It’s Sometimes the Little Decisions
When little things happen in my life, I pay a lot more attention to the meaning than I once did. Looking back, I realized that it was tiny decisions that often had the most profound impact on the course of my life.
In 2007, just as the sale of Open Interface North America was about to close with Qualcomm, I was going to buy a Cirrus SR22 and get back into flying. I’d already picked colors, options, etc. And, I’d made plans to fly to Duluth and there was an unsold production number ready for me to just say yes.
I’d been following the Cirrus owner’s blog and they were all writing about the safety of the SR22 and I began to have concerns about the product. I was reading every complaint and some were not good. Most were saying they loved their plane but were also virtue signaling every chance they had about safety and said it was a dangerous product.
I distinctly remember what happened to the founder of Eagle Computer the day after his company went public in the 80s and how he died in a car crash racing the streets near San Francisco. I happened to be down there that day. I began to notice others who died immediately after a major windfall from their companies. There was the sailor who died jumping off his new sailboat into a school of Irukanji jellyfish and died within hours. There were others. The pattern was all the same, event, adventure, death.
Months earlier, Cirrus had made changes to their aircraft, including increasing the dihedral of the wings. There were lots of arguments about its safety as a result. A new owner was landing over the Thanksgiving holiday and hit a heavy crosswind, rolled over and stalled before touchdown and died in a fiery crash with three others aboard. I made a snap decision not to buy the plane that very moment I read about the accident. I saw it as a sign and I was already superstitious about what would happen to me post sale of Open Interface.
I instead decided to get into exotic cars, and again, I was wary, but not as much. I had no intention of becoming another statistic. I read about the inability to get out of a Murcielago if it was on its roof and carried a hammer under the seat, just in case. I was already spooked.
The course of my decision not to buy the plane and instead immerse in the car community and go on to build E@RTC and Middlerock would never have happened, had I gone the flying route. I don’t know where that would have led either, but I do know that over half the people in my life today would never have met me had I gone that different course, and all of those people on the flying side, well we consequently never met, so who knows.
E@RTC has built hundreds of relationships over the last twelve years. People met there, got married and had kids. Businesses were formed, while others were inspired to get into exotics, or start that next venture. We get countless people who tell me how E@RTC changed the course of their lives and when I think back, it was all because of that one decision I made that one morning.
Today, I have people in my life and I don’t know where it will lead. I have people I love who I care about and who I’d love to help in some way. I keep thinking about the little things, my interactions, their incidence on me and how all these little things change the course of our lives and impact the course of others, often with us not having any idea or even intending to have any influence at all. I’d like to think it’s all for the best, but who knows. Maybe my life would have been better had I gone flying. I’ll never know. I just knew it wasn’t the right course.
Little things are happening in my life right now that I know could have a big impact, so I’m thinking a lot, diligent in my work so I know where it could all lead. It’s just that after all I’ve experienced, I’m thinking about my decisions with a lot more care than ever before.