and if you don’t already know it, you’ll be like, “Matt, I don’t care, and even if I did, I could get it in two minutes on Wikipedia,” but I’ll mention it anyway:

Spark plugs fire, causing the gasoline to explode and push the piston back down; that happens four times (in a four-cylinder engine), and is what causes the car’s wheels to turn. If the timing of the spark plug firing is off, the spark plug will fire too early, when the piston is still coming back up, or too late, when the piston is already going back down, causing the engine to be weak. To adjust the timing, you typically rotate the distributor, which is the component that tells the spark plugs when to fire.

The timing is checked with a very specific tool called a timing gun. A timing gun does only one thing: It flashes a light when the first spark plug fires, and, if an adjustment is needed, you rotate the distributor until the light flashes at the right time.

Okay, enough with the car repair notes. Back to the story…

My car was really weak, with the engine only running at about 60% of its normal strength. I don’t know why, but I thought it might be the timing, and I had never worked on the timing, so I read about how to fix it, and then I went out and bought a timing gun so I could do it.

Anyway, the timing was way off, so I fixed it. It’s a surprisingly easy fix. You just loosen the couple bolts that hold down the distributor, rotate the distributor until the timing is right, and then tighten the couple bolts back up.

After I fixed the timing, I took the car for a test drive to see if that had been the real problem. It was amazing how much power the car had all of a sudden. It had never had that much power. I was amazed at how such a small change could dramatically affect the car, and I asked myself, “Why didn’t I do this earlier?” I drove around on the surface (non-highway) streets first, and then when I saw how well it was doing, I took it up onto the highway.

It rocked on the highway too. As I pulled onto the highway, I pushed down on the accelerator to get up to full, highway-style speed, and the car jumped forward like a racecar. I was so impressed, in fact, that I didn’t want to stop. I switched onto the highway that goes up into the mountains, so I could take the car on some really steep roads and test it there, too.

When I got to the steepest part of the highway, the last 4km before Snoqualmie Pass, all the other cars slowed down and struggled, but mine just floated up effortlessly, like a butterfly in the sunny Spring air. I wasn’t even flooring the accelerator, it was only part way down, I didn’t want to go so fast the cops would chase me.

I muttered to myself, “Wow, f*** me,” turned around, and went back down the hill towards home.

The point of the story is that everything was already there. I didn’t have to add anything to the car, and I didn’t have to subtract anything from the car. I just loosened two bolts, rotated something a few degrees, tightened the two bolts back up, and boom, it was like I had a new car. I didn’t even get my hands dirty.

I guess the application to my life these days is that I’ve been wondering what’s missing, and thinking am I really so blind that I can’t see it. And the answer, at least according to this story, is that maybe nothing is missing. Everything I need is already right there. Just a minor tweak here, a minor tweak there, don’t even have to get my hands dirty, and suddenly things spring to life.