The Road Got There Before I Did
What 1,392 miles in the family beater reminded me about attention, capacity, and why the dashboard usually knows before we do.
The car was a 2016 Toyota Hybrid Prius. It has served our family well, but nobody is confusing it with a luxury road trip machine. It is the family beater, and I say that with affection. It is reliable, humble, and just small enough to remind you that you are not exactly gliding across America in high style.
My daughter needed it in Los Angeles for the summer, so I volunteered to drive it out there solo last week. I am not saying this officially launches my Dad of the Year campaign, but I do think the nominating committee should at least be made aware.
The plan was pretty simple. Leave Austin, get to El Paso the first night, drive from El Paso to Los Angeles the next day, hand off the car, spend the night, and fly back to Austin on day three. It was a simple plan, but there was a whole lot of road hiding inside it.
The full drive was 1,392 miles, almost all of it on I-10 through west Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, the Sonoran Desert, and the Mojave. I-10 has its moments, but I am not going to pretend this was some grand American road trip full of sweeping inspiration and perfect playlists. There were some beautiful stretches, for sure, but there were also a whole lot of miles where the scenery was basically scrub brush, trucks, dirt, more trucks, and the occasional gas station that made you question your life choices.
West Texas gives you plenty of time to think, which is a generous way of saying there is not always a lot else going on.
Somewhere between Las Cruces and Tucson, I got on a call and stopped paying enough attention to the gas gauge. That is not a great plan in the desert. It is an even worse plan in a Prius with a 9.5 gallon tank, where the exits are not exactly showing up every three minutes with a Buc-ee’s and a breakfast taco.
When I finally pulled in to fill up, the tank took 9.25 gallons out of 9.5. That is not margin. That is getting lucky and pretending it was a plan.
The honest version is that I almost ran out of gas in the desert because I was on a call and not watching the dashboard. I coach leaders on attention, capacity, judgment, and not letting the urgent crowd out what matters, and there I was, in the family Prius, apparently needing the refresher course. Nothing says “leadership clarity” quite like standing at a gas pump doing math and realizing you were one missed exit away from becoming an annoying family story.
Life does enjoy keeping receipts.
One of the best parts of the trip was stopping in Phoenix to have lunch with my business school roommate. There is something good about sitting across from someone who knew you in a different chapter and does not need a full update packet on the current one. We caught up, laughed a little, compared notes on life, and then I got back in the car and kept heading west.
That was most of the trip. Drive, think, stop, check the tank more than I did before, drink something with too much caffeine, let the GPS do its thing, and keep moving the car toward California.
But it never felt like just a car delivery. It was one of those dad jobs that looks pretty straightforward on the surface. Our daughter needed a car for the summer, so I drove it there. Not complicated. But somewhere along I-10, somewhere between the gas gauge incident and the second or third questionable snack decision, it hit me that this was also one more small handoff in the much bigger work of watching your kids keep moving into their own lives.
You do the thing that is needed. You get the car there. You hand over the keys. You fly home, and then you realize the task was simple but the feeling underneath it was not.
By the time I got to Los Angeles, the car had made it. I had made it too, technically. I started in Central time, slept in El Paso, crossed into Pacific time, and then flew back to Austin the next day. Three time zones in three days if you count the return, and enough miles in between that my body and brain were not exactly on the same page.
What stayed with me was not just the mileage, though there was plenty of that. It was the reminder that we spend a lot of time trying to get there. Get through the meeting. Get through the quarter. Get through the hard conversation. Get through the client issue. Get the kids where they need to be. Get the next thing done so we can move on to the next next thing.
But getting there is not the same as being ready once you arrive.
That is where leaders can fool themselves a bit. You can walk into the next meeting while still carrying the last conversation. You can step into a bigger role and still be operating with habits from a smaller one. You can grow the team, grow the business, add complexity, add people, add pressure, and never stop long enough to ask whether your leadership has actually caught up to the new reality. On paper, everything moved forward, while in real life part of you may still be two exits back.
I see this a lot, and I have lived it plenty too. Capable people are really good at pushing through. They can answer the email, take the call, make the decision, keep the calendar moving, and sound reasonably fine while doing it. That skill can be helpful in a hard stretch. It can also become a trap if it turns into the default operating system.
That is leadership on fumes.
And fumes are tricky because they work just long enough to convince you there is no problem. The cost usually does not show up all at once. It shows up in a tone that is a little sharper than it needed to be. It shows up when you are in the meeting but not really in the conversation. It shows up when your answer comes too fast because slowing down would force you to admit you are tired, distracted, or not actually clear. It shows up when your calendar leaves no room for anything human to happen, which is a bold strategy considering humans are usually involved.
Most of the time, the dashboard tells us before the breakdown does.
My dashboard was kind enough to be literal last week. A 9.5 gallon tank taking 9.25 gallons is not exactly subtle. Most leadership dashboards are quieter. They do not always blink. Sometimes they whisper. Sometimes they show up as irritability, impatience, fog, avoidance, or that slightly hollow feeling of being busy all day without being all that present for any of it.
That is why I keep coming back to attention. Attention is not a soft skill. It is a leadership asset. What has your attention usually has more power than what is written on your priority list. I can say the gas tank matters, but if my attention is on the call, the dashboard is just decoration. Leaders do the same thing with people, culture, risk, trust, and sometimes their own capacity. The signal is there. The question is whether we are available enough to see it.
I am not suggesting every full season requires a dramatic retreat or some perfectly balanced life that nobody I know actually lives. Sometimes the miles are yours. Sometimes the job is the job. Sometimes people are counting on you and the only responsible thing is to keep going. But there is a difference between doing hard miles with your eyes open and pretending the tank is full because stopping would be inconvenient.
That difference matters because movement and capacity are not the same thing. The road to Los Angeles reminded me that the dashboard usually knows before we do, and arriving somewhere does not mean all of you has caught up yet.
The road got there before I did.
The car made it. Thankfully.
And I am grateful for the reminder.
About Brian Vogel
Brian is a leadership coach with more than 25 years of HR executive experience at Indeed, USAA, Verizon, and LogicMonitor. He helps leaders delegate with confidence, build team ownership, and make time for the decisions only they can make.
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