Tag: Speed

Speed and Risk Make Things Better: The nightmare of the By-Pass 4 interchanges

There is a silent evil that works in the world that I had to explain to a few smart people this past week, which deserves to be heard by everyone.  One of the great examples of this evil is a road I have driven on for many decades, the By-Pass 4 interchange in Butler County, Ohio, one of the largest arteries for industrial traffic in a very productive county.  It used to be that I could drive 100 mph down that road all the time, and it was never a problem.  But these days, there are too many lights at every intersection to get up any speed before you have to slow down again, which is, of course, by design.  Over the years, to answer all the upset families who lost people to car crashes, not to mention the complaints of the insurance industry who had to make payouts on all the minor fender bender claims, the answer to this overly managed world is to lower the speed limit, put up more stop signs and traffic lights to frustrate high-speed travel in the name of safety.  But safety has a cost all its own, and productivity usually gets sacrificed.  If you can’t drive 100 mph, you will arrive at your destination much later, and among the world’s bureaucrats, there is almost a delightful glee when they tell you that something is going to take time because “it’s better safe than sorry.”  But to my eyes, the question must always be asked, “Is it?”  I would argue, and do all the time, that things were much better when we could drive 100 mph down By-Pass 4.  Sure, there were occasional crashes and deaths as a result.  But drivers were noticeably better; they had to be. Whenever you dumb down a human population with over-processing, you tend to inspire them to think less, and high-speed driving makes people think more, and they are better people as a result.

The solution to the By-Pass 4 complaints by the central planners who tend to get involved in these political problems of traffic management was to slow everyone down to where it’s faster to ride a bicycle and to take as much risk out of the process to make it so that accidents rarely happened.  This might be fine if the goal is to remove automobile accidents in your culture.  But if productivity is the goal, and speed is associated with that objective, then the By-Pass 4 exchanges along its path are devastating, which I point out in my video.  Without question, a World Economic Forum or United Nations statistician could show that such an arrangement will save lives and property value by eliminating crashes, but ultimately, the safest thing anybody could do if they didn’t want to have a collision is never to leave their house, and that looks to be the intention behind the traffic pattern design of Butler County.  Without question, everyone had good intentions, but the result of all this activity has produced slow roads that greatly limit personal freedom and make driving a real pain in the neck.  It takes a long time to get anywhere because political problems have always been solved over time by addressing complaints of every crash with more traffic lights, speed limits, and stop signs.  In the case of By-Pass 4, presenting traffic in such a way that a driver-side door never faces oncoming traffic to eliminate crashes that statistically occurred often when traffic had to engage each other at 90-degree angles and human decisions had to be made for everyone’s preservation.  By taking that decision-making process out of human hands, we must now ask whether we are all better off.  Is a safe society better than a risky society if the result is dumber humans? 

Of course, this is about more than traffic, and you can find this same mentality in almost every industry, particularly manufacturing.  Whenever there is an employee accident or an engineering challenge, the trend of the college-trained European worshipper is to put up the stopsticks and slow down a process to make a safer world.  But is it a better world, and I would argue it’s not?  Safer does not make something better.  That may be one value, but it’s certainly not the entire value.  As I always say from my favorite sport, Fast Draw, you have to manage speed and accuracy with the amount of risk your skill level allows.  If people are forced to improve their skills rather than pandering down to their weaknesses, often the result will be much better because the process of thinking makes it so that you get a better human being in the process, rather than playing to those weaknesses so that anybody can do anything.  That is the trend in our highly regulatory environment filled with government bureaucrats.  Their answer to everything is to slow things down so they can get their slow-minded, feeble minds wrapped around the problem.  Once you accept that strategy, your entire society is filled with timid people who lose the skill to manage risk because their lives depend on it.  Instead, they only need to know how to follow the rules and follow the guy in front of them as designed by some centralized planner. 

The result is that you might have fewer accidents, and you may fix the problem of quality escapes in whatever business you might be operating.  But like the traffic patterns, the safest thing you can do is to do nothing, and all too often, that is what we get out of society.  We get things slow, but at least we live to get them.  But the process of getting it kills us.  Because we may be alive physically, but our minds are dying because we stop challenging ourselves.  Such is the case in Butler County, Ohio; due to hundreds and thousands of traffic accidents and residential complaints, there are now traffic lights at almost every intersection where people travel.  And it’s tough to get from one place to another.  Not because the roads are bad.  They are pretty good.  But because there is too much starting and stopping, you can never get a good flow from your commute.  That is because the political solution to traffic problems was to hire pin-headed European-oriented Marxists to solve a uniquely American problem. You embrace risk and manage it for personal fulfillment, resulting in productive output.  Not that safety isn’t necessary, but it doesn’t take priority over productive enterprise, whether it’s getting to your destination 4-6 minutes faster or achieving a higher sales objective in your company.  Managing risk is the way to improve output.  Slowing everything down only panders to people’s weaknesses and, as a result, makes your society much less dynamic.  Everyone might live in the end, but is that the goal of life?  If everyone is just a brain-dead slug, is that better than a society where you could drive 100 mph to rock and roll music with the window down and vastly enjoy the experience because you don’t have to stop?  I’ve seen it both ways, and I can say from experience that driving 100 mph is far better.  Speed is better most of the time.  Among the skilled, accuracy can also be achieved.  But when you pander to society down to the weaknesses of the participants, then you get a lot more of it, and the satisfaction of an enterprise diminishes incredibly, such as we see every day at the By-Pass 4 interchanges created by monsters of Marxism and their bureaucratic plots of doom.  It’s good to live a little dangerously; it makes you a better and much happier person.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

My Vacation from Slow People: The need for speed is a very real thing, and is uniquely American

For purely selfish reasons, I have spent much more time shooting in Fast Draw competitions during the summer of 2022. I’ve always done competitions like this, but this year I went to all the Ohio Fast Draw events and traveled a lot more than usual to competitive events giving myself a much-needed vacation. The question that has come at me is why I was running myself ragged with all the events. There are a lot of easier things to do in life than competing with guns in stressful and very fast matches where things are measured in such small increments. Shooting and hitting a target in under half a second, or at nearly a quarter of a second as I typically do, isn’t what many people consider relaxing. But believe me, in my life, it is. That kind of speed and free flow of pure energy is a real benefit in ways that are hard to explain, which I’ve tried when people have asked, scratching their heads. But after a weekend shoot over Labor Day where I could shoot competitively with some really great shooters and the event was fast and very competent, I found myself grateful for the experience and the summation of all the other summer shoots. I was taking some of my own advice from my book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, and I’m very glad I did. Fast Draw is the fastest sport in the world, and when you have to deal with many hundreds of people per week, sometimes thousands, the chance to stand in front of a target and just let everything rip forth is wonderful.

The truth is that people are slow; they spend much of their lives looking for reasons not to do things, so when you find yourself dealing with many people, all who are doing their best to do very little, it can be very frustrating. And the world, after Covid, as a result of Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset and the intrusive actions of Bill Gates, making the governments of the world dance by the strings they control like wood-carved marionettes, has only become slower. Bureaucrats have one purpose in life: to make things go slower. Everyone in the world these days seems fully committed to going as slow as they can and to lobby for things to be slower and slower. You can see the difference in a typical drive-thru window; things have slowed down at McDonald’s and Wendy’s fast food restaurants due to a post-Covid world. The government has told employees they can take off all they want and still get paid. Doctors have become everyone’s parents and intercede when those mean old employers expect work performance for the pay they issue. It has become a real mess of incompetence that is the net result of the Biden administration’s attitude toward work, labor, and globalism, which has sucked the air out of the ambition of American effort in truly disgusting ways. And I have been getting angrier and angrier the more I deal with people causing me several times during the year of 2022 to consider just packing everything up, telling everyone to go to hell, and going to a mountaintop with all my books and saying, “peace out.” 

I live a very fast life; I always have. I love speed because the quicker you can do things, the more you get to do in life. So it is hard for me to slow down long enough to go to see medical people because time is always scheduled to their convenience, not yours. I hate going to the BMV for that very reason. It’s such a slow process. I have even been very frustrated with one of my favorite things, going to Kings Island on Friday nights after a busy professional week, because things have really slowed down there as well. My wife and I like to ride roller coasters to blow off steam. I get time to think about things while we wait in line, and of course, roller coasters are nice and fast. But the employees have been horrible this year, worse than at any other time in my life; they are slow, dim-witted, almost representatives of a zombie apocalypse. I don’t think that the people changed, but we lost IQ points during Covid, and the government has crippled young people into thinking in a lazy fashion that makes them barely functional. So even going to Kings Island to relax on roller coasters has not been as fulfilling as it normally is. I’ve never liked the European attitude toward work, which you can clearly see anytime you go to London, Paris, or the Netherlands; they don’t like the American expectation to have everything fast; they like to take their time and smell the roses as they say. But I find all that slowness disgusting. And with Covid and the Biden administration, those types of slow people have been empowered, and the more you deal with people, the more of that attitude you tend to interact with. And for me, it has been real torture. 

So that brings us back to Cowboy Fast Draw and competitive events. All the people in that sport get it. They understand the need for speed and the beauty of unleashing energy and flowing toward an objective as quickly as possible. And spending more time with those kinds of people has been truly wonderful. I can’t say that I will always be able to shoot in those competitive events as much as I did this year. What I did was probably excessive, but it benefited me wonderfully. But, I have been gone a lot. I am one who does not do well in traffic jams. I don’t like to get stuck under any conditions waiting for much of anything. When I get out of a traffic jam and back into the country where roads are wide open, I like to drive as fast as I can without people in my way to slow me down. And that’s how I am with most people. I like to pack a lifetime into a typical day, so when you end up dealing with people who would rather be asleep and multiply that by 100 or 200 people, it can be very frustrating. But I healed much of that this summer and accomplished many of my personal goals for shooting. I won a lot of events which made me happy. It was consistent even under great duress at times, so I learned a lot of good things in doing these events. But the ability to remove all the noise from my life and just let loose all the speed I can muster on something with intense focus has been wonderful. It has restored me some patience in dealing with a much slower world that needs motivation to go faster and be more competent. That is, after all, one of my core values to others, and when I get to the point where I don’t want to do it anymore, a lot of people end up suffering. So the Fast Draw events have been significant; I have been doing them almost every weekend and traveled to many places to participate in them with many like-minded people. And I can’t recommend Fast Draw as a sport enough, for all the reasons stated and more. Speed is great. Slowness is for the lazy. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

I Hate Slow People: Speed is the key to a good American life

One of the most painful things in the world for me to deal with is slow people. I’ve always been attracted to fast draw with guns, and I have spent a lot of time practicing Cowboy Fast Draw over the years, working out the details of my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. But before any of that, I have always driven fast, very fast. I do everything fast because speed is how I have been able to do so many things in my life in such a short period. My attitude certainly clashes with people when I go to Europe. They can be friendly people, but they are sloooooooowwwww at everything. If a psychologist were to peel back my hatred of progressives and Democrats in general, they would discover that my reasoning is that they think too much like slow-minded people worldwide, especially in Europe. In Europe, they will often indicate that there is no reason to be in a hurry to get anywhere, just to relax. Well, that’s not acceptable to me, so when I talk about fast draw with guns, that is a place where I am in my happiest place, in working with time in fractions of a second rather than minutes and hours or even days. I talk about often in my book of the benefit of thinking fast, professionally because it allows you to do many things in a business day that might take others weeks to do, even on the executive side of a business.

I find that in my life, I often do in a day what many who are in leadership might consider reasonable in a week. And when I say all that, I don’t mean it as a reckless endeavor.   Accuracy, to me, is just as important. The lazy people of the world have created a falsehood: speed happens as a compromise to accuracy, and that just isn’t the case. Instead, it displays good people against bad people, and speed has a value that brings to light a person’s quality. It is most often the case that lazy, stupid people are also deliberately slow, and they are the first to say that if they go too fast, they will make a mistake. All that says to me is that the person using speed as an excuse is simply trying to use the fear of a low-quality experience to cover for their lack of skill.

For whatever reason, over these last several months, I have dealt with more government pinheads than usual. Maybe with Covid gone and just realizing it, they have finally come out of their homes and back into the workplace. But they are back, and when you deal with them, they are talking the same nonsense as before, only now it is worse. Covid protocols by the slow-minded CDC losers have given the lazy of the world an excuse now. It’s acceptable more than ever to these government types to take the European mindset of slower is better, and we’ll get there eventually. Just this last week, I had to sit through a meeting with one of these guys, who I’m sure is a nice fellow. He probably has kids that love him. Maybe even a wife. But, wow, was he a slow-minded fool. He kept repeatedly saying, “we have to slow down so as not to make a mistake.” I tried to be as polite as I could, but the guy was taking a 15-minute conversation and turning it into 50, and asking for more time, which I never have to give to anybody. At least not some government bureaucrat. I hate government as much as I do because government is slow. The people in it are slow. And I just don’t like slow people. I understand our constitution is meant to slow down the speed of government. I certainly would never stand for the kind of authoritarian government that China has. They argue that they can move fast because they don’t have to get votes. It’s just one person who decides then everyone else follows. They made it look like it works in China by killing off all the types of people who might stand in their way, so in that way, they have made a very compliant society. But, they are still slow; they just don’t transfer that slowness through a bureaucracy. What they do is considerably worse, but it’s all bad in my mind. They measure actions in minutes, which I do in fractions of a second. 

Learning to think as fast as you must in Cowboy Fast Draw is unique to American culture, and it’s something we should be proud of. Thinking fast is hard-working and innovative. Thinking slow is lazy and accepting of the conditions of the world. By practicing a sport that requires a shooter to think in fractions of a second, it also impacts everything else in your life. It won’t take long to become frustrated with the slowness of everyone, the mask-wearing liberal who pulls out in traffic and is too slow to get up to speed, or the slow person fumbling with their groceries at the self-checkout. It takes them too long to bag their food and fumble with the payment display. Or, god forbid, going to the license bureau, participating in the medical industry, or visiting the post office—slow, slow, mind-numbing slow. It is my point of view, based on experience, that the key to American life is speed, not relaxing and waiting for things to happen. Americans make things happen, and they don’t take all day to do them. Part of Making America Great Again is in the speed in doing it. In not hiding laziness behind an illusion of quality. If a person doesn’t slow down, that bad quality will follow. Americans understand that bad quality happens when speed is pressing because the person doing the task is unskilled, and they haven’t spent their lives making themselves faster with practice. They have accepted the low expectations of government and slow-minded cultures as a way to disguise their own mundane outlook on the world. 

I’ve heard the excuse, especially from machining where tolerances are stoned into thousands of inches over a 10′ span, that they could screw up the whole project if they go fast. I say to those people, not if you are good at what you are doing. If you are good, you will be as fast as you can possibly be, even on delicate jobs. Learning to think fast helps a mind process more information, which makes for a better life lived. If speed causes stress, well, it’s because the mind isn’t equipped for it, and it should be. Americans should never accept slowness on anything. Yet that is the new expectation coming out of Covid: we should all slow down, like the Europeans, take our time. Maybe sit back and have some tea and crackers if we get too stressed out. That government pinhead I am referring to is the worst kind of human being, a lazy person who uses slowness as a moral assumption, then projects it to others to explain the lack of effort. And when dealing with such slow people, it is infuriating! 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Shooting From the Hip: The cost of socialism in any society

Don’t Learn to Stay in Your Lane

While I was working on the themes for my book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, one of my most important stops was the British Museum and sitting in the places where Karl Marx had written his books that literally changed the world.  While in London for this investigation, I took my family to the best restaurants and spent some time investigating the areas around parliament to understand the radical swings of their class structure and how anybody could even think that what Marx put down in his books was good.  After sitting in Marx’s same seats in the museum, I confirmed what I already knew; Marx was lazy and worked his ass off to prove it.  Yes, that is a paradox of terms, but that was what the guy was suffering from.  While his family sat at home, broke and hungry, Marx and Engles at the British museum tried to show the world why the capitalists were evil.  And many in British society who enjoyed the nice things in life felt guilty because they either acquired a lot of power from socializing or other methods, and it rotted their minds with unearned doubt.  So they formed political parties like the Labor Party in England and the Democrat Party in America.  Other places around the world, too, adopted Marx not because they thought it would make a better world but because it gave more centralized power to governments. Hence, the idiocy of Karl Marx spread like wildfire in a dry forest, and rage of destruction swept over the world.  But to my thinking, fires are good, and it benefits people to see things for themselves. That’s why what I wrote in my book was necessary.  Without the stupidity of Karl Marx to highlight the benefits of capitalism with a defense of it in my Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, people may never have seen the differences between the two. 

Learning to Get Better

That’s what has happened with Marxism mixed in with capitalism; people didn’t notice the little things slowing us all down and constraining productivity.  Marxism has embedded itself in almost everything we do, but people did not see it as it was happening because as long as they could buy their cars, get milk at the grocery, and send their kids to school, they didn’t pay much attention.  But I did notice that it has been a source of constant frustration for me during my entire professional life, which started when I was still a teenager.  One thing about me that has always been criticized was that I “shot from the hip” too much.  People would say that I didn’t take careful aim in my life and take my time when shooting at targets.  That, of course, was a metaphor for my thought processes in how I manage things.  To others, I have always been the reckless cowboy who was too impulsive to be trusted.  Yet mysteriously, everything I have always touched succeeded.  I understood it on a conceptual level, but years later, when I would finally write a book about it, I had to understand it.  Like Marx, many people in the world are too lazy to become truly good at anything.  They grow up, they grow lazy, and they are content to be average.  So they bring this attitude to their businesses, and for their lazy minds, Marx was a kindred spirit.  While they wanted to make money in life, they didn’t want to work too hard to get it, so they adopted little bits of socialism along the way to make it so that they wouldn’t have to work too hard.  This point became very obvious to me once I started the sport of professional gunfighting for competitions.  I watched for years how real gunfighters could draw and shoot a gun by drawing from the hip in under a second.  It seemed impossible to me, but I wanted to learn to do it, so I began the learning process, and once I figured it out, all these other elements became very obvious.  Obvious enough to write a book about what I learned.

Shooting from the Hip is Good

One of the premises of communism is equality, which we hear about all the time now that Biden has been inserted in the White House to preserve these gains Marxists have made around the world.  But for equality to indeed happen, we must cripple those who are the best and fastest in life at certain things.  I often compare this metaphor to a hay bail truck full of farm animals traveling down the road at 45 miles per hour.  Up behind them, storming down the highway at 120 miles per hour, is a fancy sports car that can take curves on a dime and run all day long at 200 mph.  Socialist society says that the fancy car has to stay behind the truck because that is the constraint, that is the average, and to be fair, everyone needs to build their life off the average.  The speedy car is supposed to slow down to 45 mph and not pass.  Socialist society creates rules like double yellow lines to keep everyone staying in their lane so that socialism and communism can occur.  However, in America, the rules have always been in reverse.  The fast car was encouraged to pass or have a speed lane to travel in to go as fast as possible.  Speed limits aren’t made for the best and most competent; they are made for the average, the slow, and the lazy-minded.  Those who can’t or won’t think too fast to avoid an accident.  Therefore, the speedy car is penalized and encouraged to be less than it is in a democracy where the majority of the people decide what the average behavior should be.  This is how our businesses have been crippled and how the government has enforced converting America from capitalism to socialism over time.  Through rules and regulations intended to force people to stay in their lanes, not shoot from the hip, and ignite Karl Marx while suppressing Adam Smith.

I’ve always been that guy who shot from the hip, and I’m very proud of it.  Even now that I’m later in my life than when many of these things have been said about me, learning to shoot in Cowboy Fast Draw activities has shown me the essence of becoming better each day.  What seems impossible today may be quite possible tomorrow if only you put a little work into it.  That is what America did best in the past and still is better than anyplace else in the world mired in socialism and communism.  This is also how many of our corporations had become so woke, just as the politicians of England did when scrappy old Karl Marx worked himself to death trying to create a philosophy of government that justified his laziness.  I didn’t feel I could say that based on just my opinions of reading his books.  But I could say it after I sat in his seats and saw the world from all of their perspectives.  Marxism and its birthplace there in London intended to be in the world that hey bail truck going 45 miles per hour.  They created rules in life to protect the feelings of the slow and lazy from the speedy and competent.  And when they called me names like “cowboy” and a person who “shoots from the hip” too much, they might as well have been calling me the most derogatory names humans could call each other, hoping to peer pressure me into accepting average behavior.  But I never will.  Instead, I’ll explain the differences to people with a mind to hear it, and I’m not about to ever accept getting stuck behind slow traffic on the highway.  The goal of all of us should always be to get faster, wiser, and better.  Not to accept the lazy and dim-witted who want to rule the world but are too lazy to do it. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business