Dig Deep - Certainty Is Your Gold
Galvanize your confidence and drive to motivate your way out of uncertainty
1955 is really not that long into our past - depending on your perspective of the volume in the hourglass, eh? (insert the glass of water old chestnut here) There were so many challenges - seen and unseen - and yet there were people who made it their personal mission to risk everything, exhaust themselves, to push the envelope ...
"Airplane essentially completed. Terrifically long hours. Everybody almost dead."
Kelly Johnson, Lockheed Martin Skunk Works
July 15th, 1955, that entry is in Clarence Leonard "Kelly" Johnson's log book he kept during the development of the U-2 Dragon Lady…
But to truly see, and to succeed, one must push past limitations and stretch your purview - even if only to see a year or two into the future.
Everyone in the Skunk Works program motivated themselves, reoriented themselves when challenged, and their list of so many firsts began to grow:
P-80 Shooting Star
U-2 Dragon Lady
SR-71 Blackbird (A-12, D-21, on and on...)
F-117 Nighthawk
F-35 Lightning II
SR-72 (don't say it's impossible to the Skunk Works Team!)
Were these people stuck because of apparent physical and technological limitations? Clearly not - they dug deep, found their “gold”, and created game changing technology pushing everyone into 5th Generation Warfare earlier than ever before.
As an aside, years ago (2006 to be exact) I wrote about generational warfare in my Fix4RSO blog. A researcher picked up my analysis and used it in their publication back in 2015. My blog post(s) were specific to technology determining the boundaries for each generation - especially aircraft. Below find a snapshot from his publication. You can click on the image for a link to download the PDF or use the link below the image:
THE EVOLUTION OF WARFARE FROM CLASSIC TO HYBRID ACTIONS
Bahnareanu, Cristian, PhD. Strategic Impact; Bucharest Iss. 55, (2015): 57-66
The remainder of this post is part of my book… sorry, but I’m placing the paywall here. If you’re a paid subscriber, read on..