Mindset Shifts: The Real Reason Behind Motorcycle Crashes

In a recent conversation about motorcycle crashes, often referred to as accidents, a competent rider posed an intriguing question: “Kazanın en önemli sebebi aklın doğru konumlanmamasi olabilir mi? – Could the most important reason for the accident be the correct positioning of the mind?” This question struck at the heart of an ongoing debate about the causes of and responses to on-bike-mishaps.

I experience what are commonly called accidents once every 15,000 to 20,000 kilometers on motorcycles. Each time, after physically recovering, I spend considerable time analyzing what happened and learning from it. According to the dictionary, an accident is “an unfortunate incident that happens unexpectedly and unintentionally, typically resulting in damage or injury. An event that happens by chance or that is without apparent or deliberate cause.”

Here, we must make an important correction in our thinking: riders should replace the word “accident” with “incident.” The word accident implies that a crash happened through no one’s fault, while incident indicates that someone caused the wreck or is at fault.

The first step is to recognize that most motorcycle incidents result from mistakes made by the rider. There are also cases where the crash is a genuine accident caused by completely unforeseeable events on the road, with the motorcycle, or with other road users. In such cases, the skill lies in minimizing the impact and consequences as much as possible through gear and armor, physical fitness, alertness and reaction time, and self-protection skills. I have learned to call my accidents mistakes and to analyze the reasons to increase my knowledge.

The process involves paying attention to how we react to our mistakes. In modern thinking, forgetfulness is the rule. After recording a mistake, it is often set aside to self-justify in two ways: 1) “It is not my fault; it was somebody or something else—the tires, the road, the weather, the other vehicle, my vehicle.” 2) “It is not a mistake; everybody does it. It was out of my control, an act of God, bad luck.”

In this way, the knowledge value of the incident is lost, and what happened is stored inefficiently.

In a time of efficiency, when key performance indicators are imposed by a materialistic society from business down to our family life, it is difficult to take failure lightly. We tend to judge others and ourselves based on results—what is measurable and evident by scientific, mathematical, and economic parameters. We are also trained to judge from the results, not the intention. This is both right and wrong. “From their actions, you will recognize them” is undoubtedly a good criterion of evaluation. However, intention (participation) is not irrelevant. Erring knowingly and erring without the intention of doing wrong are substantially different, although the result may be the same.

The result may not change externally and for the people involved, but the whole experience is different for the actor, the one who commits the mistake. Once recognized and accepted as a personal mistake, the incident offers opportunities to learn in riding skills and ethical life. It is sufficient to consider the tools needed for a correct approach to reality: attention, acceptance, and application.

When I look at my motorcycle crashes, I can see that a lack of attention led to distraction and the loss of details that would have solved the situation. I can see a lack of acceptance, being beyond my limits (intellectual, physical, technical) and riding with an image of myself not corresponding to reality. Or I can see a lack of application, the sign of my ignorance in putting into practice what I knew only in theory. Absence of attention, acceptance, or application is always at the source of the mistake, the why of the incidents.

Once I identify the tool that was missing and that was at the origin of the incident, I apply the “why” again, trying to identify why my attention, acceptance, or application was at fault. “I was in a routine mode, thinking I knew the road too well. I was in a speed bubble, relying on skills I do not have. I was thinking about something other than riding. I was distracted by a visual element and fixed my eyes on it. I thought I could handle the situation and did not reduce speed. I imagined the other would do…”

“If you know the why, you can live any how” (Friedrich Nietzsche), and the answer to “why” is what makes the reaction to a mistake different. The “why,” during the action, supports what the rider is doing and their intention to do it right. The rider knows that a small distraction, a reduction of attention, a simple moment of not thinking will initiate a process often ending in a so-called accident.

We riders know internally that we are the source of everything that is going to happen. We accept this law the moment we put the helmet on. When we identify the real “why it happened,” we can then identify the virtue we need to cultivate to avoid repetition: humility, knowledge, patience, discipline, simplicity. In any incident, we can pick up the virtue to practice more and more.

This is the learning process that comes from making mistakes, and what I find interesting is that this process must be replicated in our life off the saddle. Mistakes do not paralyze me or stop me from moving forward. On the contrary, mistakes (in life and on the bike) are moments of learning, stations to stop and think, and spurs to move toward unreachable perfection