9781847928955 by Smakprov Media AB

Pitlane Lessons

What F1 Can Teach You About Life and Work

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To my wife Clare, and our four children, Lexi, Leo, Rex and Ginger, with thanks for their patience, support and love whilst I live my dreams. Love you all.

Foreword

It’s Jake Humphrey here.

I first met Marc many years ago in the Formula One paddock when I was presenting the BBC ’s coverage of this amazing sport. Whilst we were on separate paths within F1, it’s fair to say it’s left a lasting impression on us both.

I was fascinated by the intensity of the on-track battles and the entertainment the racing offers, but I also grew obsessed with learning more about the inspirational people I found myself surrounded by.

What I quickly realised is this sport isn’t just about winning a race; it offers us an incredible insight into the behaviours, thought processes and cultures that drive success. What you see on track is just the tip of a very big and complex iceberg.

Thousands of people, meticulously filtered from all walks of life, come together to produce excellence in almost every area they set their minds to. It’s a sport that embraces failure. They thrive under pressure and are comfortable pushing the boundaries. It generates the kind of innovative thinking most of us would love to foster in our own lives.

My journey through F1 and beyond sparked a curiosity in me to learn more, which led to me creating High Performance, where I’m lucky enough to interview some of the world’s most extraordinary people.

Many of our biggest episodes feature guests from the elite environment of Grand Prix racing, just like Marc, as we all wake up to the incredible lessons that the sport can teach us.

Marc’s packed this excellent book full of great stories, expertise and insight, but also the kind of useful tips that businesses, parents and every single one of us can put into practice to get a little bit closer to our own version of living a highperformance life.

Jake Humphrey,

2025

Introduction

I come from a world in which almost everyone is willing to do almost anything if it means getting an edge over their competitors, because F1 is a sport where even fractions of seconds can have an explosive impact.

For a long time that meant its teams pursued the most innovative, daring technological methods available in the relentless chase for speed. They were uncompromising in their desire to explore the outer limits of what was possible with their cars. Later, that furious ambition and obsessive attention to detail was unleashed on every single aspect of a team’s performance. Earlier than most, they understood that when it comes to winning races, human beings are as important as engines.

I had a ring-side seat for much of this, spending the most amazing decade in various roles at the illustrious McLaren Formula One Team. I started as a mechanic, working on the racing cars and playing my part in the pressure-cooker environment of pitstops, before taking a wider role in programmes within the organisation dedicated to understanding and improving the team’s human performance and collective mindset. What I didn’t appreciate back then was that the elite-level people I was lucky enough to work with, and the groundbreaking things we were able to discover, would go on to change the rest of my life for the better. In passing some of

what I learnt on to you in the pages of this book, I’m hoping we might just be able to help change yours too.

Helping to transform an organisation from one that focused almost all its resources and attention on designing and engineering a faster car, towards one that realised it couldn’t have the fastest car without focusing resources and attention on the people that created it, was an area that fascinated me. I convinced our CEO, Ron Dennis, to let me have a go at improving our outcomes by learning how to get the best out of the brilliant people in the team. My new mission in life began.

Together we helped bring significant change and, in doing so, helped Lewis Hamilton to the first F1 World Title of his career. I’m very proud of that. But mostly I’m proud to say we laid the foundations for a new way of thinking at one of the sport’s oldest and most successful teams.

And that’s what this book’s about: new ways of thinking. My own journey of self-discovery and personal development changed direction through understanding the brilliance of what the extraordinary people in F1 could offer when truly enabled. We can all do the same.

Each chapter takes a different topic that F1 teams exploit extremely well and that I believe can help us all. It breaks down the ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ of each and combines this with real-life stories and examples from my Formula One experience. Embedded in each chapter is a ‘Marginal Gain’, something I think is worth pursuing in order to reach the very highest standards possible in whatever mission you’re on. Then each chapter closes with a set of ‘Pitlane Lessons’, or bitesize tips, to summarise what you’ve learnt and help you to implement them in the framework of your own life.

I worked with, and learnt from, elite performance coaches and leaders from other sports and industries, all the while trying

to understand more about humans and how we perform best. I got the opportunity to share insights with and from Olympic athletes and titans of business, as well as the world-class drivers and people within our own team. Upon finally leaving McLaren, I only became hungrier for more learning and so went on to study and read subjects like team psychology, high-performing team cultures and lots more.

Alongside a growing broadcasting career, I began giving talks at big public and private events about the things I’d learnt in Formula One that I knew could help others. I set up my own companies, helping businesses to achieve great things through consultancy and executive mentoring programmes, and today I travel the globe providing these services to some of the biggest organisations in the world.

A few years ago I had the realisation that whilst the privileged existence I’ve been lucky enough to have in the high-performance world of F1 is enormously valuable to the business world, the same things I teach my corporate clients can be just as valuable to you and me. So I started a podcast, Pitlane Life Lessons.

The ethos behind it, and this very book, is to help you to think more about the challenges you face in life, in the way a successful F1 team might approach them. I want to help you to get a little bit closer to living your own version of a highperformance existence by developing a Formula One mindset.

I hope you enjoy reading.

Marc

@marc_priestley/@f1elvis

GOALS ARE MORE THAN PLANS – THEY’RE FUEL

How to Set World-Champion-Worthy Goals

It is almost impossible to overestimate the sheer scale of the challenge facing Formula One teams. What’s required just to get their two cars onto the F1 grid is so demanding, relentless, expensive and punishing that many good teams have tried and failed even to do that. The competition for those who’ve managed to establish themselves is so intense, and at such a high level, that whilst designing and building a car to take part is one thing, creating and operating one that can compete at the front is another altogether.

The biggest teams employ over a thousand of some of the best people in the business to spend around twelve months coming up with a car they think can beat the other teams, whose own thousand of the best people in the business are trying to do the same. All are working within the same strict, but regularly changing, regulations set by the sport’s governing body, the FIA .

If the initial design process starts in February, the car needs to hit the racetrack for pre-season testing the following February. In the meantime, there’s the small matter of competing in the ferociously competitive World Championship with the car that began its own design journey twelve months earlier than that. And that car doesn’t just get designed once and then raced for a season, it gets redesigned almost every week as regular

upgrades and new components get rushed through a staggeringly rapid production system. All of that takes the highest possible levels of coordination and a relentless drive from every single person involved. And, of course, it never stops. When the season finally comes to a close in December, production of the following year’s brand-new car, and the myriad intricate parts it consists of, is ramping up to full capacity ahead of the new campaign. The everlasting cycle continues . . . the winter ‘off season’ is often the busiest time of all inside each team’s factory.

Just doing a good job, or even a very good job, isn’t enough to survive, let alone win in Formula One. You need brilliant individuals operating at their highest levels.

Which is why keeping motivated and energised teams of that many people, with such a demanding and ongoing workload that never seems to let up, is one of the biggest challenges these elite organisations face. It’s a challenge they take seriously and I was privileged to spend almost a decade benefitting directly from McLaren’s groundbreaking efforts in this area. We employed leading doctors, therapists and psychologists. We collaborated with other extremely high-performing organisations in and outside of professional sport. We conducted our own research and ran experiments, collected and forensically analysed data and went deep into trying to understand anything that might help us win.

The continual and relentless pursuit of ultimate performance means that teams are as invested in financing and innovating in the human performance sphere as they are aerodynamics and technology. Having a system of meticulously curated and measurable goals is one of the ways they manage this.

Although each has their own specific approaches, the

process is similar up and down the pitlane. Engineering and team debriefs happen daily and their conclusions help to form job lists and a strategic run plan for the next time the car hits the track. These ever-flexible plans are documented, distributed and used as guides for the team to make the most efficient use of the available time they have.

In the bigger picture, teams identify performance-based as well as halo-like idealistic targets that stretch them, but with excellence across the board, they’re able to work towards or hit them over an extended period. This happens in the sporting context, but also in the business sense, with phenomenal amounts of data continuously gauging progress across both.

But the way they do this has evolved over time. When I was starting out, each season McLaren began with the single overarching target of aiming to score more points than every other team and be crowned as champions by its end. On any given race weekend, the way we were most likely to achieve that was to go out and win the Grand Prix. The trouble is that everyone else at the top end of the sport set out with what they hoped was the fastest car the rules would allow, to achieve exactly the same thing. Even if we’d done an exceptional job by the time the car first hit the track in testing, we still had Everest-scale mountains to climb whilst others around us did anything they could to climb them faster and better. Our biggest annual aim, the reason we existed, was the same one that everyone else aspired to: to become champions. And yet the nature of F1 is such that, clearly, we couldn’t all win it.

On thirty separate occasions during my years there we hit the goal of winning an F1 race and, I can tell you, it felt amazing every single time. That’s a lot of celebrations under the podium, a lot of champagne sprayed, parties enjoyed and bonuses earned.

But . . . during that same period with the team we entered 180 Grand Prix.

To put it another way, we failed to achieve our goal 83.33 per cent of the times we tried.

Of the ten seasons I was directly involved in at the team, we managed to accomplish the one humongous goal we were led to believe defined us, winning an F1 World Championship . . . just once. And yet we carried on.

In life it can be the same. Things go wrong. There isn’t always a neat link between effort and reward. Everyone’s journeys are full of their own versions of an untimely engine failure or an unfortunate mid-race puncture. In response, we can always take the easy option and give up. We can feel sorry for ourselves and rue the unfairness of ‘bad luck’, retreat to lick our wounds and think about perhaps having another go on a ‘better’ day. But there is another way. So how can one sustain the constant drive to accomplish your goals for inordinate amounts of time, often without much to celebrate along the way?

The best teams have come to realise that the targets they used to set themselves – winning the world championship, or a certain number of races – are no longer enough by themselves (though they remain incredibly useful, as we’ll see) to ensure that they have the edge over their competitors. Instead, they set themselves infinite goals. These are inspirational aspirations that don’t have a defined end-point but are pursued continually. These are what can drive you on when the going gets tough; they lend meaning to your life, and push you to reach levels that you might never have thought possible. They were a game-changer for us, and transformed the way we conducted every aspect of our operations. In this chapter, I’m going to show you how you can do the same to your life. In the process, I hope I’ll be able to help you think more like an F1

team and positively reframe both what you’re aiming for and why you might be chasing after it.

How to set the right goals

I believe that we should all have goals in our lives. They help us to know where we’re heading, like the North Star, and give us reason to push through tough or difficult times. I can tell you that on a day when the world seems against you in the pitlane, because your car’s engine blew up in the final practice session just a couple of frantic hours before qualifying, fixating on that North Star can often be the only thing that keeps you relentlessly ploughing on against the odds. When that exact scenario played out with us at McLaren, I remember the sense of pride I felt as our entire crew threw themselves into the task of rebuilding the car in the impossibly short timeframe. No one questioned it. No one needed instructions. Everyone just knew that’s what we had to do, even though the chance of actually being ready for our immovable qualifying time slot might be slim.

We made it, just.

You can also think of goals as future rewards. They’re the delayed payback or gratification for the effort you’re putting in today and that can be a powerful motivator. When I look back at some of the heart-wrenching sacrifices and soul-crushing moments I went through along the way, when we finally did hit that enormous goal of winning the F1 World Championship at the end of 2008, the reward more than justified it all.

If you don’t set the correct goals in the correct way, they can easily end up holding you back. For me the process is important. They should have meaning and a good reason behind them. They should be important enough that they’re of the highest

priority, otherwise they simply become a ‘nice to have’, rather than a ‘must achieve’ and only one of those normally gets done. And they should motivate, not demotivate. That sounds obvious, but striving for a singular goal for a decade like I did, where the success rate is just 10 per cent if you’re lucky, can easily morph from one to the other as more unfulfilled time passes.

That’s why, these days, teams invest an enormous amount of effort into setting the right goals for everyone to chase. That process has developed through an intense search for the highest possible levels of performance. It embraces psychology and the understanding of how we, as humans, operate. In exactly the same way that we need to try and learn everything about our car in order to hopefully get the best out of it, it’s also true of the people in our team. This is because the human performance element of an F1 operation is seen today as the most important element, without which none of the technical or sporting achievements are possible. The teams always look for innovative solutions to help them get the best possible results from the resources available. It’s what matters most and so looking at how best to enable a team’s brilliant collection of people is now a major focus.

After years of trying different solutions and studying different organisational cultures, my own preferred option for goal setting is, perhaps unsurprisingly, broadly the way most F1 teams work in the modern era.

Today I set my own goals on three main time horizons.

• Short-term goals. These are anything less than a month, but can be as short as hourly or even less. I have many of these on the go at any one time. For an F1 team on race weekends these could range from getting the car ready within the event schedule timings, to winning the

Grand Prix. I try and write three simple ones in my diary before bed for the next day and the first one’s always ‘1: Make my bed’. It’s simple to achieve, I manage it within seconds of waking up and it immediately gives me a winning feeling by ticking the first goal off so early that it helps push me on to the next.

• Long-term goals. I typically have one or two of these in my life to focus on at a time and they can be anything up to a year or more away. The obvious F1 team example is the major goal of winning the World Championship. They’re incredibly difficult, but certainly not impossible to achieve, but the reward for hitting them is appropriately significant.

• The infinite goal. I have only one. This is something that’s always there in the background of everything I do and I spent a long time working out what it was. It’s a goal I can never actually achieve, hence its ‘infinity’, but it’s the most important of them all. I’ll tell you what mine is a bit later on, but this is also something we introduced at McLaren.

Each set of goals should contribute towards the next set and all should be aligned with the infinite goal. Although on very different timescales, your goal levels should all be linked to each other. Your short-term goals should all contribute to achieving your longer-term goals, and everything you do should remain true to the infinite goal. If at any point you check in and suspect this not to be the case, then spend time (add it to a list) questioning which one or more of them have become misaligned and then rectify it.

The truth is that most people have both short- and long-term

goals – they just don’t realise it. Which means that they’re less likely to achieve them. And the reason many people aren’t consciously aware of their own goals is that they rarely document, or often even acknowledge them. But, as I’m about to show you, they really should.

Writing your targets down makes you more likely to reach them

During my time at McLaren and in the years since, I’ve been lucky to have the opportunity to work with several psychologists across different fields. I was once in a race team meeting towards the end of the 2000s, where McLaren had linked us up with an external Olympic team sports psych to share experiences and ideas on how to reach a greater level of achievement. The highly professional, suit-clad man in front of us that day shared advice he swore by when it came to training his accomplished Olympic athletes for their big event. Goal setting! He told us he couldn’t recommend highly enough the value of specifically writing down a list of targets we wanted to hit every single day. He suggested writing in a diary, or on a phone app. What was important, he said, was that we actually dedicated the time to document our goals as part of our regular daily schedule. All of his athletes did it.

I remember one of my more sceptical colleagues openly scoffing at the idea and suggesting that preparing for an event that only happened once every four years sounded like it gave these athletes a lot more time than any of us seemed to have spare each day! People chuckled under their breath. But then the man went on to share a statistic from a recently published study that I’ve never forgotten and still use in much of my consultancy work today. That study came from Dr Gail Matthews, a psychology

professor at the Dominican University of California, and it concluded that people who specifically write down their goals are up to 42 per cent more likely to achieve them than those who simply conceptualise those goals in their minds. Forty-two per cent! Stacking the odds in favour of accomplishing the things you want, by that much, instantly seemed like a no-brainer.

In Formula One today, sports psychologists form part of a group that helps us to operate at higher levels by trying to maximise every detail of what goes into our performance. I’ve worked with businesses and high-performing individuals who use similar methods to help them accomplish great things. After all, we’re very happy to use a physical trainer or coach to get our bodies in shape to be able to achieve something big, so why not give the same attention to detail when it comes to our brains? Goal setting’s a technique that each psychologist I’ve encountered has recommended, and writing down the goals we set ourselves is proven to be surprisingly beneficial. Nearly twenty years on, I still write down my personal and professional goals almost every single day.

Ironically, given my colleagues’ early scepticism on that day, we were already practising a version of this in our professional lives at McLaren. I normally encouraged my teams to actively write down what it was we were trying to achieve. Sometimes that was almost done for us in the form of our race weekend schedule. A minute-by-minute document detailed what state the car needed to be in by a certain time, or when we needed, within the regulations, to be completely off the grid ahead of the race start on Sunday, for example. It might be that the event scrutineers were coming to inspect the car’s build specification at 4:35pm on the Thursday, in which case we knew the whole thing had to be together and in an inspectable condition by 4:30pm. That same car might be scheduled to be used for

pitstop practice out in the pitlane at 2pm on the same day. So that was another milestone requiring the car in a different state, with pitstop practice brakes and brake ducts, pitstop wheels, the dummy crash structure (which would inevitably get smashed to bits by the rear jack) and protective covers on the floor and other sensitive components. The timeline was set and immovable, therefore it dictated the workload. That formed a series of short-term goals that we all knew we needed to hit hour by hour, that were documented and available for everyone in the team to see.

Aside from timetables and event schedules giving us timelines to work to inside the garage, we also wrote down our own work goals so that everyone knew what we were trying to achieve. These often took the form of simple job lists. Writing down or printing out a checklist of what physically needed to be done to the car was essentially a catalogue of our short-term goals. It gave us a guide to help navigate the day, it helped me to distribute tasks amongst my crews and, most importantly, it gave us all something we could satisfyingly tick off when we’d accomplished anything on it.

In addition to this, at regular intervals – the end of every day, after each track session and race weekend, once the season was over – we’d get together to assess our own performance. The term we use is ‘debrief’. The mechanics got together to review how well their goals, or tasks on job lists, had been met. Other departments did the same. The engineering teams sat down with the drivers and analysed what we’d learnt. The point of each debrief was to check in with the goals we’d set ourselves and share what we’d discovered since. Had we achieved them? If so, how well? If not, why? The aim of every single debrief was to come up with a new set of goals. They might be completely new, or adaptations of previous ones, but the goals we

set ourselves should always be evolving and moving forward as we learn more and develop.

This all highlighted an undoubted truth. People are far more likely to physically document their targets in their professional lives than they are in their personal lives. We present annual or quarterly budget targets to the shareholders. We ‘pitch’ goals to potential clients. We agree on the milestones we want to hit over the next twelve months in our end-of-year reviews with the boss. And so on. But we rarely do anything like this at home.

Using these powerful techniques away from work, when no one’s watching and there’s no accountability at stake, is somehow a lot harder to do. It’s a bit like a professional footballer that ‘piles on the pounds’ as soon as they retire . . they suddenly understand it was a lot easier to get up and train every single day when it was literally their job and they were being paid to do it.

What McLaren realised was that our success wasn’t solely built on the way our team went about its business during the working hours of a season. The way each person lived their personal lives, how they behaved away from work, was intrinsically linked to how they showed up at the office or in the pitlane. The desire to continuously improve could be a holistic mindset applying to everything, but often only if there was deliberate intention for it to be that way. So could the team teach its people techniques that we could show them would improve their chances of success in Formula One, but also away from it in everything else they did? We had to do some learning.

Finding myself in that room with an Olympic sports psychologist was part of that learning process, and it kickstarted a fascination in my own life and work to discover more, as I know it did for lots of people in the end. Here’s what I now

know about setting goals, which I certainly didn’t appreciate to the same extent back then.

That staggering revelation that we can increase our chances of accomplishing goals by more than 40 per cent just by writing them down seems absurd, but here’s the reasoning behind it. Committing goals to a page is also a commitment to oneself. When we write things down we usually take the time to articulate them in a clearly defined way. Even that short mental process means we’re forced to think more about them than we otherwise might, and that creates a deeper internal connection.

Even the physical action of writing with a pen, or typing onto a screen, means we also have something visual in front of us to mirror back the thoughts we just had. It adds a level of subconscious reaffirmation, helping to confirm their credibility or importance in our minds.

Of course, having a document in front of us detailing the things we want to achieve also gives us a reference point to keep coming back to. That can help remotivate us in times of waning enthusiasm. When we do come back to it, hopefully we’re able to tick off an item on the list and that creates a sense of achievement, which is powerful. The brain’s reward centre fires up and makes us feel good through a release of dopamine, and that’s addictive.

That list of goals also acts as a road map that can help you recover your direction and purpose if ever you stray during your journey.

MARGINAL GAIN

Write down short-term goals every single day, using a diary, a notepad, or even the notes or calendar app on your phone.

I find three to five easy-to-achieve things make a great starting point and I write them before bed the night before or first thing in the morning. Make one so easy you can tick it off with hardly any effort in the first thirty minutes of your day; it provides an early ‘win’ and helps you launch onto the next one. Keep the list with you. Add to it if you need to and celebrate the significant achievement of ticking something off along the way. This short-term goals list can be a guide for your day or week, eliminating aimless wandering and assisting in the pursuit of time and energy efficiency. By its very nature it literally helps you to get done what you need to do, so do it.

Gail Matthews’ revelatory study noted three other factors that contribute to enhancing the likelihood of achieving the things we desire. If you want to level up your goal setting and increase the odds of success further, try this. As well as writing down goals, think a bit more about how you’re going to hit them. Noting down the steps you’ll take on the way to getting there amplifies all of the points above. Reason the problem out. Make assessments of what actions you can take, in turn giving yourself an even smaller set of very achievable goals to hit frequently along the way. This is exactly what an F1 team’s debrief does. We don’t just come out of the post-qualifying meeting saying we want to go out and win the race on Sunday; we also generate the necessary stepping stones to make it happen. That’s where most of our time is actually spent. If we’ve qualified near the back of the field, then maybe winning the Grand Prix might now be unrealistic. So we set an achievable goal that pushes us, perhaps finding a way to move forward from our lowly grid slot and get into the

points-scoring places. We then need to look at our general car performance relative to our competitors’ . . . did we qualify badly because that was our genuine pace, or have we actually got a much faster car, but made a mistake or had some bad luck? We conduct the same analysis for those cars around us on the grid and try to understand what they might be able to achieve on Sunday too. Can we set up the car to increase its ability to overtake on this track? Perhaps by lessening the wing angles, reducing downforce which might compromise cornering stability, making it harder to drive, but importantly reducing aerodynamic drag for higher top speeds along the straights where most overtaking’s done? That might be a step we can actively take to move us closer to our goal. It goes on the list and, when the mechanics have completed the set-up change, it gets ticked off and we’re one small step closer, or hopefully a little bit further along our road map, to success.

Another key understanding to come from Dr Matthews’ study is that sharing those goals with other people can also be a significant factor in actually accomplishing them. It falls under the heading of accountability. It’s much easier to turn up for training or deliver the project on time if you’re directly accountable to someone else for it. When we leave work or retire, who’s going to know, or care, if we actually hit the goals we set ourselves? We can tell ourselves we want to go to the gym, but when the alarm goes off early in the morning, there’s no one to stop us hitting the snooze button. So, finding someone or a group of people we can share our targets with can really help to drag us out of bed so we don’t ‘disappoint them’ or ‘feel ashamed’ of quitting. An F1 team will share its goals internally. The entire team’s able to see what we’re trying to do and how we’re trying to do it. I know from my own personal perspective there was no way I was ever going to allow myself to feel like

I’d let my teammates down by not delivering what I set out to do. Perhaps you can set up a WhatsApp group amongst other gym-going friends to help push each other along the health journey you’re on?

The last discovery from Matthews’ study was the importance of putting in place a means to regularly revisit your goals. That might be structuring a defined schedule through which you come back at the end of every day or every week to check in with progress. It could be setting up a regular meeting that everyone involved needs to attend . . . like an F1 team debrief . . . or it could be making revisiting the list before you go to bed part of your daily routine. Coming back to look at the goals you set yourself has a number of benefits. It reminds you of the mission you’re on, which is important. The way you felt when you constructed your goals, motivated and driven, may not necessarily be the same way you feel days or weeks later, or after the enormous disappointment of that catastrophic engine failure. Nudging yourself regularly back on track can really help you to recall why you’re putting the effort in.

It also gives you a chance to amend the goals. Being determined, yet flexible, in your approach is by far the best way to achieve most things in life. The world has a way of throwing curveballs at us that change the game, like a disastrous qualifying. In Friday night’s post-practice debrief, we may’ve been all set on winning the race and coming away with maximum points, the best possible stepping stone to achieving our longerterm goal of winning the title. Perhaps everything was looking good until it all went wrong for whatever reason on Saturday afternoon. If, in Saturday night’s debrief, we just blindly ploughed on with the same lofty targets, we’d almost certainly feel demotivated because they were out of reach, and be disappointed on Sunday. But if we’re flexible and revisit what we

believe to now be possible, we can adapt the goals, or the path to achieving them, to something that feels difficult enough to push us, but realistic enough to be attainable, and then we have something sensible to aim for. Motivation returns.

So, to help you achieve your long-term goals, you could use your diary or journalling app and, as well as documenting your goals, use it as a debrief tool to check in every day or week with your progress towards them. If you didn’t make progress, write that down too – don’t pretend or leave out the days you struggled; they’re a critical step towards the day you succeed. Tell someone else what your goals are. It could be a friend or family member, a personal confidant, or you could find it more helpful to tell the world. Social media can be a powerful way to increase accountability and help with motivation. I deliberately announced on Instagram that I was writing this book when I first began and I’m super grateful to all those who checked in every now and then to see how I was getting on. There was no way I could’ve ever gone back to Instagram to announce that I’d given up and quit – and as a result, you’re reading it now.

Infinite goals

All of this is well and good when it comes to keeping the show on the road. But one thing that working in F1 taught me is that there always needs to be something more. What I’ve come to appreciate since leaving McLaren is that many of the behaviours and thought processes I saw as ‘normal’ aren’t as ubiquitous outside of the sport as I’d imagined. I’d become conditioned to operate at such a consistently high level, to demand so much of myself and others, that it subconsciously became my ‘baseline’. In all honesty I’ve struggled on many occasions to adapt back into the ‘real world’ since

leaving the team because I’ve become impatient with what I see as inefficiencies, laziness or corner-cutting. I’ve frustratedly ‘sacked’ at least one set of builders and ‘trades’ on every one of the five major home improvement or renovation projects my wife and I have undertaken – often more than one!

That’s not to say I’m perfect, because I’m far from it – just ask my wife! I don’t do everything to F1 standards all of the time; in fact I’m sure she’ll tell you there’s an awful lot that I definitely don’t! But when it comes to something that I deem important, or that might create an advantage for me, I’ll immediately go into my F1 mentality of doing whatever it takes. You’ll never find a hotel bed that I’ve slept in unmade when I leave, because I believe in respect. I regularly unpack the loaded dishwasher, only to reorganise and reload it when in almost everyone else’s eyes it would be just fine, because I believe in efficiency. I become almost instantly frustrated, to a level I know is ridiculous and even sometimes unfair to those around me, with what I deem to be poor timekeeping, even by the smallest amounts, because I believe in punctuality. In my mind I just try to always do the things that I think matter to the best standard possible and I sometimes find it very hard to understand why everyone else in the world doesn’t do the same. When chatting recently to my friend and former teammate David Coulthard on my Pitlane Life Lessons podcast, he explained that the mentality he came out of the team with was that ‘everything matters’ and it resonated extremely well with me.

That striving for more, that uncompromising desire to be better today than I was the day before, was what helped me become successful in F1. It’s something that most people in the top teams shared. But its effect was supercharged once we embraced the concept of infinite goals.

Many big companies I work with today have ‘mission

statements’, many of which could sometimes be described as infinite goals. But I think it’s also true to say that some of those companies seem to have them because they look good emblazoned across the wall above main reception, or as a hashtag on Instagram, rather than for what they actually stand for. The concept of an infinite goal is to some extent similar to the carrot suspended in front of the nose of a donkey. It can never actually be reached, but is always there as something motivating to chase. Part of its beauty is that it avoids the very real possibility of motivation falling away once a major target’s reached. If the donkey actually got the carrot one day, why keep moving forward?

The well-documented phenomenon of ‘Gold Medal Syndrome’ is a great example of this. An athlete has a monumental goal in their life: winning an Olympic gold medal, the biggest prize in the sport. As a youngster it seems so big it can feel infinite, like they can never really achieve it, but it’s the dangling carrot that gets them up early every day of their lives to train hard. They progress up the ladder and the goal becomes more real; they’re openly chasing it as the ultimate target. Perhaps they might even make it to an Olympic squad, a huge accomplishment which becomes part of who they are in life. They’re now an Olympian. Then one day many, many years, even sometimes decades, after they dedicated their life’s work to it, they win the elusive Olympic gold medal. They finally get the carrot they’ve been chasing. The feeling’s incredible, the celebration huge . . . but then, the very next day, the carrot’s gone. The thing they’ve been hunting and struggling for, sometimes their entire identity, has been ticked off the list and vanished. Now what?

The sad truth is that many end up in a downward spiral of