Perseverance and Direction

I’ve been thinking a bit lately about perseverance and direction. Without getting into too many details, it’s fair to say that it feels like we (meaning my family unit) have been treading water financially for what feels like quite a while. Sometimes we slip back a bit, sometimes we move forward a bit, but it seems like the forward progress keeps getting called back, and it takes maximum effort just to get back from the slips. It’s frustrating, and since revenue generation is largely my responsibility, I really have no one I can be upset with save for the guy in the mirror.

It’s not like I don’t have a plan. Work hard, keep on the career track, and work harder to spin up the writer and streamer side businesses. They’re all making progress, but it’s so very slow. Maybe I should ditch some part of the plan and chase some other way.

I wasn’t even in the top 50% of my age group, total runners, or my gender, but I wasn’t last either. And for a first race, all I wanted to do was finish.

Oh, right. That took work too. A lot of hot Sunday long runs where I didn’t want to go out, much less drag through the required distance. Boring hours on the treadmill when the weather just wouldn’t cooperate at all. Full marathons are going to be more of the same. That’s what this financial thing is, really. A full marathon. Maybe even an ultra-marathon. It’s not going to be complete in a day, or a month, or a year. It’s just a regular slog of doing the things I know I need to do to get to the well defined goals that are worth the struggle.

Thunderbird no. 6 ejection at Mt. Home airshow in 2003 [Photo by SSgt Bennie J. Davis III – Still Photographer, USAF]

On the other hand, sometimes there are reasons to bail out. There’s no reason to follow a crash into the ground if you don’t have to. Live to fly (or run, or work) another day beats riding a doomed effort down to a fireball. Are my efforts doomed to inevitable failure? I don’t believe so. Systems are still reading green, I’ve got the necessary altitude, and progress is happening. That’s not the time to pull the black and yellow handles.

Side note: the incident report that led to the above picture is well worth reading. The details that led to this very expensive incident form a multi-link accident chain that ultimately cost Captain Chris Stricklin his flying career, and the Air Force a $20 million jet. He ejected less than a second before the aircraft hit the ground, and after putting it into a slight turn to avoid endangering spectators at the airshow.

All that to say that punching out is something of a last resort. Better than the alternative, but still something that can have lasting repercussions. Best to try and break those accident chains, be they in aviation, motorcycling, or careers before they lead to incidents like this.