All of us, all of us naturally minimize or explain away our own faults through the normal, psychological mechanism of rationalization.  We dismiss or forget about our mistakes but remember vividly those of others.  Thinking this way about driving, we readily conclude that, while most other people perform rather poorly behind the wheel, we do quite well.  By this process we make ourselves vulnerable to the deficient concept of defensive driving, which reinforces and justifies our complacency by telling us that to avoid accidents we must be constantly on guard  (a wearing and negative state of mind) and ready to react to others’ dangerous blunders.  By focusing our thoughts on the mistakes of others, this concept diverts our attention from our own flaws.  Though it is true that a driver must always look for trouble in order to avoid it, it is also true that his highest priority must be to try to drive so nicely that he himself never causes any problems.  But the doctrine of defensive driving, by taking poor driving for granted, condones it, and the defensive driver, by accounting all errors unavoidable and assigning them the rank of consecrated rights, merely preserves the status quo. He makes no progress toward improving the average level of competence in driving.

The complete driver, however, pursuing his ideal of error free driving, makes ever fewer mistakes.  Therefore, by both his performance and his example, he actually does raise the overall quality of driving.  He does a great deal more than observe traffic carefully, analyze situations, predict movements and their consequences, and try to avert the resultant dangers.  Knowing that all the things a defensive driver must defend against would be better prevented, he works toward that end.  He endeavors always to make his driving easily and accurately predictable.  He avoids getting in the way, virtually never inconveniencing or jeopardizing anyone. He takes responsibility for his actions and believes others should do likewise.  He is convinced that eliminating the primary cause of a potentially accident producing situation is a safety tactic far superior to leaving the avoidance of disaster to the unknown skills of someone else.  He drives smoothly and steadily without drama but will not hesitate to assume command of a situation when appropriate action by him can relieve or prevent congestion or preclude another’s dangerous mistake.  He enjoys driving and earnestly wants to do it as well as he possibly can.  Thus he constantly tries to learn not only from his own mistakes and those of others, but from the good examples he encounters.  Witnessing a bad driving practice, he reviews his own performance to check whether he is guilty of a similar abuse.  Conversely, noticing a particularly good bit of driving, he makes certain it is in his repertoire.

He finds the positive self image of a good driver infinitely more sustaining and sustainable than the negative one of a beleaguered defender. He will not, despite the intransigent insistence of the defensive driving establishment, consider his fellow drivers his mortal enemies, because he is aware that he must cooperate with them, and one cannot cooperate with an enemy.  Furthermore, holding such a conviction would ultimately drain the joy from his driving and replace it with debilitating fear.

He derives great satisfaction from and takes rationally justifiable pride in performing all phases of man’s most demanding psycho-motor activity, driving , at a very high level of competence.