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My car hydroplaned once.

I almost hit a gas tanker while on a moun­tain pass. I nar­rowly avoided it by slam­ming into the median, blow­ing a tire and then pulled over and tried to change it. In 33 degree rainy Novem­ber weather.

The median was small, giv­ing me three feet of space between my car and semis, cars and trucks roar­ing past at 60 miles per hour. See­ing as how I’m all bad ass and tough, I knew I could change my tire all by myself (like a big boy). After unscrew­ing one lug nut, I felt pain, tasted metal and smelled dirty water.

A pass­ing truck had sprayed water with enough force to throw my 200 lbs up against my car, bruis­ing my face. The impact of my body against the wheel well knocked the car off the jack, pin­ning it an angle under­neath my car. I was screwed.

My pre­vi­ous deci­sion not to put on the snow gear in the back of my car (I was com­ing home from WSU for Thanks­giv­ing break) seemed very, very stu­pid now. No gloves and no hat, just a soaked col­lege sweat­shirt and jeans with ten­nis shoes. And it was raining.

I man­aged to flag down a VW van full of Mex­i­can dudes who used their lit­tle jack to raise up my car enough that I could crawl under and get my much larger jack. As my car was in a ditch run­ning down away from the road, I had to be very care­ful not to stick my legs out too far and get them run over.

But I did it. I replaced my front tire, which I would later find out had an eight-ish inch gash in it, with a stud­ded snow tire from my trunk. Hop­ping back into my 1983 Chevy Mal­ibu, I drove up to the top of the pass, stopped to call my par­ents and girl­friend (no one answered), got back into the car and freaked. I shook. My hands were white. I wasn’t cold, as I had changed clothes and dried off. I was in shock.

Such a feel­ing that was. I had absolutely no fine motor con­trol over any­thing I did. I had tun­nel vision. I couldn’t hear a damn thing. I got back into my car and drove 45 min­utes home. I don’t remem­ber a bit of it.

I wish I could I say I reflected on my life (I was 20, WTF did I have to reflect on?). I wish I could say I thought about my regrets. I wish I could say I thought about the future. I didn’t so any of those things and now I’m glad I didn’t. Had I strayed even a sec­ond from what I was doing, I wouldn’t be here.

So what did I learn from this?

1. Always carry a backup, whether it’s a tire, pre­sen­ta­tion or bat­tery.
2. Prac­tice what you can when you can. My biggest prob­lem wasn’t chang­ing my tire that day, and in the busi­ness world, your main objec­tive is usu­ally the eas­i­est one.
3. The longer you think about how scared you are, the more exposed you’ll be to the ele­ments, dis­trac­tions or any­thing else that could keep your from your task at hand.
4. Being scared shit­less is a great moti­va­tor.
5. While pre­vent­ing prob­lems is impor­tant, it’s far tougher to solve them. Solv­ing them, how­ever, is often far more lucrative.

Now go do something.

Thanks to Jonah Keri for inspir­ing this post. Glad you’re okay, too.

More from tdhurst

• Moments of clar­ity, moments of chaos
• Weblog of Daniel Brusilovsky
• How busi­ness is like run­ning a half marathon
• State of the Economy
• Stages of lay off grief

Arkayne recommends

• The Long Dark Night of the Soul (Ryan Sut­ter)
• The Return of rYnoweb (rYnoweb)
• Of Burg­ers and Bench­mark­ing (Tomas Car­rillo)