The following list is a compilation of people I have encountered on the road in the last couple of days. In no particular order.
So here goes. I was driving down the highway on a Tuesday morning in my Nissan, and I was getting bored. So I started flipping through the radio and saw a station that was playing a song called the Goonies. You know, that classic “Goonies” one. It was a song I had always forgotten about until this. I had been listening to it on the car radio for years, but somehow, in my mind, it had slipped the memory. I had to remember it.
The radio went out, and I was the only one in the car.
I’m sure you were a fan of Goonies, but I’m sure now you remember it was in your mind, but you can’t seem to bring yourself to remember it. That’s because you have been on auto-pilot while driving, but now you have to sit in traffic and think about it. This is an important point because it shows how auto-pilot can be both the friend and enemy of conscious thought.
I think this is one of the reasons that driving is so boring. I know this because I have spent some time behind the wheel of a car and have been able to look at the road ahead, take pictures, and make decisions without thinking about it. While my brain is busy doing those things, I lose track of my goals and what I need to do next.
This is an effect that we often describe as the “self-pilot effect.” We’re not consciously doing the things we do, but are doing them automatically because we’re preoccupied with these things. For example, if I’m in a race and I’m driving, I’ll be able to look at my watch and know in my mind that I have about 60 seconds to make it to the starting line.
A couple of years ago, we wrote an article about this. It’s called the Self-Pilot Effect. We looked at several articles that described this topic, and saw that there was a strong correlation between people who had this effect in the workplace and managers who were not able to use their self-awareness to manage their subordinates.
The Self-Pilot Effect is something that you can do by simply doing things that you already know how to do. For example, by driving a car or by playing tennis. The Self-Pilot Effect allows us to not have to think about driving or playing sports, even though it is something that we normally do.
This is something that I mentioned in the intro, but I’ll repeat it here: Self-awareness is a pretty powerful tool to use. It’s not something that you’ll learn, like reading or writing. We all have a limited amount of knowledge, and some of it is simply instinctual. The Self-Pilot Effect simply encourages us to do things that we already know how to do.
When we think about driving, we don’t think about the things that we don’t want to do. It’s not that we think about not getting hit by a car, or that we don’t want to stop and walk to the store. We just want to stop and walk. We don’t think about doing something that we don’t want to do.