Conscious

CHAPTER 10Travel Light

Are you stuck in the past or worrying about the future? These are one of many attachments people carry with them when they are moving too fast without being conscious. It's like dragging around a red wagon full of bricks you don't even need. These negative attachments only keep you from reaching your potential. It's just old baggage. You need to learn to travel light.

As far as anyone in the aviation industry could tell, the stars seemed to have aligned to make Ben Sliney's first day on the job picture-perfect. A low-pressure system had swept into the Atlantic and pushed Hurricane Erin out to sea. From San Francisco to Boston, there wasn't a single airport in the United States that could report any weather conditions other than “severe clear” (pilot lingo for “perfect”).

Sliney's new job was as the Federal Aviation Administration's national operations manager, a position he had worked toward over the two preceding decades. He was looking forward to his first day. On a beautiful Tuesday in September 2001, Ben Sliney became responsible for all air traffic control in the United States.

Think about your first day on the job. You bring all your past experiences, good and bad, with you. If you worked in air traffic control, thinking outside of the box is the last thing you'd expect to have to do. Controllers live by rules and regulations, protocols and procedures, a right way and a wrong way to do things. If you improvise, people could die. Ben Sliney came ...