:: I wrote this in January of 2016. I need to remind myself of it often; just because I wrote it once doesn’t mean it stuck. ::
The ground comes up to meet you quickly when you’re landing an airplane, even more so on a windy Montana afternoon.
I’d flown solo to Sydney, Montana for my check ride, that terrifying test that decides whether you get your private pilot’s license or not. I had no idea there was an anomaly lurking in my logbook.
The check ride pilot gruffly looked through my logbook back in his dusty office, after we’d completed the flight portion of the test. “You have a lot of landings in your logbook,” he said. “Why so many?”
286 landings was unusual? It seemed right to me, but I thought carefully before answering. He wasn’t a cheery fellow, scolding me for doing well on the written test because “that means nothing.”
“It took me 286 landings to get it right, I guess.”
He didn’t say another word about it, launching into the verbal portion of the test. I flew home a new private pilot, chalking up yet another landing in my logbook.
286 landings it took me, with the help of my flight instructor, to understand how to get the airplane on the ground. Many of them were hard-fought landings, leaving me discouraged at the end of a lesson.
Yet I could not have gotten my pilot’s license without traveling nearly 300 times around the traffic pattern. My success would not have been possible without those failures.
And that realization is huge: Failure is a necessary part of success.
With the New Year comes New Year’s resolutions. It’s a time when gym memberships skyrocket and diets start...only for the number of steps on the treadmill to dwindle, and the unsavory eating habits to creep back in.
But what if we changed how we thought about failure—especially as it relates to success?