Older than my licence. I passed my first driving test more than fifteen years ago, and the Renault Megane that pulled up outside our apartment in Turkey on Friday evening was an old model back then. It had a few dents down one side and a scattering of scratches, nothing broken, just old in the way that makes you start doing arithmetic about how many owners a car has had. I did not say anything out loud. I made a small sound, somewhere between wow and oh, and started working out whether to cancel in the app and order something else. We had our three year old, three suitcases and the usual pile of hand luggage, more than sixty kilos of it, a flight to catch and forty minutes of road between us and the airport. Cancelling would have cost me nothing except a wait. I did not get the chance to think about it for long. He was already out of the car and at the door, taking the bags before I could argue about which ones were heavy, and by the time I had put my phone away everything was loaded. So I got in. The inside was cool and the air conditioning was working properly, and that was the entire basis on which I decided to give the man a chance. Forty minutes. Somewhere in the first ten minutes I noticed where his right hand was resting. On the horn. In Turkey the horn is part of the conversation on the road, used constantly and without much offence taken, whereas in Sweden, where I live, you can go a month without hearing one. He kept his hand there the whole way and never pressed it once. He drove carefully and confidently at the same time, which is rarer than it sounds. Nothing sudden, nothing that made me look up from our daughter to check what was happening outside. Early in the ride he saw the traffic building ahead, worked out a way around it, showed me the alternative on his phone and asked whether I was okay with it before he took it. He was never in a hurry. He did not sigh at us for being slow with a three year old, and when we arrived he unloaded everything himself instead of standing beside the boot while I wrestled the heavy bag out. Then he wished us a good evening and walked back to his car. My phone had no signal until we were inside the terminal, so the tip went through a few minutes after he had already gone. At the kerb I thanked him properly, more than once, though he did not appear to speak much English and I have no idea how much of it landed. What I got in return was forty calm minutes at the end of a long day with a tired child, which is worth considerably more than the fare, and the rest of this letter. The car was never driving. Not one of the things that made that drive good had anything to do with the car. The route he thought about, the permission he asked before changing it, the hand that stayed off the horn, the pace he set around a three year old and sixty kilos of luggage: none of that came out of the vehicle. A newer car would not have produced any of it, and the old one did not prevent any of it. The car was simply the only part of the job I could see before the job started, so it was the part I graded. Nobody watching that drive would have concluded he was a worse driver because his Megane was fifteen or twenty years old. We grant that to other people without thinking about it. We are much slower to grant it to ourselves. I am not writing this from above. I catch myself explaining what I have not done yet by what I do not have yet, the better setup, the right tool, the proper conditions, and it sounds reasonable every single time I say it. It is also, mostly, a description of the car. There is a version of this that goes wrong, which is deciding your best has to be better than everyone else's. That is a different measurement, and it depends on people you do not control. Doing your absolute best in the moment you are actually in is a comparison with your own last attempt, and the only thing that moves it is repetition. You do the thing again, a little better than the time before, and again after that. That accumulates into what people describe you by, and none of it is the equipment you were holding while you did it. This week. Name your upgrade. Everyone has one: the newer laptop, the bigger team, the proper budget, the title that would finally make people listen, the certificate that comes through in November. Say what yours is, in one sentence, honestly. Then take one piece of work this week and do it at the standard you would hold if you already had it. Not the whole job, one piece of it. The email, the review, the call, the handover you were going to do at seventy per cent. When it is finished, look at the result and ask what the missing thing would genuinely have changed. Sometimes the answer is a great deal, and then you have a real case for buying it. More often the answer is that the standard was never in the equipment. Until next Saturday, Vitalii Find me on LinkedIn. You're reading The Next Move — a weekly newsletter by Vitalii Lavelin.
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