That Curiously Crazy Idea Of Yours....

One cold winter morning with a fresh blanket of snow everywhere, Michael & I went flying along the New England coastline in a retractable gear Arrow. As the blinding sun poured into the cockpit we didn’t care how cold it was outside. It looked like time had frozen as the trees for miles remained bent at the angle of last night's winds. At first it was meditative, then it was almost hypnotic.

Risk Is a Reality

As we headed back towards the airport, our pre-landing check jolted us back to reality. Despite our best efforts, our landing gear wouldn’t come down. We walked thru emergency landing procedure protocols, planning our “options”, envisioning how hard landing on the frozen stiff ground would be and remembering that foaming the runway is just to put out fuel fires.(it’s not a “pillow”)

Our eyes quickly turned to the only place that wasn’t frozen – the glistening, white-capped ocean. Michael asked me, as co-pilot, what I wanted to do. I said ‘let’s just keep flying’. He thought that was a curiously crazy idea. Afterall, gear-up landings are also called plane crashes. How could I be so calm in the face of such great risk?

Situational Awareness Is Amazing....

I told him, the plane flew fine. We were warm, happy to be flying, enjoying the view and had plenty of fuel which we needed to burn anyway if we were to have a gear-up landing. At that moment, I didn’t see any imminent risk. Better still, if my life was about to be totally disrupted, I was going to enjoy this ride.

If at all possible, that amazing view became ten times more amazing. Then something even more amazing happened. We stopped worrying. We had calculated our risk, set a good plan that we would commit to executing and accept that that’s all we could control.

With our minds in a good place, new ideas started flowing. We thought we had tried everything to fix the problem but in our jolt we clearly had not. We reached under the cockpit and jiggled a wire – the gear came down.

There's Always an Answer

These are the words I hear at MIT all the time. "There's always an answer" and there's no shortage of world-changing brilliance that has come out of that University.

It's also the one singular difference between success and failure. The only real failure is quitting. Everything else is just a result that is in direct correlation to our willingness to learn from it.

It's amazing what we find when we take an accurate assessment of a "risky" situation. Risk is a reality but focusing on it won't give you the answers you need to get out of it.

So commit 100% to that curiously crazy idea of yours, the idea you are the most passionate about and remember, there's always an answer!