Marlow's Musings 3/16/25
Insights, adventures and fun stuff from this week.
Audio narration by David Marlow
My first car was a 1964 1/2 Ford Mustang. Considered a classic now it was a beat-up 11-year-old vehicle with only 1st and 3rd gear that cost me $250 in cash.
Having no second gear made the drive home an adventure. Given that I had all of five minutes experience operating a manual transmission, it was even more so.
If you can imagine, replacing the transmission by hand was the easy part of owning this car.
The gas gauge would have been more aptly named a guess gauge as it wouldn’t read below a quarter of a tank. I never knew exactly how much fuel I had in the car.
Every so often, the generator would quit working. It happened the first time while driving down the highway to work.
The GEN light came on, and I ignored it thinking if the battery died, I could get a jump start at work.
What didn’t cross my mind was that the car needs a battery to start AND fire the spark plugs to run.
Suddenly with cars whizzing by me, the engine started to sputter and stall.
Pulling over I popped up the hood, jumped out, and started wiggling any wire I could find hoping to restore the connection before the engine died.
One of the wires did the trick and the engine ran smoothly again.
I had no idea which wire or wires; every time, it seemed like a different one. Yes, this happened many times.
Even with those quirks, I loved that car.
50 Years
The Mustang is a legendary vehicle, so when the 50th anniversary approached, Ford Motor Company announced a redesign to commemorate the milestone.
The project is chronicled in the documentary ‘A Faster Horse.’1
The title is a play-off of the Mustang name and something Henry Ford was famous for saying.
"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."
The star of the documentary is the Chief Engineer. He owns the project end to end.
In the documentary, it was pointed out that you were a Chief Engineer once. You either created a successful car and got promoted, or you failed, and your career was over.
No in-between.
I found his deputy interesting though because he was an example of living his Ikigai.
A Supporting Role
The deputy for the 50th Anniversary Mustang was on his fourth project. He didn’t seek promotion or want to be a Chief Engineer.
Instead, he saw his role as ensuring the Chief Engineer succeeded.
As a deputy, he found satisfaction in having helped three prior Chief Engineers launch projects and get promoted.
Did Ford recognize the contribution he made? Could it be that he was as important, if not more so than the ‘inexperienced’ CEs running the launches?
I wonder how many of those CEs would have been successful without this deputy. As I mentioned, I found him interesting because he gave up the ‘default’ path of promotion to stay true to what he did best. In my final thoughts, I’ll share more as to why he is the ‘hero’ in the story.
Seeing the Light
Even with the help of an experienced deputy the Chief Engineer ran into many problems. Bringing a car to life is a complex undertaking.
Gale Halderman, the lead designer on the original Mustang points to the challenge of making an excellent finished product.
“Designing a good-looking car is as easy as pie. Designing a car that the company can afford, the manufacturing guys can assemble, the engineers can engineer, that’s damn difficult.”
Mid-way through, the project stalled over such a design challenge—a $6 part. Not any old part, it was the iconic sequenced taillights. The finance guy wouldn’t approve spending the money. The Chief Engineer demanded that it be part of the design all but declaring they weren’t moving forward without it.
The finance guy countered that while it seemed like a small amount, multiplying that additional cost by every car made would put the project over budget.
It would have been easy for the finance guy to stand firm on budget constraints and for the Chief Engineer to abandon the iconic feature.
If they saved money on the taillight the 50th Anniversary model would have been missing a key part of the car’s history. It would have been something less than the classic car deserved and the buyers wanted.
Instead, the Chief held firm that the lights stayed in the design and the finance guy held his ground as well. The difference? The Chief agreed to team up with the finance guy to find the $6 reduction somewhere else. Both upped their game instead of taking the easy path.
It is hard to fight those forces of mediocrity driving us (pun intended) to lesser results.
I’m guessing somewhere along the line someone fixed the gas gauge and electrical wiring problems too.
Word of the Week
Mediocrity (n.)
/ˌmēdēˈäkrədē/
1: The state or quality of being average or ordinary
2: A person or thing of moderate or low quality, value, ability, or performance
From Latin mediocris meaning "halfway up a mountain," this word identifies the place where the climb has stalled. The mediocre are neither at the base nor the summit. Sure the view has improved from the valley yet fails to reveal the panorama possible from the peak.
Mediocrity operates in the space between effort and excellence. Unlike outright failure, which demands correction, mediocrity often goes unchallenged—persisting precisely because it fulfills minimum expectations.
Most people live mediocre lives. Not in the definition of success and failure rather in the sense of not living into their Ikigai and remaining stuck halfway up the mountain.
In case you missed it…
This week’s Ikigai Thought for Today…
The Deepest Need
Some journeys are direct while some are circuitous. Some are heroic and others are muddled. The best ones are where we live out our purpose to meet the world’s deepest needs.
Ikiquest+
This week’s Coffee Contemplation…Things that Need Doing
I get asked questions all the time about Ikigai. For this week’s coffee contemplation, I laid out some that I get asked most frequently and share a way you can answer them for yourself.
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Comment of the Week:
This one is from Amanda, on the post I shared about the misguided Venn Diagram for Ikigai…
A couple of years ago I was talking to a colleague at a conference. She was telling me that she was working with a career coach and brought up that diagram and that it just didn't make sense to her. I shared how you explain Ikigai and her face lit up. "Now that makes sense," she told me. I can't wait to give her a copy of your book!
Quote I’m Pondering
This thought is from George Lois2…
Only with absolute fearlessness can we slay the dragons of mediocrity that invade our gardens.
Final Thoughts
It would be easy to see the Deputy Project Engineer in the story as taking a mediocre path because he declined the default path of promotion. I see it as the opposite.
In our careers, it doesn't matter so much what the job is, the type, or the industry. It's more about integrity. When you're working in a job, that does not allow you to be the real you, living out your essence, you're disintegrating a bit when you're doing that.
Too often we take that default path. Somewhere along the way we just began shutting down parts of ourselves to be able to function in the default space.
Promotion for him would have brought more money for sure. It also would have brought stress and disintegration into his life.
He avoided that and the mediocre life that comes with it. I’d say he was the hero in the story.
Quest Well.
David Gelb, dir. A Faster Horse. White Horse Pictures, 2015.
Lois, George. Damn Good Advice (For People with Talent!): How To Unleash Your Creative Potential by America's Master Communicator. London: Phaidon Press, 2012.
Mine was a 1964 Pontiac Bonneville. It had all the gears, but was decidedly temperamental about when to use them.
You can tell your age when you are talking about the Mustang. My first new car was a 64 mustang. It was bought and only my sister could drive it, but it was something to see. Years later I was over at a relative's home, and he had bought a 69 Mustang with the 429 Cobra jet engine. I grew up during the muscle car era. Without getting long winded I will just end this by saying I enjoyed the pure muscle cars.