Comair Flight 5191 attempted to take off from Lexington Kentucky's Blue Grass Airport over the weekend. The main runway is 7,000 feet. The runway the plane attempted to use was 3500 feet. This is a twin engine plane. It requires at least 5000 feet getting off the ground. The crew and the passengers had no shot at making it. Somehow the pilot got onto the wrong runway. Should he have sensed there was something wrong? You could argue the decision to crash was made the moment the plane made it to the wrong runway. The pilot could have picked up on a couple of clues which included:
1) There were signs that told you the correct runway
2) There was less lighting on the shorter runway
3) The concrete on the incorrect runway was severely cracked
There were 50 people on the plane including the crew. One crewmember made it out alive. This was the first air disaster in this country in five years. The last crash was out of JFK when a plane crashed in nearby Queens, NY killing 265 people on board. What do we learn from this latest air disaster that can help us in our daily lives to think better, and make better decisions?
The first learning-Denial
I think we are all in denial. We deceive and lie to ourselves hoping, just hoping that problems will get better. You know problems never get better. A problem left alone gets worse, never better. At least that's true 99% of the time. You have to tackle problems head on, and the worse problems are the ones we do not believe to be true. We DENY the problem. If you deny it, you don't have to work on it.
The most successful people I know and I know scores of fabulously successful people, are people who tackle problems tenaciously. They don't let the problem fester. They literally jump on their problems. Nothing interferes with getting things done. You see there's always stuff you can stick in the way of pursuing your problems. There's always more interesting, satisfying things to do than solve problems.
If you want to deny that something is a problem, it's going to come back to haunt you. In my business which is picking stocks, when I make a mistake, I know it. The market forces me to know it, and it forces me to face up to it. I can't hide from it, just like a pilot can't hide from his mistakes either. I can't deny my problems, and neither should you. Whether it's picking stocks, or flying airplanes, you have to deal with PROBLEMS, only the dead do not have to deal with problems. Life really comes down to solving problems.
The second learning-Automatic Pilot doesn't always work
There are times in life when you have to be "juiced" as they say, and there are times when it's okay to be less than perfect. We know that most accidents involving planes take place taking off, and landing. This is when you have to be in your optimum thinking mode. Was the pilot in Kentucky performing in an optimum manner, or was he going through the motions.
We have all heard the expression, just showing up is 90% of the battle. It's probably a true statement. It's just not true of airline pilots while they are in the air. Did the pilot in Lexington see the busted up concrete? Did he choose to ignore it? We know there were signs pointing to the correct runway. He either didn't look, or saw it, and edited it out of his thought process.
The third learning-Question yourself
It's all right to be opinionated, but not to the point where you sit back on your opinions, and refuse to entertain new opinion changing information. The first thing you have to do is have good training. Nobody has better training than the Marines. There is no force in combat like a Marine recon unit. They function as one, are fearless, are dead on accurate with their fire power, and have proven they can get the job done. Their training is so superb that they do not need to question themselves, the captains, and the lieutenants may have to. but not the unit participants.
Most of us don't have such precise training. Even pilots who have fabulous training must learn to question themselves constantly. The rules and instructions involving pilots at professional airlines are very clear. There is no ambiguity about them. Pilots are taught what to do, how to do it, and how to react in every situation. It is only when a pilot falls back on a "going with the flow" type of thinking that he runs into trouble.
For a pilot, there are what we call "decision windows". This means you have a certain amount of time (maybe seconds) to make a decision, or else the decision is made for you. Once the pilot hit the wrong runway and picked up thrust, the game was over, the decision had been made to crash. Take advantage of all decision windows in your life.
The fourth learning-It's always easier to go with the flow
Yes, it's always easier to go with the flow. It's true for pilots, it's true for us. No one questions that Tiger Woods is the greatest golfer of his generation. Can you imagine what it took for this man a couple of years ago when he was already at the top of the golf world to change his swing? Woods made a decision that his swing was less than optimal. He was already the number player in the world for years.
He actually took several months off from the tour, and worked with a swing master "Butch Harmon". Tiger ripped apart his swing and, recreated it into something far better. No other golfer in the world would have had the guts to do that. If Tiger Woods can do it, so can you. Don't just go with the flow. Make your own decisions. You are the scriptwriter of your own life. No one else is authoring it.
The ancient Greeks had an interesting thing to say about living life. When a man died, they didn't ask about his accomplishments. They asked if he lived his life with energy. Too many people are just going through the motions. If you're a pilot it could get you killed.
We should all feel saddened by the death of the passengers of Comair flight 5191. Our prayers should go to the families of those who died. For ourselves, we must learn the lessons that such flights tell us, and heed the warnings, or else our own problems will only get worse as we choose to ignore them.
--
Richard Stoyeck's background includes being a limited partner at Bear Stearns, Senior VP at Lehman Brothers, Kuhn Loeb, Arthur Andersen, and KPMG. Educated at Pace University, NYU, and Harvard University, today he runs Rockefeller Capital Partners and StocksAtBottom.com
Value Investing
http://www.stocksatbottom.com
Develop your mind and change your life
Email Reminders Save the Day!
You've got a planner, a Palm Pilot, and enough sticky notes to wall paper one side of your room. But you still forget things. Why?
The fact is that when you're really stressed—the weeks when everything goes wrong, and you've missed about every deadline you've had due to emergencies that derail every attempt to get back on your track—you don't even look at your planner. No, your time management tools are buried under paperwork, and the sticky notes have long stopped being useful simply because there are too many to keep track of.
And that's assuming that you're the type who'll keep a calendar to begin with. Many of us aren't. Realistically, we forget to jot things down (an unfortunate habit that becomes far worse the more stressed and distracted we are).
Enter, the email reminder. No matter how disorganized you are by nature, or how toxic your schedule may be, you're bound to check your email. It's the way the office system has evolved, and our work habits have changed with it. All business and personal correspondence is now coursed through the web, and even if you no longer have the time to go to the bathroom and brush your teeth, you'll still (albeit hurriedly) quickly check your email for any new updates or instructions.
Setting up an email reminder means that whatever happens, you never forget the important things: it's right there in your inbox, the digital equivalent of a secretary hovering over your table.
Email reminders can also help cut down on your paper clutter—which, you have to admit, are one reason we feel that our business lives are spiralling out of control. If you've got dozens of papers stuck on your bulletin board, you can't sit down at your desk without feeling that your deadlines are screaming at you.
Besides, it's hard to tell at one glance which of those dozens of reminders are due today. It can all be overwhelming: which are most important? Which need to be taken care of right now, or can wait until next Tuesday? You can set up an email reminder to give you your schedule piece meal, so even if you are swamped with work you're at least able to focus on the most essential.
Email reminders are also part of the move for a fully integrated digital office. It makes more sense to streamline your work day so that everything you need to do is centralized in one place. You write memos and reports on the computer, send them through email, and simultaneously check what's next on your to-do list. For a hyper-busy executive, that's more "natural" than having to rummage through your papers for your planner, or wasting time retyping all the information on your Palm Pilot.
Email reminders can help you take back control of your schedule. No, it won't do the work for you—but it can make it easier to manage your work flow, so you don't get this toxic again.
Philip Nicosia is the webmaster of Onlinereminders.net, a site that provides a free email reminders service.
