WING TIPS

I was down in my basement recently, rummaging through my old flight records. My mission was to see how much flying time I had accumulated over the years. As I leafed through my logbooks, the names of some of the more exotic and exciting places I had flown brought back fond and heart-warming memories. I miss those days. But I digress. Back to my mission: total flying time. When I added airline flying, military flying, and personal civilian flying time together, I calculated that I had 18,773 hours of being up in the air.

That equates to 782 days, 26 months or two years, and two months of being off the earth and booming through the blue skies. Any way you slice it, that’s a lot of time off terra firma.

With that backdrop, let me share with you one plain remarkable fact. Never, ever—not even once—in 18,773 hours, 782 days, 26 months, or over two years and two months, did I ever take off without knowing exactly where I planned to land.

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The Plan

Most military and civilian airline flights are required to operate with a flight plan that specifically details the particulars of that individual flight. These flight plans state where the flight will originate, what departure procedure will be used, the airway routes expected to be taken, and the arrival procedure you plan to use at the destination. When a pilot is about 100 miles away from the airport, you’ll also be assigned the specific runway where you can expect to land.

The point is in professional aviation, you need to be very clear and definite about your destination and how you expect to get there well before you ever take off. When you are in the cockpit of a jet flying at 40,000 feet and 600 miles per hour, you don’t have the option of pulling off on the side of the road to try and figure it out.

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The Flight Through Life

Likewise, if you want to get to a lofty place in business and life, you’ll need to be very clear about where you want to go and how you expect to get there. After all, if you don’t know where you’re going, how can you ever expect to arrive?

Many folks have never gone through defining their true vision because they don’t know what they want. Even if you have started a business or are in the corporate sector, very few folks have developed a detailed flight plan that maps out where you want to be at a given time with a clear plan on how you’ll get there. We may sometimes have a vague notion of what we might be able to do with our lives or what path we may be able to take, but defining a true-life vision requires much more. It requires a certainty of purpose, which creates the passion for achieving your desired goal.

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Think

Take some time to think about your future for a change. It’s something that most folks usually have little time for. People are so busy doing, and the doing is often inconsequential things. Do you want to be in the C-Suite of your company or have 30

locations for your business? Would you like to start a nonprofit and positively affect the lives of a million people? And what route will you need to take to get there?

Will it be the final or only course? Likely not. We sometimes must deviate around storms on our journey to great things. But if you don’t know the destination and are not flying the planned or adjusted route, you are guaranteed not to arrive.

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A Quote To Consider!

“Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now.” ― Alan Lakein, author

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