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For Wilbur and Orville the dream had taken hold. The works of Lilienthal and Mouillard, the brothers would attest, had “infected us with their own unquenchable enthusiasm and transformed idle curiosity into the active zeal of workers.” They would design and build their own experimental glider-kite, drawing on much they had read, much they had observed about birds in flight, and, importantly, from considerable time thinking. They had made themselves familiar with the language of aeronautics, the terms used in explaining the numerous factors involved in attaining “equilibrium” or balance in flight, where balance was quite as crucial as in riding a bicycle. Lift came from air moving faster over the arched top of a wing, thereby making the pressure there less than that under the wing. Pitch was the tilt of the flying machine, front and back, nose down, nose up. Roll applied to the rotation of the wing, up or down on one side or the other, like a boat rocking. Yaw applied to the direction of the flight, the turning of the plane pointing the nose left or right. Equilibrium was the all-important factor, the brothers understood. The difficulty was not to get into the air but to stay there, and they concluded that Lilienthal’s fatal problem had been an insufficient means of control—“his inability to properly balance his machine in the air,” as Orville wrote. Swinging one’s legs or shifting the weight of one’s body about in midair were hardly enough. Wilbur’s observations of birds in flight had convinced him that birds used more “positive and energetic methods of regaining equilibrium” than that of a pilot trying to shift the center of gravity with his own body. It had occurred to him that a bird adjusted the tips of its wings so as to present the tip of one wing at a raised angle, the other at a lowered angle. Thus its balance was controlled by “utilizing dynamic reactions of the air instead of shifting weight.” The chief need was skill rather than machinery. It was impossible to fly without both knowledge and skill—of this Wilbur was already certain—and skill came only from experience—experience in the air. He calculated that in the five years Lilienthal had devoted to gliders and gliding, he spent a total of only five hours in actual flight. It was hardly enough and not how he and Orville would proceed.
The Wright Brothers
David McCullough
It has been estimated that upward of 10% of the American public have significant narcissistic personality features. Most major psychoanalytic theorists see a continuity between normal narcissism and pathological narcissism. The extremity of the narcissistic personality disorder illuminates normal narcissism. In the DSM IV, 1994, the overall description of the Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is a “pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration and lack of empathy, beginning in early adulthood, and present in a variety of contexts.” Including five (or more) of the following, the person with the NPD: 1. Has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements). 2. Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love. 3. Believes that he or she is “special” and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions). 4. Requires excessive admiration. 5. Has a sense of entitlement (i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations). —American Psychiatric Association, 2013, p. 669
Dangerous Charisma
Jerrold Post, Stephanie Doucette
Too Little of What You Need, Too Much of What You Don’t Most of the mistakes you can make on the way to achieving your goal fall into two broad categories of wrongs. The first is what psychologists call underregulation,1 not doing enough of something you need to do for success. So far the mistakes I’ve talked about in this chapter, missing opportunities and not self-monitoring, are examples of this kind of error. Lacking the self-control to avoid temptation and control your impulses is another kind of underregulation.
Succeed
Heidi Grant Halvorson Ph.D. and Carol S. Dweck
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