I met Pawel at a filling station on the western edge of Istanbul – the city I’d been cycling towards for the past twenty-seven days – where I’d stopped for a drink and some shade away from the lunchtime sun.
He trundled past, slowly, heavily burdened. Just as he crossed the last possible entrance to the forecourt he turned his head my way and I waved. He saw me, stopped, pushed back a metre, then swung his forks in my direction and scooted across the apron.
No surprise.
Cyclists like talking to cyclists; about starting points, destinations and the travails in between. Pawel was on a year long trek from Poland but wasn’t interested in the usual storytelling. He was all about his side project – videoing every biker he met about whatever they’d learned on their journey.
It’s fertile ground. A question every long-distance cyclist asks themselves in those endless moments on empty roads when solitude in the sun melds with the rhythm of tyre on tarmac to make us contemplative and open to insight.
With two thousand miles in my legs and a hundred hours of reflection under my helmet, what did I have for Pawel? No idea.
In the moment – sun-addled, Coke-caffeinated, hot and demob-happy with my mind already anticipating the end of its journey three hours away – I’ve no idea what I said. Could have been anything. My newfound love of Haribo Tangfastic, the tessellated benefits of various cycling and travel apps, the exact best place to pack every single item in my panniers, or something truly profound about hydration (it’s important).
What I should have talked about was cycling as a metaphor for leadership and a life of projects. Pawel, if you’re listening, let’s try again.
- Make the decision and get on with it
- Seven hours a day will take you a long way
- Doing is the route to happiness
- Take care of care issues straight away
- Don’t worry about bike-box problems
- What’s behind you doesn’t matter
- Things will go wrong
- We choose
Make the decision and get on with it
Cycling across Europe is a project. It has a defined goal. It involves a start, a middle and an end. It consumes resources, one of which is time. It’s full of ups and downs, good days and bad, headwinds and easy progress, moments of doubt, moments of fear and if we’re lucky, moments of surprise and joy – like swimming in the Danube under a blue-blue sky or whooping my way through a mountain tunnel with a motorcycle escort that appeared from nowhere with miraculous timing.
It’s intimidating. Most project are. I mean, Istanbul, it’s a long way. Before I turned a pedal or packed a towel, uncertainty blocked the path; when will I start, what’s the route, what will I take, who will I go with, how big are the mountains, how far is it anyway, where will I sleep, what about work, life, injury, can I pull it off, am I stupid to try, I’ll look like a fool if I fail. With so many worries, the status quo pushes in the other direction; it’s easier not to take on the hills, not to bother, not to stare down the nay-sayers in my head or anywhere else.
As cyclists, leaders, entrepreneurs, project people, we know this: work out what you want to do, add reality, remove ego, make the decision and get on with it. The first four steps are about objectives and teams and resources and smarts and are mostly the domain of the whiteboard and the spreadsheet. Getting on with it is where the rubber hits the road. It takes action, commitment, discipline. It means making choices to do this instead of the other thing. It means committing to doing the work, to getting up, putting yourself out, finding a way and to keep on moving until the doing is done.
Make the decision and get on with it or you’ll never leave the driveway.
Seven hours a day will take you a long way
Having made my own decision, found the time and gained the latitude from my family and colleagues, my trip involved a straightforward process. Every day, I woke early, ate as much as I could bear then turned my handlebars east and pedalled seven-ish hours until I got to where I’d chosen to go that day. On the way, I tried to stay hydrated, eat enough food not to run out of energy, and deal with all the obstacles my path rolled into.
Turns out, spending all day every day doing something specific can take you a very long way. In my case, twenty-seven days times seven hours equals 2,244 miles and the traversing of a continent. There were problems along the way, metaphorical and literal mountains to climb, but seven hours a day does the job – push this pedal, then that one, every action taken in pursuit of the purpose.
The problem with most projects isn’t doing the work of pushing the pedals, it’s not even the mountains. Project people love mountains. They’re big and difficult and challenging. They’re also interesting, exciting and rewarding and they lead us to the other side and the valley beyond. However hard, the work is simply the path we’ve chosen and we wouldn’t have taken in on if we didn’t believe we’re up to the task.
The problem is everything else. Anything that doesn’t support the purpose. Anything that distracts us or that knocks us from our path.
The objective I set myself was cycling to Istanbul by an achievable hard-stop deadline. Previous experience has taught me I like seven hours a day of cycling. I’m objective oriented, reasonably fit and not much interested in sightseeing, relaxing in spa hotels or anything other than daily progress and a good night’s sleep. One hour a day wouldn’t work for me or my deadline. Visiting every extraordinary cathedral or medieval town, nope. I took a half hour detour through Ulm and swung into Bratislava at the cost of thirty extra miles. That’s ok, these were planned exceptions made with my eyes wide open and at no risk to the end goal. If I’d let my head turn every time the thought hit me, I might have had a lovely time, I’d definitely bag plenty of Instagramable moments, but that would have meant a failed project or, if that’s what I wanted, an entirely different one. Less, cycle to Istanbul, more, ride around in circles.
Every other cyclist I met had their own way of doing things in pursuit of their own objectives. One only cared about speed between Belgium and the Black Sea and was happy to sleep wherever he stopped and entirely without comfort. A Swiss couple had taken twelve weeks to cover the same distance I covered in three. Three months into a year-long trip, they stopped at all the sights and stayed for days wherever their interests took them. Success for them was spending time together and exploring whatever they found.
Different objectives, different realities, different definitions of distraction. Every team has unique objectives and attributes, and their way of working has to fit. The Belgian’s way would have been physically impossible for me, the Swiss would have only taken me as far Germany.
Seven hours a day will take you a long way. Fourteen hours might be faster until I broke, one hour would be slower and I’d miss my deadline. The way to win is to define objectives that make sense given your reality, and use a process that fits the team that’s doing the work.
Then get on with it.
Projects go bad (and are miserable for everyone) when the objectives and processes don’t fit the ambitions or attributes of the team, when distractions are allowed to get in the way (cathedral, day-to-day whirlwind, customer request, brilliant idea, whim, rabbit hole) or when resources are compromised (disagreements, dogma, warring departments/couples, competing priorities, dysfunctional teams).
Doing is the route to happiness
Between lockdowns in 2020, eighteen years after first thinking about cycling from Land’s End to John O’Groats – eighteen years of being intimidated by the distance and prioritising other things – I got on my bike and cycled end-to-end. Twelve days of action after eighteen years of good intentions.
We can think ourselves into almost anything if we care about it enough. And out again. Fears and doubts stops us doing what we know we should – can we, could we, should we, this way, that way? We prevaricate about the best way – forgetting that any of the candidate actions will teach us more and take us further than any amount of doing nothing. We hold back – if we don’t really try we can’t really fail. We worry – what other people think? We succumb to the status quo.
The requirements for any successful project are focus, clarity, commitment and discipline: work out what you want, have a realistic hypothesis for how you’ll get there, accept this means sacrificing alternative use of the resources, do the work until it’s done.
Important as the focus, clarity and commitment are, it’s the discipline of doing that gets things done.
On the way to Istanbul I met many other cyclists – all of them doing it, none of them thinking about it. Some were on one day tours of thirty miles, one was on a four month trip of six thousand and I met an Australian half way between Tbilisi and Lisbon which he was about to reroute for a three month side-trip to Madagascar. Does it matter what anyone thinks about that? Nope; he was all smiles, doing what he’d set out to do and having the time of his life.
All of them were. Despite whatever version of adversity they’d – sun, hills, punctures, crashes, loneliness, aching legs, stiff backs, time pressure, funding constraints, wind, rain, abundant trucks and aggressive dogs – they were all happy.
Doing it – making progress towards long-term goals we care about – makes us happy. It makes cyclists happy, it makes teams happy. Even in adversity, it’s the act of doing something meaningful that puts that smile on our face. Wanting something and doing nothing about it makes us sad.
Take care of care issues straight away
As cyclists or leaders of projects and companies, we’re problem solvers. We fight those fires. A broken chain, a disappearing developer, a wobbling customer, anything on the critical path. The one thing we always deal with before we do anything else.
At the other extreme, we know to ignore problems that aren’t really problems at all. An intermittent clicking sound appeared on day one in France and visited once in a while for the next two thousand miles. It caused no issues and I did nothing about it except listen each time until it went away again. No biggie. A lot of life’s irritations are like that – annoyances more than anything else. Disregard, but keep an ear out for increases in volume or persistence.
The trouble comes when we get complacent, when we normalise, when we continue to ignore that intermittent knee problem even when we realise it’s become a persistent knee problem, because we can, because it’s too small to be an actual problem yet. But a small problem in a critical area is a big problem waiting to happen. More important than their size implies.
Somewhere in Hungary I learned the lesson. At the first sign of a hotspot I pulled to the side of the road, dug around in my pannier, found the relevant cream and applied it to my, erm, undercarriage. Arghhh, that’s better. Two minutes tops. The lesson I’d learned? Take care of care issues straight away. It became a mantra. Suncream as soon as the sun comes out, lip balm every time I ate, charge my devices immediately I entered my hotel. No putting-off, no horse trading in favour of sixty extra seconds of progress or a slightly earlier shower. Anything in a critical area; take care of care issues straight away.
The wider point, anything rubbing the wrong way is on the critical path and demands that fire-fighter attitude. In a team, at the merest hint of a hot spot, clarify the brief, deal with interpersonal clashes, iron out misunderstandings, establish buy-in, smooth handoffs.
Don’t worry about bike-box problems
In any kind of project, there’s a lot you don’t know. One option is to plan and plan and plan again so by the time you’re doing the actual work, it’s as much as possible a process of taking known step followed by known step. Some cycle tourists like it that way, spending months or years planning, imagining how they’ll deal with every issue. The problem with this kind of planning? Reality. I met an Austrian couple in Serbia who were taking a bus home. Cycle touring, they said, was not what they thought.
My way is more agile. A few known milestones then work things out two or three days ahead as I get the lay of the land. For this trip my plan was to cycle across France towards Basel, pick up and follow the EuroVelo 6 cycle route (thank you Europe) down the Danube to Vienna and a bit further (taking short cuts whenever it meandered too much), then leave the marked path somewhere in Bulgaria and find my own route to Istanbul before flying home with my bike packed away nice and snug in a box.
The biggest logistical problem of the trip was the literal last thing I needed to think about, that box. It’s the one thing I needed to come home that I wasn’t carrying with me on the way. Where would I get one, should I ship one out, should I buy one, how much would it cost, where would I store it, at a hotel, at a bike shop, when does it make sense to sort it out, what about language issues? It’s easy to obsess about things like that. Someone actually asked me about it as I sat waiting in Newhaven for the ferry to France, twelve miles after I’d set out from home.
My plan: forget about it until I get there. There was nothing I could do about it on the road, and worrying about it would only have caused stress and wasted my energy and time.
For context, bike shops are known to give or sell used bike delivery boxes to cyclists and if I failed to source the real thing I was pretty confident I could figure something out with found cardboard and gaffer tape.
Bike-box problems are problems you know you’ll have to deal with, know you can deal with when the time comes, and have no upstream impact. Why worry? Deal with them when you need to and waste no energy between now and then.
What’s behind you doesn’t matter
There’s no good route into Istanbul. Seventeen million people means a big city. A big city means a lot of traffic. Lots of traffic means lots of roads and lots of choices and none of them are great for cyclists. Whatever way you choose means thirty miles of fast and slow, hilly and flat, residential and express, pot holes, pavements and pedestrians and no bike lanes worth mentioning. The one thing you’ll never be: alone.
If you can’t deal with it, find another way. I met a French couple half way across Turkey who planned to eliminate the problem by cycling to the airport and take a train from there.
Why were they nervous? Ignoring the obvious for a moment, they wanted to avoid what they couldn’t see and could imagine. Understand the risks and manage them. You either take the French route or you don’t.
The train worked for them because Istanbul was a footnote to their bigger travels to India. For me, cycling to Istanbul meant cycling into Istanbul. I was nervous, but having made the decision to cycle, see rule one: get on with it.
Then I met Chris from Liverpool. His bike a patchwork of dents and farmers’ welds following a downhill crash in Czechia, his body a Rorschach of bruises from somersaulting his handlebars after jamming in tram-rails in Romania – both times when he was distracted. His hard-won advice: what’s behind you doesn’t matter, only what’s ahead.
The decisions that brought you and your team here are bike-box problems of the rear-view mirror. There’s no value in sweating the two day old choice to come south rather than go north. You’re here now, what’s next? Don’t worry about what everyone else might do. Don’t obsess about all the things you can’t control. In the moment, in the day-to-day, what matters most is what’s in front of you, not behind.
I’m not saying never look back. Of course you should learn lessons from the past (you don’t like traffic) and plan your route as best as you can. Today though, in this moment, knowing what you now know, having made the decisions you’ve made, keep your eyes forward and deal with whatever’s in front.
Things will go wrong
I had a deadline. My objective wasn’t just to cycle from my house in Hove to the Bosphorus in Istanbul, it was to do it with a couple of days spare to find a bike-box and return home in time for other commitments.
Then it rained for three days and on day seventeen a series of small decisions found me traipsing across an unridably muddy field, soaking, sixteen miles from the last passed human, fourteen from the barking-snarling dog that chased me and three from where the tarmac ran out. Moving forward meant a mile or two of carrying my bike and kit in a leap-frogging back-tracking relay with three feet of walking for every one of progress. After that, tarmac again and a straight shoot south for seventy miles. No problem. Except I stumbled in the mud and because of one of those small decisions I now have a hole in my leg and blood is running into my shoe.
Feeling sorry for myself won’t get me out of this field. The mistake I made doesn’t matter. Wishful thinking won’t make it better and catastrophising will make it feel worse. Justifications and rationalisations won’t help.
What will? Clarity about the state I’m in and what I can do with what I have to improve my situation and make progress again. Just like with every other problem then.
I patched myself up and stopped most of the bleeding. Walking was painful but possible and after an hour and change of slow-and-miserable leap-frog-relay I made it out of the field and back in the saddle. With the help of a friendly pharmacist and the longest day I’ve ever spent on a bike I made it to my hotel, my leg swelling into a tennis ball and reality setting in.
I needed time to recover, time that wasn’t in the plan and couldn’t be squeezed into the schedule if I was to keep my commitments. Unable to sleep, I wavered between it’ll-be-alright optimism to it’s-over despair.
Everybody has set-backs. Things will go wrong. All projects are time challenged, resource challenged, technology challenged, capability challenged. The issue isn’t the challenges, it’s how you meet them. If you’re committed to the objective, if it means something, if you’ve built a culture of getting things done, you find a way. Shift deadlines, change deliverables, rearrange resources, reset expectations. Keep going. Reset your focus and get back to making progress.
The hotel agreed to look after my bike. Two days later I was back in Britain. Sixteen more, domestic commitments fulfilled and my leg looking and feeling mostly how it should, I was back at the hotel, pumping up my tyres and pointing them east again.
We choose
Tens days later, with my comedy suntan and a freshly minted scar on my leg, twenty-seven cycling days after sitting at that ferry port in Newhaven feeling part fool part fraud, I was standing on the Galata Bridge in the middle of Istanbul looking across the Golden Horn and over the Bosphorus to Asia. Definitely not in Kansas anymore.
The project life takes us places we haven’t been. That’s the point. Leadership is about choosing to do things even when you don’t have to do.
We choose to do these things because they’re hard, because we like a challenge, because we want to stretch ourselves and our team. And whilst we love it, finding ourselves no place like home can cause crises of confidence. What am I doing here? Can we summit that mountain? Do I have the legs? Can we find the answers?
Yes.
Maybe we haven’t been here before but we found our way this far and can find the next place too. Maybe we’re not sure what’s around the bend but we’ve been around plenty of bends and know when to go fast and when to go slow. Maybe we don’t have all the answers but we do know the way to get where we’re heading is to keep moving forward and work the problem as we go.
Pawel, here’s my summary: every project – whether it’s cycling to Istanbul, launching a product, building a company or anything else – starts with working out what you want, travels through a landscape that defines reality and is dependent on the choices you make along the way. It can be hard sometimes, but easier choices – like doing nothing, or not addressing the issues, or giving yourself a break and letting things slide – will get you somewhere, just not where you know you want to go.