I have a confession: I actively seek out broken cars.

Not because I'm a masochist (though Cam might disagree), but because there's something deeply satisfying about taking something that doesn't work and making it work just a little bit better.

I spend more time than I would like to admit scrolling through Craigslist and eBay car listings. I find myself skipping over all the "runs great, no issues, maintenance up to date" cars and clicking on the ones that start with "needs work" or "project car" or "ran when parked." The latter of which is by far my favorite title or subtitle, and is as close to I get to instantaneous clicking.

After a recent scrolling session, I realized I might have a problem. Or maybe I realized I don't want things without problems.

Perfect cars are boring. They're automotive elevator music. They start when you turn the key, they go where you point them, and they never surprise you with mysterious noises or dashboard light shows.

Perfect cars don't need you. They don't challenge you to understand them. They don't force you to learn about fuel systems or ignition timing or why that noise only happens when it's cold outside.

Perfect cars are like perfect people: intimidating and unrelateable (and probably hiding something if we’re being brutally honest).

Working on a broken car is like meditation, if meditation involved a lot more cursing and countless trips to the parts store.

There's something about having a specific, solvable problem that clarifies everything else. When your car won't start, you're not worried about your career or your social media presence or whether you're living your best life. You're focused on one thing: making this machine run.

It's honest work. The car doesn't care about your résumé or your networking skills. It only cares whether you can figure out why it's not getting spark or fuel or compression.

Success is binary. It either runs or it doesn't. There's no performance review, no quarterly assessment, no stakeholder feedback, and no input from someone without the necessary experience. Just you, the problem, and the immense satisfaction that comes from hearing an engine turn over after hours of troubleshooting.

Here's what I've learned…people who drive perfect cars talk about horsepower, zero-to-sixty times, and a bunch of stats from a brochure that real folks don’t care about. People who drive broken cars talk about the time they fixed their alternator in a parking lot with a paperclip and electrical tape on some real MacGyver shit.

The broken car community is more interesting. They have better stories. They know more about how things actually work because they've had to figure it out themselves.

They're more generous, too. Show up at a Cars and Coffee event with a pristine show car, and people will admire it from a distance. Show up with something that obviously needs work, and people will offer tools, advice, and stories about similar cars they've fought with.

Broken cars create community.

My garage has become my therapist's office. Instead of talking about my feelings, I work through them with wrenches and YouTube tutorials.

Car problems are manageable problems. They have causes and effects. They respond to logical troubleshooting. They can be diagnosed, understood, and (theoretically) fixed.

Life problems are messier. Career anxiety doesn't respond to a torque wrench. Relationship issues can't be solved with a new timing belt. Yet, for me, something about working on mechanical problems makes the non-mechanical problems feel more manageable too.

Problematic cars keep me engaged. They force me to learn things, to develop skills, to become the kind of person who can solve problems instead of avoiding them. Or at least those are the things I tell myself.

Perfect cars turn you into a passenger in your own transportation. Broken cars turn you into a partner in the journey.

I'd rather have a car that needs me than a car that doesn't notice I exist.

Most of my automotive projects fail. Not catastrophically, but incompletely. I fix one thing and discover two more things that need attention. Or more commonly, I solve the original problem but create new ones in the process.

This should be frustrating, but it's actually liberating. It's permission to be imperfect, to learn by doing, to accept that progress doesn't always look like completion.

In a world that expects everything to work perfectly all the time, there's something beautiful about embracing things that work imperfectly most of the time.

My cars teach me patience, plenty of humility, and the value of small victories. They remind me that good enough really can be good enough, and that the journey is often more interesting than the destination.

Perfect cars might get you there faster, but broken cars teach you things about yourself you never knew you needed to learn.

Perfect cars only have one way to go.

Imperfect cars are pure potential.

Not to mention, the incredible amount of optimism we must have in order to look at a complete POS and see the possibilities…but that’s a deep dive for another day.

-Nick
Founder, PURSUIT OF SOMETHING