“Eyes forward” was one of the first lessons my dad drilled into me when he taught me to drive. He didn’t want me fiddling with the radio or getting distracted by other people in the car. For the record, I can only imagine how my dad would have handled driving lessons in the era of cell phones. In that sense parents back then had it easy.
As a former pilot, my dad was big into the proper use of the car’s “instruments.” I needed to not only pay attention to the road in front of me but skillfully monitor the rear and side view mirrors so I always was aware of the traffic around me.
This sounds unbelievably obvious, but only the terrified parent sitting in the passenger seat the first time their easily distracted teenager pulls onto the highway truly appreciates how much about driving we take for granted.
There’s a broader life lesson in this story about understanding where we direct our eyes. Or, to put it in the context of our driving metaphor, which way we look as we steer through our own lives.
For the young, like most things, this doesn’t seem like much of a challenge. It’s all about the windshield. The road is new and stretched out in front of us, offering endless possibilities. The young are hard wired to look forward. Besides, their life experience is short, there’s not much to see in the rearview mirror.
However, once we reach middle age the choice about which way to look gets much more complicated. We are confronted with the sad reality that the road behind us is longer than the one in front. Or sadder still, perhaps we believe what came before is more appealing than anything that lies ahead.
This is not to say that looking back is inherently a bad thing. Our memories are our treasure. As we get older it’s our life experiences, what we can draw from our pasts, that gives us a level of wisdom and insight unavailable to the young.
Where it can become a problem, however, is if we give the rearview mirror too much of our attention. There’s a reason why the mirrors in cars are much smaller than the windshield.
Spending too much time looking back prevents us from seeing new opportunities in front of us. Worse, it can create a situation where we convince ourselves that there are no news roads for us to explore and what’s to come can’t be any different from the past. When that happens, our past becomes not a blessing to cherish and learn from, but an anchor dragging down our present and future.
Seth Godin calls it the sunk costs fallacy: when we believe we can’t make a change in our careers, relationships, or interests because of the significant investments we’ve made in time, money, and emotional energy into our current situation. It’s the unfulfilled lawyer who tells herself, “I need to keep practicing law even though it no longer makes me happy because law school cost a ton and I’ve been doing it for twenty years. Changing now would be a waste. There’s no other path for me.”
All that philosophy buys us is more mediocrity, or worse, misery. In business, it’s never an acceptable justification to keep doing something solely because that’s the way it’s always been done. That’s a recipe for calcification and failure.
Our lives should be no different. Whatever baggage we carry from our pasts, they should never be an excuse to limit our possibilities for the future. Rather than look at our past decisions as sunk costs, we should look at those experiences as invaluable gifts from our past selves to who we are today. Our histories should inform, never dictate, our futures.
Again, only a fool ignores experience. But if your rationale for decisions is based solely on the past, you are the equivalent of the driver navigating through the rearview mirror.
To carry this metaphor one step further, I think our tendency to spend more time looking back explains why it’s common for older people to move slower and become more conservative in their decision making. Instinctively we know it’s unsafe to punch the accelerator if we aren’t “eyes forward.”
It explains why so many of us in middle age too often settle for something less. To me this is the real tragedy of aging, we allow our pasts to narrow our futures. Instead of using our experiences as wings, they become weights. We forgo chances to grow, to drive down new roads. When that happens we truly become old.
In the end it’s undeniable that there is no recapturing the breadth of open road from our youth. Time and gravity always win, eventually all of us run out of road. But that doesn’t mean we have to make that day come any sooner by looking the wrong way.