What is the reason you got into trucking?

How is your trucking career going? If you are reading this, chances are you are just starting in the trucking industry, and may be in need of a little advice, encouragement, or help. Are you finding trucking school challenging? Enjoyable? Maddening? Don’t worry, this is common. Many people feel pinched by the challenges of trucking school early on, but soon they catch up and find out that they made the right decision to pursue a career in this fast-paced, exciting, enjoyable industry.

What is the reason you got into trucking? Many people want to get into trucking because they want to see the world. If that is the case for you, perhaps restlessness is the reason you feel uneasy. You’re eager to get out on the road and see the country. Again, perfectly understandable. But if so, you need to be sure you develop two of the skills a trucking professional needs most: patience and focus.

The trucking industry certainly takes plenty of focus. Sitting on the docks, waiting for your truck to be loaded (or helping to load it yourself), then at your destination, waiting for the truck to be unloaded and for you to begin your long trip home or to your next destination.

Or perhaps you’re sitting in traffic on the highway, waiting as time ticks away on your deadline while rubberneckers gawk at a fender bender, or a construction project delays everyone. Yes, patience is a large part of trucking, as much as the smell of diesel or sandwiches from the truck stop.

Focus, now that’s a part of trucking that is absolutely ingrained. It all starts during your trucking training, while you’re sitting there, yearning for life on the open road, don’t forget that you have a job to do first. You have to earn your way there. That means sitting through trucking school, logging those hours with your instructor in the truck, and paying your dues, as the old timers might say. You have to learn to do before you can do.

And learning that focus will serve you well on the highway and roadways, where you have to be eternally vigilant. This is especially true in the trucking industry, where a slip up could mean someone’s life, or the loss of thousands of dollars of property, and the loss of your own credibility as a driver. So in trucking as in life, focus is important.

As you’re putting in your hours in the classroom and in the practice truck, you are building credits on your CDL permit, and soon enough that will add up to your very own commercial driver’s license, your ticket into the trucking field and a job driving big trucks over the open road, hauling cargo that will help boost the American economy. It is your pass to the start of a new career, one that has a place for someone ready to jump into trucking and drive it on down the road.

So don’t daydream your way through trucking training ready to jump into the trucking industry full-bore without the proper training. For starters you probably won’t get past trucking training if you are daydreaming through it; those two skills are your friend, your metaphorical companion in the truck, guiding you through the trucking industry and leading you to success. The trucking industry doesn’t want people who rush through their jobs. Rushing leads to carelessness, which leads to loss of property and ultimately income.

Remember the trucking industry is constantly moving, but moves at a deliberate pace. This is by design, to ensure that all of the details are taken care of, and there won’t be the issues that make a trucking company lose business.

Take your trucking career seriously, even before it begins. If you play like you practice, then the way you behave in your trucking training will go a long way to cementing your reputation in the trucking industry. You need success early to find it later, and in trucking you are only as good as what you can provide. If you don’t have the skills to overcome boredom, you won’t get far in the trucking industry.

Keep trucking, and the trucking industry will find a place to work you in.