When I reflect on what makes some people stand out in the world of work while others seem to always be learning, always following and never attaining mastery…my mind settles on a word parable — land that plane.
It’s easy to start a project, assignment or task, it’s much harder to bring it to conclusion. With an airplane as our working metaphor, I noticed that so many people know how to send an airplane up in flight, very few have practiced how to land the planes they launch.
You can spot the extreme exemplars — they are always starting never completing, strewn across their personal and professional lives are many abandoned projects. They lack the discipline to harness limited resources to complete tasks, they do not have the emotional depth to manage difficult bosses and colleagues on a project to hand-hold it to completion. They wear out so easily. They complain of being denied opportunity but they are overlooked for not having the track record of completion.
Always starting, never completing. They don’t know how to land planes
Planes by their very nature break the law of gravity to attain flight. It can be argued they need to fulfill another law ( of thrust and lift ) in order to nullify the first law (gravity). To bring a plane down after passing through these 2 laws thus requires a 3rd law.
Steven Pressfield in his acclaimed book “The War of Art” did the universe a favor by wrestling this 3rd law down and unmasking it for all man kind. He called it Resistance. That bogey man that requires a daily set of blows to be subdued. Resistance obstructs us from committing, obstructs us from pressing forward in the face of adversity, it tell us to rest easy when we ought to put our shoulder to the plough. Resistance is the deformed cousin of laziness
We need to break free of Resistance to achieve any meaningful thing in life. There will always be reasons to give up on a task, project, relationship or goal. Resistance is the voice that tells you to rest easy, go with the flow, catch the next wave and settle for less.
The ability to land the planes you send into orbit requires grit, the clenching of teeth and bending of the back to the plough. It’s not ‘Easy street’ here — we sweat, we bleed, we cajole. we force enemies to work together, we scrape coins together to fund our dreams and do the things we fear most so we can achieve our goals
We land the planes we send up.
It is the path we commit to and the one I commend to you
Be committed, land the planes you launch.
(If you liked this post, hit the green button on your merry way to world domination :-) Thanks.)
