Okay, technically he wasn’t talking about business success, per se. But “Fearless” Felix Baumgartner knows how to take on a complex challenge, face down unexpected problems, and succeed. Something that small business owners and entrepreneurs do every day.
On the 65th anniversary of Chuck Yeager’s legendary flight breaking the sound barrier, Felix Baumgartner, the Austrian daredevil, jumped out of a hot air balloon and free fell more than 24 miles (128,100 feet) to earth yesterday, then amazingly landed on his feet to the cheers of his friends and sponsors. At one point, he was traveling at 833.9 miles per hour, easily breaking the sound barrier. The jump/fall took less than 10 minutes.
He had trained for five years. He had to overcome a debilitating case of claustrophobia, which made putting on his space suit almost impossible. And during the fall, he started to spin out of control and had to figure out how to stop it. He risked exposure to the vacuum of space which could have caused his blood to vaporize. He had to tolerate extremely low temperatures (-91.8 F) which might freeze his equipment or him. And an accidental deployment of his parachute at such a high altitude would have been disastrous.
Yet, he did it. And made it look easy. Here are a few of the things Felix Baumgartner said about the experience that we think easily apply to the challenges small business owners face every day:
“It’s way more difficult than anything I have done before.”
“There was a time I really thought I was in trouble. I had to decide to fight all the way down and I finally got stable.”
“I had a system to achieve this. I break things into portions. I don’t look at the end result, just always looking for the next task.”
“The exit was perfect but then I started spinning slowly. I thought I’d just spin a few times and that would be that, but then I started to speed up. It was really brutal at times. I thought for a few seconds that I’d lose consciousness… It was really a lot harder than I thought it was going to be.”
“Sometimes you have to be really high to see how small you really are.”
“I couldn’t have done it without my team. Everyone joining my dream. We were on top of the world.”
“Don’t live life as a spectator. Always examine life. Espouse new ideas. Long for new things, constantly discovering new interests, escaping from boring routines. Engage life with enthusiasm—grasping life aggressively and squeezing from it every drop of excitement, satisfaction, and joy. The key to unleashing life’s potential is attitude.”
—Felix Baumgartner, Daredevil Sky Diver
