Imagine you’re driving along in your car and suddenly the check engine light pops on your dashboard. There’s essentially two things you can do. The first is ignore that thing and keep on keeping on. Sometimes that’s the right thing to do. Recently I was rushing my wife to the emergency room and wouldn’t you know my “Change Oil” indicator lit up. Not the time to swing into Jiffy Lube for service. Context, especially exigent circumstances might mean that we need to move on for the moment. Additionally, vehicle sensors can give false positives. My truck has been telling that my front driver side tire is nearly flat for two years. It’s not. So now when it pings I barely notice it.
While we can agree that these are reasonable circumstances for ignoring these indicators what happens if we always ignore them? That’s right, things break down. If I go long enough without changing the oil eventually the engine will seize. If I completely disregard my tire pressure just because the gauge was faulty I might actually find myself roadside with a flat tire. If we ignore signs and signals from our vehicles for too long we can end up with catastrophic systems failure or minimally losses in performance. This chain of logic is incredibly easy to follow when it comes to maintaining vehicles or caring for our tools. Where we often fail to use it is in the realm of the maintenance of our own health.
We go til’ it’s broke, and then go some more. Sometimes this happens because we don’t even know the check engine light is on. Sometimes it happens because we know it’s on but we aren’t sure what it means or what to do. Sometimes, we just ignore it altogether because in that moment it is the easier thing to do. The Check Engine Light Curriculum that I’ve been sharing with the Navy Seal Foundation’s Warrior Fitness Program for the last two years, and that I’m now sharing with you, is a system to help us all better understand what is going on with these vehicles that we drive through life with.
The posts that will follow here will provide a basic framework and some language for building what I refer to as the Performance Longevity Dashboard. This dashboard, and the accompanying toolkit, will be the focus of this Substack in perpetuity. The design and application of indicators for our dashboards and discovering tools for our personal toolkits is a never ending process of investigation. One I look forward to sharing with you as we move forward.
Thanks for reading,
Rob