Achieving Flight
This is a photo by the infamous avant-garde artist of the early 1960’s, Yves Klein. In fact, Klein himself is the person in the photo.
This wonderfully conceived masterpiece of modern photography invites you to consider Klein’s predicament. Notice where he puts you, the viewer. Look at the expression on his face. Wonder what is next, or not.
Dear reader/viewer, today let’s meet halfway. You are not inside the window. You are not broken and bleeding on the cobblestone below.
You are achieving flight.
“There is an art to flying... or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.”
The concept of achieving flight seems near impossible —like almost any other big accomplishment. How do we “achieve”? How do we “fly”?
We all try stuff. We all seek to achieve things. At first, we plan. Next, a lot of effort—much of it not seeming to accomplish anything. But then, if you are lucky enough to get that far, there could be a launch. You are underway—you are achieving flight.
Flight is an appropriate metaphor for many kinds of achievements because it’s a bit anti-intuitive. For much of human history, people thought humans were not meant to fly and never would, even though they could see with their own eyes that birds could do it. Up until the point when the Wright brothers left that sandy beach at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, failure of human flight was more a case of failure to understand flight with enough detail and ingenuity to make it happen.
If detail and ingenuity are the wings of flight, the hope described by Vaclav Havel in the following quote is the engine which propels it all
Václav Havel, the mid 20th century European writer and former President of the CzechRepublic once said, “Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.” Havel’s version of hope is both calculated and visionary. This “orientation of the spirit and heart” propels the effort from concept to launch to landing.
As Havel also mentions, it’s not about blind prognostication. You must have a plan which lays out “how to”. To understand “ how to” flight, Let’s break it down into some of its essential components. These components can be viewed as metaphors for launching and flying any sort of enterprise. We are all designers, pilots, and flyers. All of our endeavors can resemble flight.
IF PIGS COULD FLY
The first thing to understand about flight—and certain endeavors—is that some are not meant to fly. So it’s important to choose the objects of our flight wisely. No pigs! Remember the old saying “When pigs fly”? We are reminded that some dreams and some designs are not very “aerodynamic.” When pondering the potential for achieving, and flying, choose something that might actually fly.
LIFT
Let us first consider the phenomena of “lift.” Lift is all about contradicting gravity. There’s nothing wrong with gravity—after all, it does keep us from flinging out into space (an achievement of "flight" which is not so welcome). In fact, "falling" is part of flying, and we can thank gravity for that. Objects orbiting the earth are actually locked in to a controlled fall, but the speed of the fall exactly matches the rate of travel around the curvature of earth’s atmosphere, so the object appears to glide across space .Orbit is nothing more and nothing less than “elegant balance”.
THE LEAP OF FAITH AS A DESIGN FEATURE
It all starts with a leap of faith; not only the religious kind of faith, although this can certainly be involved in some approaches. The more general version of faith is the conviction that this path is possible, and that a way can be found. This is a confidence in the power of vision, firmly bolted onto analysis, and then liberally slathered in elbow grease.
Call it inspiration. Intuition. Hard-headedness. Unrealistic expectations that you can do something that others have not yet done . This is when faith chimes in.
Larry Page, co-founder and former CEO of Google, famously encouraged his employees to maintain “a healthy disregard for the impossible.”
This is the intellectual leap that can also be a description of “faith.”
I have named Yves Klein’s photo composition as the “Leap of Faith” because that is what these leaps of faith look like to me. The actual name of the composition giving to it by Klein is “ The Painter of Space Hurls Himself Into the Void”. Klein says it better than I could have.
A flight miscalculation
CALCULATION
Calculation is the bookend to faith. Faith and hope—without the calculation to go with them—are called “wishful thinking.”
As the saying goes, God helps those who help themselves, and calculation is one of the ways we serve as a helpful partner. Achieving flight is famously about calculation. Instrumentation which adorns every cockpit is the physical representation of the dominance of calculation in the process—as it should be with every enterprise.
There is no excuse for lack of continuous measurements and metrics. After all, these tell us where we are and how we are doing. Any endeavor must make an ironclad commitment to measurement, calculation, and analytics, before, during and after launch, all the well through flight, and beyond landing.
DESIGN
It all comes down to design. Not design that makes us feel infallible. Perhaps the designers of the steamship Titanic did that, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Good design prepares us for reality while being fast and efficient.
Good design is usually born from failure. Sometimes you even have to throw a monkey wrench into the gears just to see what bad things might happen.
General Electrics test jet engines. Among the many tests, it shoots birds into the jet engine fan-blades.I know what it feels like to be aircraft engine stal...
When you combine vision, a leap of faith, and intense calculation into your designs, you can achieve flight. One of the finest examples of this was the first flight of the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. What a great combination of design, calculation and leap of faith. The rest is history.
There is always a first “take-off point,” when all of the opposing forces shift from can’t to will. This point is not only a triumph of design, planning, and nature, but also a confirmation of the force of your vision and the overcoming of your fear that it may not happen. Think of a time when it all came together for you. This is the essence of achieving flight.
We are all aviators. We all endeavor to connect the dots in the most efficient manner.
Less than three generations after the first primitive aircraft lifted off from a beach in North Carolina, the heavens are full of these unique expressions of science and intent.
Here is a 24-hour view of every flight in the world on one day from a few years ago, put together as a compilation from all global air traffic controls.
Each one of these dots is an endeavor. Each is the manifestation of intent. Each is hurling itself at the ground, and missing. It seems as if the impossible is possible after all.
Each one of these dots is an endeavor. Each is the manifestation of intent. Each is hurling itself at the ground, and missing. It seems as if the impossible is possible after all.
PREPARE FOR LANDING
As with anything that takes off and achieves flight, eventually there should be a landing (at least if we are lucky!).
So, let’s try to land where we started from, that Yves Klein picture. Take a closer look. It’s a real predicament, leaping out of a second story window, hovering ever so briefly over the rock-hard asphalt street below. Nevertheless, notice the bliss, the optimism on his face. Does he know something we don’t know? How can this end any other way than poorly? Why would he do such a thing? What drives human beings to achieve what appears to be impossible, and how can they pull it off?
I do know how this all ended for Yves, but I am not going to tell you how, just now. I will say that Yves figured out a way to do something which looked and seemed impossible—just like those who have achieved their own flights and their own impossible endeavors. They leaped out of their windows, only to miss the very ground everyone else thought they would crash down to.
“The knack [of flight] lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss,” wrote Douglas Adams. By achieving flight you have successfully missed the crash others expected, the certitude of some of your peers, and perhaps even surprised yourself. You did not crash. You achieved flight. There are accomplishments, and then there are accomplishments.
Here’s to missing the ground every time, or at least hoping for a nice soft bounce or two in the cases where your calculations were slightly off.