Stop Looking in the Transmission

When I was about 14 Dad let me get our 1952 Willys Jeep back in working order. (Yes, in Frontenac 14 year-olds occasionally drove around on the dirt roads... most of the time with our parents...)

All the neighborhood kids and I had motorcycles and had been driving on the roads for years by then anyway (and no, none of us ever got chased by the authorities... never...) 

Back to the Willys. So when Dad - throwing all caution to the wind since I was the one who was known to take everything apart and only get some of it put back together again - let me work on the Willys, I did the most logical thing I could think of. 

I took the top off the transmission. 

I was gobsmacked. Now how in the world could these things work? And this was 50 year-old technology too - in other words I knew that newer transmissions were... um... more complexer... 

All those gears and parts, just waiting to go wrong. There's no way these things didn't break down on a daily basis, I thought. Yet they didn't. And they don't. 

Many smart-as-can-be people have figured things out before us, and incrementally improved on existing systems and technology over time to develop something that seems like it just shouldn't work. 

Yet it does; sometimes for a couple hundred thousand miles. 

This is a good analogy to use when one starts to think thoughts of who's going to do everything, what can go wrong, when the best time to act will be, where will the time come from, why it won't work and the rest of the scary stuff that makes us all avoid risk. 

The trick is, just don't look inside the transmission. 

Start with quality, be rational, stay sane, do some planning and be gentle on your resources and know that if the transmission does start to clunk, there's never a virtual service station far, there's always phone-a-friend, industry contacts, educational institutions, and people like me, and we all have numerous ways to solve problems. 

Just don't look in the transmission...