Tuesday. I sit in the dining hall eating the marshmallows from Lucky Charms, reading the Wall Street Journal.
crunch, there goes the blue moon. Student loans, I read, are up hundreds of percentage points. Housing loans are down. Have been down, since the recession.
crack, there goes the little rainbow. No one is buying houses anymore. Median age is 44. Am I going to wait 26 more years to buy my first house?
snap, there goes the shamrock. No one is getting lucky anymore. No one is taking risks. Does that include me?
***
In 1918, Captain Benjamin Lispner founded the Airmail.
1918 was a horrendously bad time to start Airmail, but Captain Lispner was the kind of person who could not be daunted. In 1918, Woodrow Wilson was getting the US involved in WWI— a bad time for all— and aviation was still mostly seat-of-your-pants, Wright-Brothers style. People were just beginning to realize that you could mount machine guns on planes to fire through the propellors instead of just pilots shooting handguns at each other.
Someone later told him: “If I had been in charge when you tried to start the damn Airmail in the middle of a war, you’d be in jail now.”
But that someone was not in charge, and on May 15th, 1918, with Woodrow Wilson himself in attendance, they stood in a field in DC, and watched the first plane take off.
It had not been filled with gas when they first started it. Lispner hoped the President did not notice that the pilot began flying the wrong way, south instead of north to New York.
And thus began catastrophic risk of the Airmail service.
Four Flying Jennys, famous printed upside down in the stamps; perhaps it was an omen of things to come. No instruments, no cockpit covers, just ex-military pilots and old barnstormers and flying across mountains in fog with only instincts and nerve.
The mail is important, but not that important. Not important enough to die for, as many of those pilots did.
***
It has all become so boring, so watered down, diluting good wine. Can you advance anything without risks? Nothing on earth is every going to be 100% safe; at what level is there an acceptable loss rate and you move on?
A century ago, people flew rickety airplanes for fun, brushing up against death only to pull up at the last moment (or not, and suffer it) and now—
Now everyone seems much less content with the risks.
I crunch my marshmallows.
Or maybe it is all much more calculated and quantified now and I know what I am up against, toe to toe. If I take a rocket into space I know there is a .003 percent chance I will not get to return here and eat these marshmallows again. If I fly on a commercial jet there is a .0003 percent chance I will not return. If I BASE jump off a dam, there is a .03 percent chance I will not survive.
I know.
And because I know I sit here eating lucky charms and reading a newspaper instead of investing, instead of flying, instead of doing?
What is acceptable risk, acceptable loss?
***
Enter Jack Knight.
Jack Knight could be credited with saving air mail.
It is 1921 and the post office is struggling to make all its flights, to gather enough money. Congress is reluctant to provide more funds. And thus the new suggestion— a trans-continental run. Two pilots will take off from San Francisco, two from New York. They will meet members of their relay teams, and thus, the mail will go through.
Jack Knight was waiting in Nebraska, and by the time the baton was handed to him, he was the only pilot still flying. One was dead in the Nevada desert. The pilots who were supposed to meet him in Iowa were kept back by a snowstorm. All the rest of the mail had been loaded onto trains.
Jack Knight flew the whole way to Chicago in a snow storm, at night, with no navigation.
It was insane and it could have killed him and it probably should have but when the mail went through to New York— because he made that leg— and Congress funded the airmail service.
Should he have done it? When he landed in Iowa, hearing that the other pilot was delayed, should he have given up?
Knowing all the risks and the meager reward, should he have given in, loaded the mail onto a train? It wasn’t like he was Lispner and this was his dream; he was just a pilot with a broken nose from a crash a few weeks early and a refusal to give in, no matter how insane it was.
Can you advance without people like that?
***
Innovation requires careful math and safety.
Innovation also requires people like Jack Knight who are willing to look the risk in the eyes and ignore it; you can’t go to space without astronauts and you can’t build planes without test pilots. You can’t remake an economy without people who are willing to put up the money into crazy things.
Calculated risk is important– you don’t want to kill people.
But so is ignoring the odds to make progress.
Calculate the risk. Quantify it. Try, up to a point, to reduce it.
But then find someone crazy. Someone with a indomitable spirit, someone won’t take no for an answer and when present with impossibility will surmount it with unbelievable alacrity. They can be a good engineer; they can be a Jack Knight who will fly blind for the airmail, of all things.
You cannot have innovation without risks. You cannot have heroism without risks.
I pick out all the marshmallows from my lucky charms, let them shift from hand to hand.
I am no Jack Knight.
Not yet, anyway.
I finish off the marshmallows in one crunch, dust off my hands, take the newspaper, and go to find something to challenge. Something to overcome.
Maybe a nice biplane and a sack of air mail will do the job.
Oh, and midnight.
With no compass.
And a snowstorm for fun.