Where To Start?

When I turned 28, I bought my first motorcycle. Still naive to the motorcycle world, I bought a classic 1978 Honda CB400T. My romanticized vision of myself was to ride from coffee shop to come shop without a care in the world. The bike didn’t look like what I envisioned, but it had the bones of what look I wanted.

Notching an early win in any project that is big, challenging and seemingly impossible to conquer is super important. Choose an area that is interesting to you and somewhat challenging. An area that you know you can easily do. Preferably a not so terribly complicated area.

Little by little, I started removing parts. At first it was easy, illiminating simple cosmetic pieces here and there. From the outside, I thought it would be an easy project bike, but it quickly grew complicated as one issues unraveled into another. I uncovered one mistake after another all hidden from my original inspection until it became more than I could handle with the time and money I had available to me.

Getting an early victory puts some wind in your sails and it makes the upcoming challenges seem less formidable. Before you know it, you’ve already achieved some success early on. If you maintain that focus and that attention to detail and replicate your working process, the victories will come in the small parts.

I quickly discovered it would cost more to fix than the bike was worth. It was a tragic pill to swallow knowing it wouldn’t be as simple as I had envisioned, nor would it happen anytime soon. Despite it not being able to run, it was a symbol of my freedom, so I figured it was worth not giving up on.

Starting off somewhere that you know you’re going to do a good job, it’ll make you feel more confident. While you complete those parts, you have time to familiarize yourself with the surrounding areas that you can address next. You can see how what you’ve done relates to the more complicated parts with greater clarity and understanding and therefore less challenging.

-Busy Brain