Tuesday, November 08, 2011

Creative Panic

The trip I’m on is a research trip. I’m interviewing people for a book. One of them, whom I met just yesterday, is one of the world’s great fighter pilots. He was telling me about a time when his engine cut out at an altitude too low to eject from and how he managed to run through all the engine re-start procedures while the plane was dropping X hundred feet a second, toward a populated area. Bottom line: he ejected anyway, somehow survived—and had the presence of mind while still in the cockpit to trim the plane up so sweetly that it crashed intact and didn’t even catch on fire. I asked him, “How the hell did you do that?” He said, “That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?”

Read the rest of
Steven Pressfield here.

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