Occasionally a book comes along that manages to weave its way so thoroughly into the fabric of your own being that it actually changes who you are in some small way. These books never leave you, even if you forget details or plot turns or names of characters, because you will never look at anything quite the same way again after having read it.

It is my terrible misfortune to have just finished one such book. Having finished it, I was overtaken by a profound emptiness; my own thoughts echoing in the space the book’s words had once occupied in my mind. Having finished it, my first thought was to write. This is not typically my first thought after reading such a book — my more typical first thought is to sulk for days, convinced I should give up writing entirely because I’ll never create something with half the impact or merit or beauty of what I just read. This book, however, managed to have all of those things, and still be inspiring. Garth Stein wrote The Art of Racing in the Rain. I’d hate it if I didn’t love it so much.

“That which you manifest is before you.”

It was the first sentence I read that really did a spin cycle on my perception. I’ve trained at several performance driving schools but never really thought to apply the lessons I learned there to life itself and the living thereof. No matter what happens to you, on the track or in life, is a result of your own actions. Even things for which you bear no active blame, nevertheless occurred because your own choices, your own mistakes, put you in the position for them to happen. This doesn’t mean you should blame yourself for every trouble that befalls you. It means that you should accept that it happened and move on. You can’t change it, and dwelling on it gives it more power in your mind than it ought to have.

No matter what happens in life, you always have a choice. You have a choice of action or inaction, but both are choices. When things happen to you, you have a choice to react or not to react. There are consequences of every action and every inaction, of every reaction and every failure to react. We should take ownership of these consequences — not to beat ourselves up over them, but to learn from them. There is no destiny you have not created from your own thoughts and actions.

Sometimes things may happen to you over which you legitimately have no control. What matters is not what happened — it’s how you deal with it that matters. It may not be easy. To mix metaphors, amateur poker players will say (and are taught to believe) that not every hand is playable. Smart poker players know that depending on the totality of the circumstances, every hand is not only a playable hand, but potentially a winning hand. Whether you’re playing poker or racing cars or simply living, the art lies in knowing when a risk is or is not necessary; and in knowing to take the necessary ones and ignore the rest. The only destiny you have is the one you write yourself.

To move forward, you must look forward.

“The visible becomes the inevitable. The car goes where the eyes go.”

One of the first things I learned about performance driving, or driving at all, really, is that your hands on a steering wheel are hard-wired to follow your eyes. You intuitively know this if you’ve ever inadvertently swerved your car while reaching down to the passenger-side floorboard to retrieve something. The faster you’re driving, the further ahead you have to look, and this isn’t just to monitor stopping distance. Your brain can’t process a track moving that fast. The further ahead you look without losing focus, the longer you have to process changing conditions, turns, markers, etc. If you start sliding and you’re looking at the median, you’re probably gonna end up in it. If you keep focused on where you want to be, you’ll find a way to make it there.

Many of us (myself included) are often guilty of not looking far enough ahead in life. If I can just make it through the next 4 hours of work I can have a beer. If I can just make it through the week I have the weekend. If I can just get this paper done before it’s due tomorrow I can deal with everything else. Ad infinitum. The problem is that we become so hyper-focused on the next few hours that everything else slips through the cracks. You are white-knuckle driving through life and time slows to a crawl while you grind unhappily through it.

And then, some of us (myself included) are also guilty of looking too far ahead. Let’s face it: 10-year plans are fucking stupid. You don’t know where you’re gonna be in 10 years! Nobody does. If you do, then with all due respect your life is boring and you should get out more. When you look far into the future with idealistic plans of what that mythical future might bring, you lose focus of the actual road ahead of you, and when you lose focus of the road, you run the risk of missing something important. You fail to interact and react; you fail to recognize changing conditions until it’s too late to properly adjust for them.

The key is finding the balance: to look far enough ahead that you can smoothly navigate life’s many turns, but not so far that you lose focus and fail to make a necessary adjustment to changing conditions.

“Yes: the race is long — to finish first, first you must finish.”