A few months ago, my endurance racing team was eight hours into the 24 Hours of Lemons in Thompson, CT when the engine let go. We were running under a parody theme that race, a Martin Shkreli tribute, which in hindsight felt fitting for the amount of pain that followed. We sourced a replacement engine overnight, got it installed before sunrise, and it failed at startup too.

Nobody on that crew was a professional mechanic. Nobody had a manual for "what to do when your backup engine also dies at 4 a.m. in a paddock." But because the culture on that team allowed for trial and error, lots of it, people started working the problem immediately. Form a hypothesis. Observe the result. Adjust. Form the next hypothesis.

I've come to think of that instinct as the figure-it-out muscle. It's not an innate trait some people are born with and others aren't. It's a habit, built through practice, trust, and a bit of psychological safety. And it's the single most reliable predictor I've found of whether someone will actually be good at their job, whether that job is digital marketing, racing, or anything else where reality refuses to follow the tutorial.

It's Not About Knowledge

The muscle has nothing to do with how much someone already knows. Some of the most capable people I've worked with, in racing and in consulting, didn't have deep expertise walking in. What they had was a refusal to stay stuck, and enough reps to trust the process of testing their way out.

Contrast that with people who are extremely credentialed but freeze the moment the dashboard, the engine, or the client relationship stops behaving the way the textbook said it would. Credentials tell you someone has absorbed a body of knowledge. They tell you almost nothing about how they'll respond the moment the playbook runs out, which is exactly the moment that matters most.

A Crucial Distinction

This isn't about recklessly breaking things, and it isn't about stubbornly grinding on an approach that clearly isn't working. The figure-it-out muscle includes knowing when to stop. It isn't blind doggedness, it's a structured curiosity to genuinely understand the problem. Sometimes that means abandoning an approach entirely and trying something else. The point was never to look busy. It was to actually get somewhere.

Where You Actually See It

You can't reliably spot this in an interview. People are good at describing problem-solving in the abstract. What you're looking for is evidence of it under real conditions, ideally conditions with some stakes attached.

This is part of why I've never been able to fully separate my racing life from my professional one. A pit lane is one of the most honest environments there is for watching how someone behaves when something breaks and there's no time to look it up. Do they ask a smart diagnostic question and start eliminating possibilities? Do they get their hands dirty checking the obvious things first? Or do they wait for someone more senior to tell them what to do?

I look for the same pattern outside of racing. Has this person built something of their own, even something small and unglamorous? A woodworking project that didn't go according to plan. A car they kept running past the point it made financial sense. A piece of software they taught themselves to write because no existing tool did quite what they needed. None of those projects need to be impressive on their own. What matters is what the person did the first time something didn't work as expected, and whether they knew when to stop.

Right now I'm building a tube-frame race car from scratch, wiring up engine management for a motorcycle engine that was never designed to run in a car like this. There is no manual for this specific combination. Every session is a version of forming a hypothesis, testing it, and adjusting. That loop, run enough times, becomes a way of working that shows up everywhere else in your life too.

An Example Outside the Garage

I saw the same trait for years in a very different setting. Dan Barker, the CEO at Wikimotive where I spent several years in a handful of different roles, had it in spades. He wasn't the type to wait for a playbook when the market shifted or a client problem didn't fit anything we'd seen before. He'd start testing an approach, watch what happened, and adjust, the same loop I was running in that paddock at 4 a.m. Watching someone run a business that way, day after day, taught me as much about this muscle as any race ever did.

Corporate language has its own names for it. "Bias for action." "Solution-oriented." Both point at the same thing, just with the edges sanded off. I like "figure-it-out muscle" better because it doesn't let anyone hide behind a buzzword, and it makes clear this is trained, not inherited. It's not a value on a slide. It's what a person actually does in the first five minutes after something breaks.

Why This Matters More Now, Not Less

It's tempting to think this muscle matters less as tools get better and more automated. I'd argue the opposite. The more powerful and abstracted the tools become, the more often you hit situations nobody has documented yet, because the tool changed last month and the internet hasn't caught up. Platforms update overnight. New categories of problems show up faster than anyone can write a guide for them.

In that environment, the people who wait for the manual are always going to be a step behind. The people who start testing hypotheses the moment something looks wrong are the ones who keep pace, and eventually the ones who write the manual everyone else ends up reading.

Why It's a Leadership Job, Not Just a Hiring Filter

Here's the part that gets missed most often: "figure it out" is not an excuse for lazy onboarding or poor management. Startups struggle with this constantly as they find their form. Someone reads about scrappy, self-directed teams, strips out all the context and support, and calls the resulting chaos empowerment.

You can't dump people into ambiguity with no direction and expect the muscle to appear. A leader's job is to absorb that ambiguity, set clear boundaries, and provide the air cover people need to experiment without fear of failure. Not every person on a team will have this muscle built out, and that's fine, not every role needs it. What a team without it needs is a leader who does, someone willing to go first and make it safe for everyone else to try.

How to Actually Build It

A few practical things I've learned, both from hiring and from building race teams:

Start with small, safe failures. People can't learn to trust the test-and-adjust loop if the first time they try it, the stakes are severe. Give them low-risk situations where a wrong guess costs almost nothing, so the process becomes familiar before it ever matters.

Narrate your own thinking out loud. Most people never actually see how a competent person works through ambiguity, they only see the finished, clean result. Talk through your own hypothesis testing in real time and you're handing people a process, not just an answer.

Resist the urge to just answer. The fastest way to kill this muscle is to always be the person with the fix. When someone comes to you stuck, ask what they've already tried and what they think the next test should be, before you tell them anything.

Ask about a time something failed, not a time something succeeded, when hiring. Success stories get rehearsed. Failure stories reveal process, because the person has to explain what they actually did in the moment, not what they wish they'd done.

Debrief the failures, not just the wins. The engine we installed at 4 a.m. in Thompson never did fire back up that weekend. What made that useful wasn't the failure itself, it was that afterward we could point to exactly what got tried, in what order, and why. A real postmortem, not a blame session, turns one bad night into a pattern the whole team can use.

Protect people when their hypothesis is wrong. This is the psychological safety piece, and it's non negotiable. If someone tries something reasonable and it doesn't work, and they get punished for the outcome instead of coached on the reasoning, they stop testing hypotheses and start waiting for permission. That single moment decides whether the muscle compounds or dies.

We packed up that weekend in Thompson, drove home, and started figuring out what we'd do differently next time. That's the whole job, in racing and everywhere else. Not having the answer. Being the kind of person, or building the kind of team, that goes and gets one.