Wait, am I like Don Quixote?

Don Quixote was always on my mind, but I never read the book. Based on what I’ve heard over the years, I assumed he was some kind of great Spanish Robinhood, highly revered as he took on great adventures and helped the poor.

I finally read the book, and now I realize Don Quixote was more of a village idiot accompanied by his loyal dolt, Sancho Panza than a hero.

His conquests were inflated by his imagination and the many fiction books he read on knight-errantry and chivalry.

The knight tales were already a thing of the past when Don Quixote was alive in the early seventeenth century.

You might have heard of his most famous battle, when he charged a windmill while Sancho watched with amazement at his master’s foolery.

Quixote didn’t see a windmill but instead a giant with flailing arms.

It didn’t stop Don, though. He never succumbed to the fallacies of his fictitious fights.

Instead, he blamed “enchanters” for changing his villains into ordinary objects and all his stories grew from hapless misunderstandings to epic adventures.

To him, roadside Inns were castles and prostitutes were princesses, all because it fit his narrative.

But something funny happens along the way. His lunacy proceeds him as he adventures across the countryside in search of new heroic deeds, and his receivers start to entertain his “knight-errantry” ways.

In one example, a Duke and Duchess knew he was coming and received him as a great knight. They welcomed him with huge celebrations and treated him like a king.

They also designed lots of little tricks to mess with him and entertain themselves, but as far as Quixote was concerned, he was living the life he wanted.

He was as a knight-errant and was jokingly treated that way, but to him it was real enough.

Is it bad if Don Quixote somewhat reminds me of myself?

Maybe I shouldn’t admit it, but considering my consulting mindset was “fake it until you make it”, it doesn’t seem that far off!

I’d wager that most of us don’t feel like we belong when we start something new.

Trust me, when I joined the volunteer fire department in my small town, I sure as hell didn’t feel like I belonged.

That point was accentuated on one of my early fire department calls when I was the first on the scene of a grass fire approaching a house. You must hear the full story.

As Don (I mean Dan) pulled up to the scene, the panicked family told him to pull around to the other side to fight the fire. Dan saw the flames approaching the house, and when he put the manual truck in gear, he popped the clutch too fast and killed it.

With the family staring, he managed to get it going and drove around the back of the house, and pulled off the dirt road when the truck was suddenly halted with a loud “clunk”.

It was only after he realized he ran over a spare tire hiding in the tall weeds that “chocked” the wheels and meant the truck would stay right there.

That didn’t stop him though as saw the fire spreading across the field and burning a pile of trash where it originated.

He ran out of the truck with his firefighting gear and pulled the hose close to the fire which at this point had angrily ignited a stack of tires only a few feet from the house.

They burned like a torch with the black smoke billowing into the air. It was only seconds away from igniting the house.

As his heart raced, he realized he was the last line of defense.

Any firefighter knows you should start the water before pulling out the house, but Dan defaulted to action over thinking clearly.

Precious seconds ticked away as the hungry fire grew. Dan ran back to the firetruck and started pulling levers to try and get the water flowing.

Even though he had been trained on how to use the truck, the intensity of the moment scrambled his thoughts and all of the words on the gauges turned into a language he couldn’t read.

The puzzled family watched him running back and forth and yelled at him to just spray it with water!

In a moment of clarity, he grabbed the fire extinguisher, ran over, and extinguished the flames that were engulfing the tires.

It saved the house, but the family wondered why he wasn’t using the hose laying next to him.

Shortly after, another firefighter showed up and turned the water on, allowing them to put out the remaining flames.

You better believe I’ve practiced turning on the water a thousand times since and will never make that mistake again.

While it was embarrassing for me, the family was still happy I was there to save the house. I never would’ve suffered that embarrassment if I never joined the fire department.

If we don’t fake it until we make it, a lot of times we don’t even start. I felt like Don Quixote when I started my consulting career and walked into a Vice President’s office at age 22 to tell him “how to improve his business”.

There are many Don Quixote style stories from those days as well, like the time when I thought I was on mute… but I’ll save that story for another day.

We also felt like Don when we became “world travelers” and visited 25 countries back in 2013.

Our friends and family saw us as world travelers, even though we felt clueless as we hopped on a one-way flight to New Zealand. We figured it out along the way, and our story was told.

There were numerous misadventures along the way like fighting the taxi mafia in Jordan and suffering from intense food poisoning in Thailand.

However, we felt like world travelers by the time we finished.

Sometimes we become so afraid of looking like a novice or making mistakes, that we never start.

Maybe you don’t need the over-confidence of Don Quixote as you seek out knight-errantry, but we can also learn from him.