Taking Wins No Matter Where They Come From

You may wonder why I gave this post the title I did since it doesn’t seem very aviation related, so I will tell you. That thought was what got me to stop reading tonight and write the long post before this one, that I am sure multiple people stopped reading after they saw it wasn’t just about airplanes, and that’s okay, cause I wanted to share, as well as the post you are reading now.

In the book Crushing It! that I mentioned in my other post, there is a story of a T-shirt business that thought they had missed a golden opportunity to grow their brand because their logo had been on the back of the shirts when a bunch of people wore them on a show sponsored by Oprah on her network. Turns out it actually proved to be a huge win as they were able to tell their customers they “had their backs” and it was one of their biggest surges as a company.

This got me thinking about my flight that I had today (sweet video from that hopefully coming next week), as well as the same experience I have had on countless other flights over the years. Sometimes you don’t do everything right, and you still get a positive result and success. I have previously written about airdrops and how they work, to include my constant desire to learn from each flight and figure out why I got the result I did. Reading tonight made me realize how often I have screwed up in some, or many, ways and still had a successful drop.

It has been easy for me to beat myself up and see my mistakes and just chalk my success up to luck, but sometimes we need to just take the win wherever it came from. By no means am I saying that we as aviators shouldn’t analyze our performance and look for ways to do better, but I am saying we should enjoy the successes we have, even, and maybe especially, if we didn’t necessarily deserve it.

I have heard that luck is simply where preparation meets opportunity, and maybe that is true to some extent. We train and study and analyze so that we get thrown a proverbial bone on occasion. We have a great landing on a rough weather day where we struggle to keep the plane stable, or we encounter unexpected favorable winds that allow us to make up for a delay, or we simply have a day where despite Murphy’s best efforts, everything just seems to work out in the end.

I wonder how often we throw away a win, or miss an opportunity to enjoy success because we feel like there were too many mistakes getting there. To quote the Beatles (I think), “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” So why not enjoy the positive results that life gives us, no matter how hard it was to get there.