Today is July 2 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “Do you recognize the overnight success myth?”
People who navigate the chaos understand what Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson noted in their best-selling book Rework: “You know those overnight-success stories you’ve heard about? It’s not the whole story. Dig deeper and you’ll usually find people who have busted their asses for years to get into a position where things could take off….you have to do it for a long time before the right people notice.”
Edwin Albert Link, Jr. knows all too well that being an overnight success is just a myth. Link created the first flight simulator but his road to success was far from a smooth non-stop flight. Born in 1904, Link was 16 years old when he fell in love with flying and took his first lesson.
Over the next seven years his fascination with flying grew and he eventually purchased a four seat Cessna.
Since he had been working in his father’s piano and organ factory Link used pumps and other parts to build a devise that compressed the key elements of a plane the size of a bathtub.
He named his device the Link Aviation Trainer and advertised that he could teach pilots regular flying and instrument flying. For seven years no one wanted to use his device.
By the early 1930s he was reduced to hauling one of his trainers on a flatbed truck to county fairgrounds, charging 25 cents a ride. In 1934, however, 14 years after he discovered flying and 7 years after he created his simulator, the U.S. government finally purchased simulators to help improve the training of Air Corps pilots.
Successful people who navigate the chaos recognize that overnight success is a myth. Do you?