Motorcycle Diaries Volume 2: Learner

I received a request for my shirtless dude of the day to be Jason Statham. I'm obliging.


Reminder: Last weekend I took a motorcycle safety course. It was super fun and I learned some skills that will help me ride a motorcycle. I also learned and considered some things that had nothing to do with motorcycling. Those are the things I'm going to talk about here.

Learner

This was not the first time I took a motorcycle safety course. About twelve or thirteen years ago I took a very similar course in Virginia after a friend talked me into it. At that time I had been driving very briefly and really hadn't spent much time on two wheels of any sort, motorized or otherwise. I had never used a clutch on any vehicle of any kind. Despite this fact, I thought I was some kind of motorcycling wunderkind.

I would say the key word in that last sentence was "thought." In recent years, I've noticed that I can acquire a reputation for arrogance or over confidence. To the people that have that opinion, I would say I have come a long, long way. Clint circa 2000 was a specimen in arrogance. If I ever encountered something new, I would just assume I was already good at it because I was, you know, me. Well, that weekend the best rider on the range went down with his bike twice and was visibly shaken by the end. To this day, I am not sure why I passed. I have half a mind to believe that the instructor passed me out of sympathy. After that, all I had to do was go to the DMV to get my license endorsed, but I never did. There were certainly other reasons, I didn't have the resources to buy a bike at the time. But the heart of my decision was the fact that I rode a motorcycle terribly and was scared to get back on one. My friend got a bike after the course and I remember being jealous but knowing I just didn't trust myself with one.

Fast forward a decade and some change. I'm a grown man. I can handle adult decisions and adult responsibilities. I've been through some challenges and made some decisions that no one I know has quite had to go through or make. Despite these truths, I was worried seventeen or eighteen year old Clint was going to show up and ruin this whole thing for me. Then there was the alternative, what if my prior failure had nothing to do with my immaturity, but I just wasn't any good at riding a motorcycle?

It turned out that I took very well to riding. For the past 6 years, I've been driving a car with a manual transmission. Additionally, my cycling/mountain biking handling skills translated pretty well. It sort of sounds strange to cite these completely different skills as reasons for riding a motorcycle well, but I really felt like they helped. I felt that I had a huge advantage over the other students without the same prior experience. I can't imagine how hard it must be to simultaneously learn the concepts of riding, the physical components and how to work a clutch. As I realized how much my preexisting skillset benefited my motorcycling, I started to get confident, which was good. Then I started to get over confident, which was bad. Again, I was starting to find myself in a place where I was doing something I knew very little about and yet considering myself an expert on it.

Over the past few years, I've had a lot of cross-cultural training and interaction. Probably the lynch pin to successful cross-cultural interaction is entering every situation a learner. Taking the posture of a learner means a number of things. It means being as humble as possible. It means recognizing that everyone in the world could teach you something. I means knowing that no matter how much you know or think you know, you still have a lot to learn. Most obviously, it means if you're interacting with an expert, you do everything you can to ask, learn and mine for information and wisdom.

Fortunately, this training kicked in. It reminded me that even though I felt remarkably comfortable for a novice on a motorcycle, I was still just a novice putting around a parking lot at 25 mph or less. Not only that, I was surrounded by a number of people who knew much more about motorcycling than I did. As a result, I realized that although I was comfortable, I was not great at riding a motorcycle. I was barely even scratching the surface of learning how to ride. I took the posture of an learner. I observed as much as I could watching other people ride, and asked as many questions I could of our instructors. If I had been too sure of myself, I could have wasted valuable opportunities to learn. Instead I feel that I made the most of the time I had.

I'm really thankful for the training and experiences I've been given. Getting to travel the world and work with people different from me continues to benefit me even when I'm just taking a motorcycle safety course. I hope I continue to be afforded these chances, that I take them and make the  most of them.