I recently read a book called “Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car and how it will change the world” by Lawrence D. Burns, and there were a few key interesting parts of it that I would like to share that really reflect the obsession it takes to achieve something great. This is not really a summary, just a few lessons I picked up from the story and my view on being “Obsessed”.
The book opens with describing the events that led up to the first DARPA grand challenge (a race across the Las Vegas strip that had to be completed by a fully autonomous vehicle) in 2003. 2 of the notable teams were led by this great, shrewd, and super confident professor called Red Whittaker, and another one was by Anthony Levandowski who is now a star in the field of autonomy. The aspect of the story that affected me the most was the preparation. To build a fully autonomous vehicle from scratch, the volume of hard, really hard fucking work and problem-solving required is insane.
My limited experience of being on a large engineering team building an electric race car has had some parallels to that story. There are a lot of people who are extremely knowledgeable and dedicated to making a fast car. One of the more touching parts of the book was during the autonomous race, for which the teams had worked tirelessly for an entire year. The car made a mistake and broke down after making a wrong turn which eventually resulted in them not finishing the race. Students had given up on their classes and all they did was write code, fix things, and solve problems. The entire process of building an advanced technology was painful yet inspiring to read. What I learned was that when you have a singular mission (In this case it was building autonomous vehicles which would be a revolutionary technology saving lives, time, and resources), you can push your body and mind to limits that you could not believe was possible. It’s like the governor of a car (the great David Goggins analogy) that restricts the car from reaching its maximum speed, if you remove that governor which is a metaphor for the excuses/restrictions in your head you can really blow through your own speedometer. Many people never find that productive obsession in life, and I hope to try my best to find what it is that gets me going.
That obsession is essential in my opinion if you want to be number one with anything that you do. If you want to be a football star you should eat, sleep, shit, and piss thinking about football, and work related to the game should take like 90% of your time. Even your source of entertainment would be playing madden or watching film. Now of course there is a flip side to this coin, where the obsession with your goals will lead to imbalances in other parts of your life. But I genuinely believe that obsession is the one thing that should guarantee you will achieve your goal eventually. I personally was very passionate about basketball and I failed, if I had a true love for the game there was no way that I would have ever stopped playing. I thought about how hard training was, how much money my parents were pouring in, how I was not seeing any results, I made excuses, and then eventually I started to quit because that dream just went further and further away each day. Living with the fact that you quit is tough and with whatever I do in life a part of me will always want to quit now whenever things get hard. I hope if you are reading this you find whatever it is you are obsessed with.
Now, this definitely is not how everybody should live, and when I am writing about the obsession I mean it in the most positive connotation, but for the few of you out there that have found what you love doing I am happy for you. Our current success in the field of autonomy is built upon the obsession of individuals and teams that participated in the first but legendary DARPA challenge!
Akshat Jain 