Apollo Rescue Thinking
"One of the many lessons out of all this is starting on day one it was from the very first moment, assume you're going to succeed and don't do anything that gets in the way."
The thoughts of Ken Mattingly, Nasa astronaut and famed lifesaver of the Apollo13 moon mission. As reported in glowing obits aplenty this weekend.
The man himself is recorded in the fascinating transcript with this attribution;
A friend of mine in business kept telling me, “When you’re not sure what to do, just don’t get in the way of success, because you’re not sure what’s going to happen.”
Normally I'd steer well clear of the kinds of deepism that such exhortations to adopt a winner's mindset implore.
Think It To Be It and all that verges on #delulu.
This is though a welcome worthy exception. Given the magnitude of the success in the toughest of adversity from where it hails.
Sure, there's a plethora of truncated posts daily online in such image.
From Failure Is Not An Option through vacuous agency-avoidant manifestations to Believe To Achieve and its ilk.
I couldn't help myself but search for the most recently posted tweets on 𝕏 on "success". I stopped half-dozen in;
Success isn't waiting for you, it's made by you
Success rewards those who persist
'I think the key to life is just being a happy person and happiness will bring you success' Diego Val
Many of life's failures are those who did not realise how close they were to success when they gave up
Develop success from failures; discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success
Success is the only motivation
Proving how tricky it can be to spot the blossoming rose amid the dung filled field. (And that's before you fall upon #successquotes.)
All this duly also reminds us that when presenting, sometimes it is the fuller citation that works best. Fuels your proposal. Stays in the buyer mind.
A case of the lengthy, unwieldy even, beating the supposedly snappy, pithy social media friendly 'inspirational' excerpt.
We needn't give the truism a bad name here. There's a solid place for aphorisms and koans. Whether crafted (like an EE Cummings) or caught by chance in conversation (especially with a prospect).
As with many of the genre, corollaries exists. Often deliberately sarcastic. Sometimes merely pointing out a tangential path. Although not an option for the crew here no doubt, stretching to such reminder as #failfast perhaps.
What could be taken from this specific learning though, is exploring what specifically might "anything that gets in the way" be?
Now there's a dialogue with a prospect that feels like it might just start to give your moonshot the best chance of getting there and back.
