Profile For Brett Aquila

That's fantastic! Wow, five years. What a ride, eh? Trucking is crazy.

It has been a blast watching you develop over the years, and it is truly an honor to have you here helping drivers make their way in this industry.

One thing that always stood out to me was your take on women's issues. I love that you don't play the victim, and you never encourage anyone to play the victim. You take control of life in an empowering way and you let nothing hold you back. I'm a huge fan.

Congrats on your big 5 year anniversary!

The key is to focus on learning, not on your performance.

Whether you're in the truck or watching someone else in the truck, learn from each moment. We all get very nervous if we focus on getting an excellent result while doing something we're no good at. You won't get excellent results unless you get lucky because you're no good at driving or backing a truck yet. That's perfectly fine. That's how it is for everyone in the beginning.

Instead of focusing on your results, focus on learning. Each time you learn something new, it will improve your results later on.

Remember, failure is the best teacher. When you or someone you're watching does something wrong, make sure you understand why it went wrong and what would have produced better results.

Getting a great result is not the goal during this phase of the game, learning is the goal. Every time you learn something you've succeeded, regardless of the result you've gotten from the attempt. So with each attempt just try to relax, give it your best shot, evaluate everything that happened, take lessons from it, then take another shot.

When it comes time to test you still may not feel ready, but you will be ready. Trust yourself. Be confident.

Unbelievable! Man, really sorry to hear that. Keep us posted. We'll be thinking about you!

Of course the $250,000 trucks still have to have humans on board just in case

They also need a team of engineers to oversee operations and an elaborate monitoring tech infrastructure running at all times.

I've said it many times already - this entire self-driving truck thing is nothing more than a marketing ploy for tech startups to get investors and sell their companies to larger companies. It's also funding university research departments.

In my opinion, you will not see an impact to our industry from self-driving trucks within the next two decades, possibly longer. Airplanes, trains, and ships have been capable of autonomous operations for decades, and all those are far easier to navigate using autonomous technology. Yet all of them have people operating them.

No form of transportation on the planet is more difficult to automate than big rigs, and the salary of big rig drivers is nowhere near that of commercial airline pilots or large ship captains, so the cost savings wouldn't really be worth the trouble even if you could pull off the technology, which they can't - not even close.

When should we be worried? When they actually begin building purpose-built highways with infrastructure to support autonomous tractor-trailers. When you see that happening, then you should be concerned. Check back with me in about 30 years and we'll see if they have accomplished anything yet.

I would have terrible anxiety having to trust the computer software in the truck to get me where I’m going safely.

Yeah, no kidding. We can hardly use our phones or computers without hiccups; the Bluetooth won't connect or something locks up and you need to restart the system. I think this entire self-driving vehicle thing is absurd, and I write software myself. It's easy to convince people who don't write software or design complex systems that this technology is just around the corner. But heck, in the 60's The Jetsons had everyone convinced robots would do everything and technology would solve every problem. Unfortunately, here I am in 2020 and I'm still mowing my lawn and taking my garbage to the curb.

Show me an autonomous lawnmower that can figure out anyone's yard without human intervention and trash cans that can roll themselves to the curb and maybe I'll believe we're only 50 years away from truly autonomous vehicles navigating the highways without human intervention.

My only thoughts on this is that the first time the system fails and it will, you’ll have several destroyed trucks, dead truck drivers and who knows what other carnage when the remote controlled trucks are now completely out of control due to no driver behind the wheel.

I feel the same way. Platooning will work until it doesn't, and then you'll have a catastrophe. The risk/reward isn't worth it. If they want the benefits of aerodynamics, then allow for "truck trains" like they have in Australia. That way you don't have all of those individual trucks as a potential point of failure, you only have one tractor pulling a line of trailers. Anything that big and heavy has the potential for carnage but platooning a series of individual trucks seems far more risky.

You would never convince me to get in a truck that's platooning with other trucks. No way.

If you hate dealing with people that bad, honestly this job is probably not for you.

That really doesn't help much.

This is a "last resorts" type of situation... meaning I don't have many options left and I've already decided and committed to doing this.

At this point, just would appreciate anyone that can help me with the info that I've asked.

Thanks...

Why doesn't it help much? It answers the question you were asking.

My grandma always said, "Kill em with kindness" because life will not go well for you if you're a jerk. It's as simple as that.

Being kind to people is important. People will normally mirror your attitudes and behaviors back at you. If you think most people are intolerable, most people feel the same about you. If that's the case then no one will want to do you any favors, and they will often be happy if they can make you miserable. They'll have plenty of opportunities to do that if you're a truck driver.

If you're miserable, then you're used to life not going your way. That won't change if you become a miserable truck driver, or anything else. Things will not go well for you.

Some people never figure out why it's important to be kind to people. That simple premise eludes them. Well, there's a song for people like that from Roger Alan Wade, "If You're Gonne Be Dumb, Ya Gotta Be Tough."

*REMEMBER* The first one that meets Brett and posts the photo wins!

I know, right??? I'm way up in the Northeast corner of New York State in the Adirondacks and no one ever comes up here. I might have to move to Ohio or something!

That sucks man! You and I and many others on this website are alike in that we always strive to be highly productive in our lives. We thrive on a challenge and get the most we can out of life.

Nothing is more difficult than sitting around doing nothing!

We've had about the hottest, most humid summer on record. The heat finally got to me a bit, and I wound up being a little overtrained. My coach told me to take three fulls days of rest. That's the first time in 2 1/2 years of training with him I've even taken two fulls days in a row of rest!

Three days of rest? People were genuinely concerned for my sanity.

If a high-level coach wouldn't have directly ordered the rest I very much doubt I would have considered that, which leads to overtraining for a lot of athletes. Like my coach says, "You don't have an off switch. You always think more is better."

Well, yeah!

So I know being sick is miserable, but doing nothing makes it far worse. I wish you the best for a strong, fast recovery from here and keep us posted!

I could care less about that kind of "Brotherhood."

I think that is the key consideration right there. What type of Brotherhood do we hope to promote? What type of drivers do we want sharing the highways with our families and loved ones and representing our industry?

We all must draw a line in the sand and determine what is acceptable and what is not. What direction do we want our industry to go?

The guy you reported is exactly the type that goes on long rants about driver-facing cameras being an invasion of privacy.

There are still far too many dangerous, irresponsible truck drivers on the road today. The industry has made gigantic leaps forward in terms of the quality of the equipment on the highways overall, and cleaning up the drugs and filthy truck stops of the past. But we have a long way to go before we can say most drivers are operating safely and at a professional level at all times.

Keeping a proper following distance, side-by-side "racing," and distracted driving are still major issues. It's difficult to spend 10 or 15 minutes on an Interstate without seeing a blatant disregard for safety or courtesy by truck drivers.

I must admit I'm shocked that with all the cameras in our society, blatantly dangerous driving is still so common. I thought most of it would have been cleaned up by now.

Wow, finally after all these years I can say I've heard at least one story of a gun that saved a driver. Of course, if four guys couldn't handle one driver, I don't think he saved himself from much. It doesn't sound like they had the ability to inflict harm on a paper bag. It also sounds like the driver missed all four guys from point-blank range, too, so I don't think any of these people involved were Special Forces at any point in their lifetimes!

It's always hard to analyze a scenario that probably didn't happen. Like Old School said, a dispatcher would never put a message like that over Qualcomm. It also makes no sense to have him take an HOS class if the driver knew he was breaking the rules. It's not like he didn't know the rules. Finally, why would a dispatcher deny saying something he put in the Qualcomm, knowing there's a record of it? Even rookie dispatchers know not to tell someone to break the rules over Qualcomm and then deny it.

I've had a long career of listening to fictional stories from truck drivers. I rather enjoyed it most of the time. I knew most of the stories were partly true at best, but I didn't mind. I looked at it the same way I look at going to the movies. I don't care if it's true or not. I just want it to be entertaining.

Does anyone know of a single instance where a trucker saved himself from harm because he had a gun on him? I've been in the industry for 27 years and I don't know of a single story. We've had tons of people say they'd love to have a gun on them and we've had over 16 million visits to this website over the past 13 years but I've never heard a single story where having a gun made a difference. I'm sure it has happened at some point, but so do lightning strikes and meteor impacts but no one seems to be concerned about those.

In 15 years of driving, I never had a problem. I was never robbed or harrassed, nor have I felt like I was in a truly dangerous situation. I've been through every dangerous area you can imagine over the years - East L.A., South Chicago, MOST of downtown Atlanta - but never a single incident or real concern.

I have no issue with people wanting to carry a gun. I don't care either way. I just hate to see people stressing over something that is so unlikely to ever be an issue. Naturally, you might say, "It only takes once" and to that I say, "Well that applies to lightning strikes and rattlesnake bites and meteor impacts, too, so why aren't you obsessing about those?" Do you lock yourself in the basement during thunderstorms? Do you carry a snake bite kit? Are you tracking near-Earth meteors and potential impact zones?

I was a little upset when TMC changed course but I think it turned out for better, for me.

All major carriers offer fantastic opportunities. They all have outstanding equipment, a strong support structure, powerful financing, and a long list of Fortune 500 customers. People often believe they must find just the right company to work for, but that's not true. An awesome driver will be happy and successful at any major carrier, a lousy driver will be miserable at any major carrier.

Give Millis everything you've got for one full year. See it through. You may eventually decide you want something a little different, so you'll move on. But most of the time a person stays with a company for a full year, they're thrilled right where they're at.

Alright I started with a plea for restraint, and then couldn’t restrain myself. See how hard it is?

I saw that!

Call me sheep if you want, but to get along in society (or a career) sometimes you need to do things you don't want to do.

Let's also remember that to have a strong, healthy, stable society you sometimes must root out people who are bent on destroying it or manipulating it for their own gains. That starts with bringing an awareness of the problem to those who don't see it.

All imma gunna say is.....classifying a death as due to covid. when their prior health issues were the main cause always comes back to MONEY!!!

Yes, it does. With COVID it's rather easy to follow the money and see who the big winners are financially. This has been a big eye-opener when it comes to our society's ability for critical thinking. Some listen blindly to anything they're told while others seek the truth for themselves regardless of the original source.

Jrod, that column you sorted by the last time is "New Deaths" which is the # of deaths a country reported for that day only.

I don't think it's a vast political conspiracy. (I'd love to be wrong about that though, I bet it would make an amazing story!)

Oh you're definitely wrong about that. It's an amazing story the same way Hitler's was an amazing story. It's the story of sociopaths who fought their way to the top of the food chain and manipulated the world for their personal gains. The same story as humanity has lived for thousands of years, only the actors and the methods change.

And this is a screen shot from the link you just shared... weird, its exactly the top 5 I listed!

That's because you have it sorted by the wrong column. Jrod, I'm sure you're a fine recruiter, but a statistician you are not.

Are you religious? Just curious, you heard reap what you sow? Or Kharma? Or all dogs have their days?.......no matter what language you speak it in, or what walk of life you use it from.......it is a truth.

I'm not sure why you're saying that. Don't be cryptic. Just say what's on your mind.

Im a multi tasker, i have been working on my career

I don't see any scores for you in our High Road CDL Training Program. Do you have your CDL already? If not, do you have your CDL permit yet? Do you know the logbook rules inside and out? Are you positive you can pass a DOT physical?

I wrote an entire book about how to be successful in this industry. It's free to read here online:

Becoming A Truck Driver: The Raw Truth About Truck Driving

Have you read that?

I can say this; nowhere in my book did I recommend reading about lawsuits or complaining about recruiters as part of the strategy for being successful in this industry.

I still applaud those who suffered and fought. They knew it was illegal, they got Justice in court. No matter what the trucking industry tried to shove down their throat, and the cronie capitolists who enforced these illegal activities.

Brad, let me ask you something. You've spent the past two days complaining about Swift. Now you're worried about a class-action lawsuit against a company that frankly you don't know the first thing about.

Are you going to spend any of your time preparing yourself for a career in trucking, or will you continue distracting yourself with unhelpful things?