Pit stops

I was stuck on a very long flight recently without any reading material, so I ended up reading the inflight magazine cover to cover. One of the articles was about Danica Patrick, former Formula One racer, current NASCAR driver. In an interview she was talking about how the racing styles are very different because stock cars are not race cars:

A NASCAR RACE CAR IS NOT really a race car at all, which is what makes the sport so tough. It has almost no downforce to keep it on the pavement; with 850 horses under the hood, it’s way overpowered; and the rest of the 43-car field is always bearing down on you.

I thought -- this is like me. Over the years, I have fine tuned my brain to be super efficient and as powerful as it can be. But the rest of me still has the same limitations -- fancy race car engine under the hood of a normal stock car. I have been thinking recently that for the first time I have more time than I have mental energy. Little errands that used to bother me like shopping are now welcome mindless tasks (as long as I can keep them mindless). This realization might even induce me to have a committed relationship and family?

Another analogy to NASCAR -- pit stops. I will just do nothing for weeks at a time. I used to think this indicated that I was a lazy person, to just take off to some exotic location every six months or so. Now with this NASCAR analogy, I realize that these might be necessary pit stops. It seems odd that it is actually faster to race like mad, then come to a complete stop for several minutes, then repeat. Wouldn't it be faster to just go slower and be easier on tires? Conserve gasoline? I guess not, not at least for NASCAR and it seems plausible that not for me either.

I think my NASCAR life has less to do with me being a sociopath and more to do with me doing high level brain tasks all of the time for my profession. But maybe the sociopath plays into fact that I have never felt guilty shirking work in some tropical location, which has actually been a boon to my productivity over the years -- a personality quirk that has actually given me a competitive advantage amongst my colleagues who are also regularly running their brains at over-capacity to the point of exhaustion. (Or maybe they're not also running their minds to exhaustion but are just smarter than me. If true, maybe my laziness has allowed me to be one of the stupidest people in my career field while still remaining competitive).