They've actually made the decision to go SuperBike racing. If you check his
blog, they just completed testing at Las Vegas where they are lapping at the record pace.
I wrote a long piece about him at
midliferider. I've also been corresponding with Michael himself. Great guy. For what it's worth, he loved what I wrote. Here's a snip . . .
For reasons most people can’t and won’t fathom, what he’s doing matters. Why? Because he’s following his dream. He’s taking the journey. He’s plumbing the depths. And when that happens, when a soul stirs, the universe responds.
Good Grief Man, It’s Just a Bike!
True. It’s just a bike. Even sillier, it’s a racing bike. It has no purpose other than to go round a circuit as fast as possible for less than an hour. Still, even if the whole notion of men and their toys baffles you, you have to admire the sheer grittiness of the entire enterprise.
The best part of the story is the guy leading the parade. I’ve yet to meet the man, but the book on Michael is that he was born in 1964 with motorcycles already in his blood. If you have a look at the Motoczysz web site, you’ll see what I mean. His dad, grandfather, and great grandfather were all smitten with bikes so it seems natural that Michael would be too. The part about taking on the industry giants seems less obvious at this point.
Michael studied at Parson’s in New York and Portland State, got married, and had two sons with seriously excellent names: Max and Enzo. The baton will pass.
In 1990 he started an architectural firm called Architropolis. That would make him, what, 26 at the time? The firm thrived and thrives and has done award-winning work for famous people and famous companies. It’s okay to feel jealous and the story is barely underway.
Note two things at this point:
1. Most people would be thrilled to be doodling houses for the likes of Cindy Crawford and could easily be excused for settling in for a rewarding career with lots of time and money left over for mad hobbies and great vacations.
2. There isn’t even a whiff of a credential at this point to suggest that starting a company to build a world-class racing motorcycle based on revolutionary new technology would be a good idea. Naysayers, and we’ll get to them in a minute, are still looking for that heavenly sign.
Apropos of point 2, “But that’s what happened.” A muse visited, strange notions about the proper way to configure an engine, gearbox, and suspension sprang forth, and the boy-architect genius decided that the logical next step was to not only tilt with giants, but do it on an impossibly compressed time frame, displaying levels of under-funded bravado that cause most people, including and especially captains of industry, to roll eyes. Those of us who have started businesses (and I’m one of those people) smile and applaud wildly, even if just to ourselves. Either you get it or your don’t.
It’s the hard that makes it great
There is a wonderful interchange between character’s played by Tom Hanks and Geena Davis in a movie called “League of Their Own.” The Davis character, Dottie Hinson, has decided to quit and go home with her newly returned and wounded war-hero husband. It goes like this . . .
Jimmy Dugan: ****, Dottie, if you want to go back to Oregon and make a hundred babies, great, I’m in no position to tell anyone how to live. But sneaking out like this, quitting, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life. Baseball is what gets inside you. It’s what lights you up, you can’t deny that.
Dottie Hinson: It just got too hard.
Jimmy Dugan: It’s supposed to be hard! If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great.
I can’t remember exactly when it is that I first heard about what Michael was up to, probably it was in a motorcycle magazine, but I do remember two things: 1) How cool it all sounded. How utterly, heroically, magically cool. 2) How pissed off I felt reading the nay saying from this expert and that poobah. I shouldn’t have been, but I was. Nay saying goes with the territory. It’s how you know you’re on to something big.
Just so I can get this out of the way, the naysayers were and are wrong. Not just about what Motoczysz is doing. About everything.
First and foremost, they’re wrong at a metaphysical level. The only people who say no to someone else at the beginning of a great journey are people who are too timid to leave on their own . . . people who have already said no once too often to their own journey, to their own dreams, and now they’re bent on passing their lack of courage to someone else.
“I was and am too frightened to leave the village, so you can’t possibly be justified in doing it either.”
And if that accusation by way of observation causes you to bridle, take your anger out on someone else. You either get it or you don’t.
Which brings me to the second fault with nay saying and naysayers. Let’s ignore the obvious, that every invention, every discovery, every great adventure has always been sent off and beset by the worries and nays of others. What’s less obvious is that the naysayers and doubters lack vision. They see what they see in a single slice of time. They miss the whole concept of the journey: That by virtue of setting out, you open yourself to both the likelihood of failure and the opportunity to learn from it and go beyond.
“It won’t work, so why do it?”
“Of course it won’t work, but something else will. That’s why.” Or in the words of Jimmy Dugan, “It’s the hard that makes it great.”
To Journey is to Seek Your Own Soul
This is the part where those hoping to read about counter-rotating engines, interchangeable gearboxes, single-shock front suspensions, or any of the other 20+ patents Motoczysz has amassed may want to check out. It’s all shockingly cool. If the company never fields a competitive bike it has assured some kind of future for itself just on the strength of its inventions. But if you focus on the gear, and maybe for the second to last time I’ll go on record as saying it’s great gear, you’re missing the bigger picture. You’re missing the importance of what’s going on here.
Even given the little I’ve related about what Michael and team have been through, to go from table-napkin dream to a bike that is currently lapping at test tracks at a class-leading pace, you have to know that it’s been a tough road.
Besides the naysayers, there have been bad castings (both the people and the metal kind), flakey vendors, broken bits galore, blown engines, crashes, team members quitting, money problems . . . the list just goes on and on. Plenty of opportunities to give up. But the true believers have not. They are now officially beyond themselves. They are now Jason and the Argonauts. Without knowing it, Michael and crew are now following a script written in the very soul of mankind. It’s now no longer about a motorcycle. It’s about the “big why?”
What Michael and crew are onto now is nothing less than what Joseph Campbell describes as the “heroic journey.” Every culture down through history treasures at least one of these stories. Although there is a wonderful richness and variety to the various myths and legends, heroic tales all ultimately adhere to the designs of what Campbell calls the “monomyth.” Here it is in a sentence.
“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”
It goes on from there . . . [
read]
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