The Rearview Mirror Is Smaller Than the Windshield

There is a reason the rearview mirror is smaller than the windshield. I realize that sounds like something printed on a motivational poster, and maybe it has been, but I have been thinking about it differently lately. A death in our extended family had me spending more time than usual thinking about the past, about the role the people who came before us continue to play in our lives and about the balance between honoring what has been and paying attention to what still is. Death has a way of doing that. It pulls stories forward that have not been told in a while. It sends you back through pictures and memories. It makes moments that seemed ordinary at the time feel more important in retrospect. That is all good and necessary, but somewhere in the middle of it I started wondering how much of our lives we are supposed to spend looking backward.

I think about that differently now than I might have years ago because my own center of gravity has changed. There is the extended family I came from, with all of its history, relationships and memories, and then there is the family Gina and I have built together. My wife and our four kids are not history. They are the life that is happening right now. That does not make what came before less important, but it does make me think about where attention belongs. Someday I will be part of someone else's past too, and when that happens I hope my family remembers me. I hope they tell the stories, keep the pictures and probably make fun of some of the same things they make fun of now. But I would hate the idea of them spending so much energy memorializing me that they failed to fully invest in the lives happening in front of them. If my kids have families of their own someday, I would want those families to become their center. I would want them creating traditions I never saw coming, building things that have nothing to do with me and continuing forward.

That thought eventually became less about death and more about time in general. I am capable of ruminating much more than I would like to admit. I can replay something that happened, reconsider a decision or keep turning over a conversation long after there is anything useful left to learn from it. I can do the same thing in a much more enjoyable way with nostalgia. An old picture comes up on my phone and suddenly I am looking at the kids ten years ago, or Gina and me somewhere I had not thought about in years, and there is a natural pull toward that period of life. It is easy to look at those pictures and think about how great that time was, even if I know intellectually that life was probably no simpler then than it is today.

What has started to amuse me is thinking about the version of me who was actually standing in those old pictures. I doubt he was walking around thinking, "These are the good old days." He was probably worrying about something at work. He was thinking about money, schedules, the kids or whatever problem seemed particularly important that week. He was probably looking at pictures from an even earlier time and feeling nostalgic himself. In other words, I may have spent part of the period I am nostalgic for now being nostalgic for another period that had already passed. Once you see that pattern, it becomes a little harder to ignore what it says about the present.

There is a very good chance that ten or fifteen years from now I will look back at pictures from right now and feel exactly the same thing. I will see the ages of our kids and think about how young they were. I will look at Gina and me and probably think we looked younger than I realized. I may look at the businesses in whatever unfinished form they are in today and remember this period as incredibly exciting. I may miss the chaos, the projects, the constant changing of plans and even some of the problems that feel irritating right now. The strange part is that none of it feels nostalgic while it is happening. It just feels like a Friday.

Maybe that is one of the advantages the past has over the present. The past has already been edited. We know which things mattered because we know what happened next. Some of the stress has faded while the funny parts got better in the retelling. The uncertainty is gone because there is no longer anything uncertain about how the story ended. The present has none of those advantages. It is unfinished and usually inconvenient. The dishwasher breaks during the week you already have too much going on. Somebody needs to be picked up. A project costs more than expected. A business has a problem that has to be dealt with right now. The present arrives without any indication that this particular Tuesday may someday be one of the days you would give anything to experience again.

I think that is partly why I have been drawn to the rearview mirror metaphor. The usual interpretation is that you should stop dwelling on the past and focus on the future, and I agree with that to a point. But I do not think the answer is to eliminate the rearview mirror. It is there because what is behind you matters. You learn from it. You remember where you came from. Sometimes you need to know what is approaching from behind before you decide what to do next. The problem comes when looking backward becomes the primary way you navigate. No one would drive down the highway staring into the mirror, even if the view back there was beautiful.

This shows up in business in ways that are a lot less philosophical. I never set out to create what we have created with The 601 Group. There was not a plan sitting on a desk somewhere years ago that showed this collection of businesses, locations and ideas. There are days when what we have built feels like a wild success, and there are days when I can look at the exact same thing and convince myself it is a massive failure. Usually the truth is somewhere in the middle, but almost all of it exists because we kept going long enough to see what the next step was. One thing led to another. We made a decision, learned something and then made another decision with information we did not have before.

I have become much more comfortable with the idea that a decision can have been right when you made it and still need to change later. I used to think consistency was a much bigger virtue than I do now. There is a natural instinct to defend an old decision because changing it feels like admitting that you were wrong. Sometimes you were wrong. Other times the circumstances changed, you learned something or an opportunity appeared that you could not see before. Either way, there is not much value in protecting the pride of the person who made the decision six months ago. That made sense then. This makes more sense now. Both things can be true without requiring a trial to determine which version of you was correct.

The same thing happens with success, although I think it is easier to miss. Failure can trap you in the past because you keep trying to understand what went wrong. Success can trap you there because it gives you something pleasant to revisit. I have trouble sometimes when someone asks me what accomplishment I am most proud of because things that once would have felt enormous tend to become normal very quickly after they happen. They are already behind me. I do not spend a lot of time thinking about them because whatever is unfinished has a much stronger pull on my attention.

There is probably a flaw in that. I know I could be better about stopping long enough to appreciate things. There are moments worth celebrating, and constantly moving the finish line can become its own kind of stupidity. But there is another side of it that I do like. I have never wanted to build a trophy case and spend the rest of my life walking people past it. Jimmy Iovine has talked about not having a rearview mirror, and that idea has always resonated with me. There is something appealing about being interested in the next thing without needing the last thing to keep proving who you are.

The odd thing is that I can see how distorted my own perspective probably is by imagining a conversation with a younger version of myself. If I could sit down with myself from twenty or twenty-five years ago and describe my life today, I think that guy would be pretty impressed. Not because everything worked out exactly as planned. Almost none of it did. But he would hear about Gina, four kids, a career I could not have fully imagined then, businesses we built from things that did not exist and experiences I never would have known to put on a list. He might look at the whole thing and wonder why the current version of me does not seem more impressed by it.

The answer is probably that I am standing inside it. What would have looked enormous from twenty years away becomes the ordinary texture of a Tuesday once it is your actual life. You do not wake up each morning amazed by the things you once hoped for. You wake up wondering why something has not been done yet. You see the gap between where you are and where you want to go much more clearly than the distance between where you started and where you have already traveled.

That makes me wonder about the other direction. If I could talk to myself twenty years from now, what would that version of me see when he looked at my life today? I suspect he would see some things I am not paying enough attention to. He might think about the ages of the kids and tell me to stop worrying about whatever problem is filling my head tonight. He might want another ordinary dinner with everyone around. He might miss walking into one of our businesses while it was still unfinished and full of possibility. He might even miss the problems, not because the problems themselves were good but because having those particular problems meant those people, businesses and opportunities were still part of his everyday life.

That is where my thinking about this has changed the most. Looking through the windshield is not only about the future. I originally thought of the metaphor that way. The rearview mirror is the past and the windshield is whatever is coming next. Keep your attention forward. Build. Move. Do not waste time trying to recreate something that has already happened. I still believe all of that, but the windshield also contains the road directly in front of you. It contains the present.

That seems obvious, but I am not sure I have always lived as if it were. It is possible to spend too much time in the past, but I think it is also possible to become so focused on the future that you miss the life that will eventually become the past you are nostalgic for. Those are really two versions of the same mistake. In one, you are somewhere old. In the other, you are somewhere that does not exist yet. Either way, you are not entirely where you actually are.

None of this makes me less interested in what is ahead. If anything, I think I am more interested in it than I have ever been. There are businesses I want to build, things I want to learn and places I want this whole strange path to take us. I do not think ambition and presence are opposites. I think the challenge is learning to build toward the next thing without treating the current thing as nothing more than a waiting room.

The past deserves respect, but it cannot be recreated. Even when we return to the same places, gather the same people or repeat the same traditions, we are different people standing in a different moment. Maybe honoring what came before does not mean trying to keep it alive exactly as it was. Maybe it means carrying forward the parts that mattered, letting the rest change and being willing to create something new from what we were given.

I suspect I will always spend some time in the rearview mirror. I will still look at old pictures. I will still replay decisions longer than I should. I will still miss people, places and versions of our family that no longer exist in quite the same way. I am not trying to stop doing any of that. I am just trying to get the proportions right.

The rearview mirror is useful. It is just smaller than the windshield for a reason.