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Pure exploration without a sense of what one is looking for can take a long time. The value of technical knowledge, when used as an approximate goal, is that it gives the student a sense of direction and focus. For example, it might take a student unnecessarily long to learn to weight the downhill ski instead of leaning back toward the hill as initial instinct dictates. A pure awareness instruction might be, “Notice how your weight is distributed between your uphill ski and your downhill ski.” This instruction, with appropriate follow-up questions, would produce the desired result in time. But the goal might be reached more easily with the following set of instructions: “Placing more weight on the downhill ski than on the uphill ski will give you more balance and will make turning easier. What I want you to explore is how much more to weight it. You can try weighting different amounts and look for what feels best and what works best for you.” In this case I am not worried about doing it right or doing it wrong, because I’ve been told to explore. At each step of the way I am paying attention to my own experience and am looking for my destination. My instructor observes my learning process and may make recommendations to see what happens if I increase or decrease the weight distribution. But these recommendations are not so much trying to get me to do it right as they are aiding my process of self-discovery. Because my primary reference is my own experience, I become more capable of knowing when I am on or off track. The instructor is thus playing the role of making me more and more independent.
Inner Skiing
W. Timothy Gallwey
“Look, winning has a price. And leadership has a price. So I pulled people along when they didn’t want to be pulled. I challenged people when they didn’t want to be challenged. And I earned that right. … You ask all my teammates: ‘The one thing about Michael Jordan is he never asked me to do something that he didn’t (bleeping) do.’ When people see this, they’re going to say: ‘He really wasn’t a nice guy. He may have been a tyrant.’ Well, that’s you. Because you never won anything. I wanted to win. But I wanted them to win and be a part of that as well.”
— Michael Jordan, at the end of Episode 7 of the ESPN Films documentary series “The Last Dance.”
‘People Were Afraid of Him’: Michael Jordan’s Competitive Fire Often Blistered His Chicago Bulls Teammates — Even as It Devoured His Foes
Dan Wiederer
In my view, shared by many blue-suiters, this marvelous airplane should still be operational but, alas, that was not to be. One of the most depressing moments in the history of the Skunk Works occurred on February 5, 1970, when we received a telegram from the Pentagon ordering us to destroy all the tooling for the Blackbird. All the molds, jigs, and forty thousand detail tools were cut up for scrap and sold off at seven cents a pound. Not only didn’t the government want to pay storage costs on the tooling, but it wanted to ensure that the Blackbird never would be built again. I thought at the time that this cost-cutting decision would be deeply regretted over the years by those responsible for the national security. That decision stopped production on the whole series of Mach 3 aircraft for the remainder of this century. It was just plain dumb.
Skunk Works
Ben R. Rich and Leo Janos
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