Hammer and tongs, I think

This is a post about hitting a nail on the head. Almost literally. I was mulling over something yesterday – something that completely escapes me at the present time – but somewhere in one of the tangents lay this thought.

You need to use the right size hammer with the right amount of force for great results. The hammer, come to think of it, may have originally entered this lumbering train of thought via the famous Osho sermon on the F word, where innovation was defined as 'Get a bigger effing hammer.'

Consider this. The task is to take one nail of a given size and make it sit flush in a piece of wood. But here's the thing, there's a whole bunch of people out there and a whole selection of hammers to do this with. As you can guess, everyone uses a different size of hammer, uses a different swing (equals force, roughly) to get the job done.

What I'm hammering on about is that small hammers require larger swings. And big hammers require smaller swings to get the same job done. So when you upgrade to a larger motorcycle, think about this. Tomorrow, some of you will be riding an R1. That's like going from a plastic mallet to a nail gun. With no transition phase. What takes twenty full arm-behind-it swings on your Splendor will take a mere caress on the hair trigger. Swinging heavily with a nail gun will only cause collateral damage, and you could, literally shoot yourself in the foot with it. Be gentle. Respect the machine. The other thing is when you're out on the road, remember that other people aren't lucky enough to have a hammer as large as yours. So give them time to get what you would be able to do in flash.

Further, two people with same hammer will still approach the problem differently, and one approach will always be better. Learn from that approach if you can. Some extremely skilled people out there will get the job done with the oddest of hammers, respect them. Others will keep bashing their thumbs and miss the nail entirely. Give them encouragement, and lots of space.

That's the thought. What's it about? I haven't figured it out, yet. But it seemed to make sense at the time...