Transcriber: Son Huynh Reviewer: Denise RQ
Hello. Hi.
Just out of curiosity,
let me see a show of hands for everyone who's ever made a skydive here.
There's several of you out there.
Well, you guys, must be nuts.
You have to admit:
jumping out of a perfectly good airplane is a pretty crazy thing to do.
I really think that it would be down right stupid
if it weren't for one thing:
there is nothing more incredible than flying through the sky,
past the clouds,
using your arms and legs as wings, unattached to any man-made flying machine.
There is nothing like it.
Most people think that skydivers like to jump
because we love the adrenaline rush.
But that's not it at all; I don't like to be scared.
It frightens the hell out of me to be scared.
We jump because we love to fly,
and in free fall, there is no sensation of falling
relative to other people we're in free fall with.
We have complete control and complete maneuverability.
It's the closest mankind has come to experiencing really true human flight.
There is nothing else like it.
I did my first jump back when I was in college.
It was a freshman year, living in the dorms,
the middle of the winter;
we were hanging out and the idea of skydiving came up.
There were about twelve of us who said
how skydiving had been a lifelong dream of ours.
We'd wanted to do it
ever since the first time we saw a picture of a parachute
or a film of somebody in free fall.
We promised that as soon as the winter was over,
we'd schedule a day, and we'd all go make our first jump together.
In the middle of the winter, when it was impossible to do that,
it was really easy to talk big.
But when that day finally arrived,
I got up in the morning, and I was terrified.
I slowly went over to the window
and pulled the curtain to check the weather,
I was begging that it would be pouring rain
so I'd have an excuse not to go,
and I wouldn't have to chicken out in front of everybody.
No such luck.
It was beautiful blue skies.
Some of my friends who lived right in the rooms next to me,
in the same building,
must have looked out a completely different window
because of the twelve of us who were going to go that day,
only four of us actually made it to the skydiving center.
This is over 30 years ago now.
Skydiving was much different back then.
We used round, military surplus parachutes.
They were connected to the airplane with a static line.
The static line would deploy the parachute as soon as you left the airplane.
So it will only be about two or three seconds of free fall.
We used single-engine Cessna planes, tiny, little airplanes,
but all the seats had been taken out of
so that we could fit inside them with the big equipment that we had.
I remember, seated on the floor, facing backwards in the airplane,
the pilot was here, and next to me, on this side,
was a big hole in the airplane where the door had been removed.
All the ride up, I was just about climbing into the pilot's lap
because I don't want to get too close to this door
before it was really time to go.
At about 800 meters,
the instructor looked at me, and he said, "Climb out."
Never been so terrified in my life.
I slowly put my foot outside and reached for the landing gear.
I reached outside, I grabbed the windstrap, I pulled myself out
so I'm now standing under the wing, in the wind, balancing on the tire,
and holding onto this strap for dear life.
I looked back in at the instructor, and he said "Go."
Right then I knew this was it.
This was the moment of decision time.
All the dreaming about skydiving and talking about skydiving
came down to this second.
It wasn't too late.
I could still change my mind and climb back inside.
I was seriously thinking about doing that.
But if I ever wanted to fly, like I'd always dreamed of,
I was going to need to jump off this plane.
I was still standing there, holding on, thinking about it,
as we flew way past
where I was supposed to leave the airplane.
I thought, "I made it this far, I got to go."
I just jumped off and arched as hard as I could,
I watched the plane fly away from me.
That moment of decision time
is the essence of what is meant by the phrase "taking a leap of faith."
I researched all I could and found
everything there was to know about skydiving,
but there is still so much that I didn't know, that I couldn't know.
At that moment, I had to have a little faith
and just trust that my equipment, myself,
and the world that I was going to leap into
would work out as they should.
I think, most of the time,
when we're really trying to achieve a big goal, it's much that way.
We don't often strive to achieve something that we've done before 100 times.
We try to do things we've never done before,
or possibly that no one has ever done before.
I don't see how it's possible to know everything you need to know
about something you've never done before.
To some degree or another, when you're really trying
to stretch yourself and reach for a big goal like that,
you're probably going to have to take some kind of leap of faith.
Well, can I get a glass of water?
From that moment on,
I was jumping out of airplanes every chance I could.
Soon, I discovered 4-way formation skydiving.
4-way is the most competitive athletic event there is
in the sport of skydiving.
The French team were the world champions.
These guys were incredible.
To watch them fly was like watching nobody else.
They were so fast, they were so precise.
They were so in sync with each other all the time.
Thank you.
I watched them, and I thought, "That's it. That's how I want to fly.
That's the way it's done right there."
The more I thought about it, I thought, "I think I can learn to fly like them.
I think I can learn to do that."
Then it occurred to me,
"If I can learn to do that, I could be a world champion too."
I'd never won anything. I'd never even tried to win anything.
But the idea of becoming a world champion at this sport
that I'd so fallen in love with
just grabbed me like nothing ever grabbed me before.
But how could I possibly compete against the French team?
These guys were a professional skydiving team.
They had all the resources anybody could ever want.
They each had two sets of parachute equipment.
They had professional packers who pack the parachutes for them,
so they never had to stop to do that.
They had an airplane of their own, at their disposal
whenever they needed it.
We each had one set of parachute equipment.
We had to pack for ourselves in between every jump.
Then we got on the airplanes with the rest of the skydivers
whenever there was space available.
They were going to make about 1,000 practice jumps in a year.
We'd make, maybe, 150.
The obstacles just seemed to be too many
and based on the numbers alone,
it would be impossible to compete against the pros.
But I've never been that strict of a numbers person,
so I asked myself another question,
"Is it possible for me to succeed?"
Not is it guaranteed that if I do the work, I win.
Not even is it likely,
but could the circumstances exist that make it even remotely possible
that I could compete against the pros?
Well, these guys weren't gods. They weren't super human beings.
They're just people,
and like everybody else, they could be beaten.
That raises a second question,
"Did I want it badly enough
to do what it was going to take to make it happen?"
That's the real question.
A lot of people have the potential to succeed,
far fewer are willing to make the commitment,
to make the sacrifices, to take whatever risks there are
and to do the hard work that is going to be necessary.
So the next question was, "What is it going to take?"
Well, for starters,
I was going to have to quit my job,
leave my home, and move somewhere south
that we could find the skydiving center with good weather
that was open all year round.
Secondly, I was going to have to sell everything I owned
and beg, borrow, and steal
to come up with the rest of the money that this was going to take.
Third, and probably most difficult, I had to find four other guys
who were as nuts as I was, who wanted the same goal
and were willing to make the same commitment.
It just didn't seem like it was going to add up.
So I thought it through.
I thought, "This is what I want more than I've ever wanted anything.
I'm going to have to try."
So I quit my job, packed up my van
with the clothes that I had left after selling everything,
and moved south looking for a team.
Luckily enough, I actually found people who were as nuts as I was,
who wanted to make the same commitment and go after the same goal.
We moved to a skydiving center in Arizona.
We lived in our vans.
We ate out of coolers.
We went skydiving all day, every day.
Ten months and 750 jumps later,
we made it to the National Skydiving Championships.
We went head to head with the pro teams.
It was great; we were right on their level,
skydiving as good as I'd seen the French team.
Now that I was able to fly like this,
it was as fabulous as I always wanted it to be.
But hen it was all set and done, we lost the meat.
At this point, I figured that my quest for the world championship was over.
I was out of time, I was out of money.
If I wanted to have dinner that night, I was going to have to find a job.
Then suddenly, I started getting contacted from skydiving teams all around the world.
They'd seen what our rookie team had done,
how far we had progressed in such a short period of time.
No team had ever done this before.
They thought, "If we could do it, they could probably do it too.
They started hiring me to show them how.
Before I knew it,
my whole schedule was filled with coaching teams.
I was getting paid to do this.
Then I got a phone call
from the largest skydiving center in California;
one of the largest in the world.
They offered me a job.
They wanted to start a team of their own, sponsor it themselves.
They wanted to hire me
to be the player coach and captain of that team.
They were going to pay me to do 4-way.
They were going to pay me to do what I'd just sold everything but my soul
to come up with the money to do it.
No job like this had ever existed;
that's why I never even thought about looking for one.
The job came looking for me.
It was my pursuit of victory that created this opportunity for me.
It was the pursuit of victory not the victory itself.
I'd still never won anything.
This was the opportunity of a life time,
I wasn't going to let it slip by for a second.
They gave me the chance to a collective team
with some of my best friends
who I also knew had unlimited potential in this sport.
We started training immediately.
We had a learning curve that was steeper than any team I've been on so far.
Every day, we had the chance to really challenge ourselves,
to be the best athletes, the best sportsmen,
the best flyers, the best teammates,
and really, really, the best people that we could be.
I know it's the most overused cliche in the world,
but I was truly, truly living my dream.
Then I was woken up one day
and usually, I would just leap out of bed; I couldn't wait to go to work.
This day was different.
This day I could hardly get out of bed.
I felt like I was so heavy,
like there was someone pushing me down into bed.
I was trying to collect my thoughts, but I couldn't even think straight.
I tried to open my eyes,
but I didn't have the energy to even peel my eyelids open.
Then I thought, "There is something wrong.
There's something seriously wrong here."
When I was able to finally open my eyes,
I found myself laying flat on my back and staring straight up at the ceiling.
Over me, I saw wires, hoses, lights, and gauges.
I realized I'm waking up in a hospital bed.
I had no idea what had happened,
what I was doing there or what was going on.
I soon found out that I had been in a plane crash.
In the crash, I'd broken my neck, cracked my skull,
had a severe brain injury,
collapsed one lung and had other internal damage.
You can imagine this was quite disturbing,
because the last thing I could remember, I was great.
I was on top of the world.
That wasn't all the bad news.
The plane we were riding in carried 22 people;
16 of the 22 had been killed in the crash.
One of them was one of my teammates who was like a little brother to me.
Other members of a team called Tomscat from Holland
that had come to work with me in California.
All the rest were pretty much close friends of mine.
The crash had been over a month ago.
They told me I'd been in a coma for nearly six weeks and lost 40 pounds.
While I was sitting there trying to grasp all of this,
I realized that not only were these friends gone
but they were buried weeks ago.
This was already history.
The doctor came in, and he told me I was lucky to be alive.
It was fairly clear.
He said that it looked like I'd be able to recover and go back to a normal life.
But it would be a new normal.
It would be a normal that included daily medication
and excluded any rigorous athletic activities or sports,
and that I would certainly never skydive again.
It was like I was waking up
in a completely different world than the one I remembered,
like there was a parallel universe,
and I was a completely different person here.
In the world I remembered,
I was strong, I was confident, I was completely independent.
I had a very clear goal that I was aiming for.
I had a path on how I planned to get there.
I knew who I was,
and the person I was hoping to become in pursuit of that goal.
That was all over.
Now I woke up a completely different person.
I was weak, I was fragile.
I was insecure.
I wasn't thinking straight.
I was completely dependent on everybody else for everything.
I didn't recognize myself.
I didn't recognize myself when I was looking from the inside out;
and I certainly didn't know who that was I was looking at in the mirror.
I had no idea what my future could possibly hold.
But I did remember one thing.
I remembered what it felt like to truly, truly be living my dream.
After having had the chance to experience a life like that
I didn't want to settle for anything less.
If I couldn't skydive anymore, I'd have to find a new dream.
But whether I could continue this pursuit for the world championships
even under these circumstances,
came down to the same two questions,
"Was it possible for me to succeed?"
Despite the doctor's grim prognosis,
I saw no reason that I couldn't skydive again.
My spinal cord, fortunately, was intact.
My internal organs were working well enough that I would get by.
"Did I want it badly enough
to do what it was going to take to make it happen?"
I've never been in a situation like this before.
so I really didn't know what it was going to take,
but I knew that if I could get past this time,
I'd be ready to handle any challenge that came up.
Having said yes to both those questions, I had to try; I had to.
We recovered. We rebuilt our team.
We made it to the National Championships that same year,
and we got the bronze medal.
We rebuilt the team, got back to the National Championships the next year,
and got the silver medal.
Rebuilt the team again, got back to the Nationals
and finally, won the gold medal
and went on to win the World Championships
the next five times in a row.
(Applause)
Thanks, I needed to drink.
Having finally achieved this goal I was after,
I could not have been more proud,
but those particular championships and medals
were single moments in time.
They were so short-lived.
Really pursuing your dream, going after your goal,
that was a way of life.
And after almost having had my life taken away from me,
that's the way of life I'm always going to choose to live.
All of you guys have great ideas. That's why you're here.
That's what TED is all about.
With those ideas come specific goals.
Make sure you're not just talking about them.
Go after those goals.
Pursue those dreams.
Follow your passion.
I know these are cliches you're sick of hearing,
but they are not only cliches.
They are very real if you want to make them real.
Ask yourself those two questions,
"Is it possible for you to succeed?"
And if so, "Do you want it badly enough to do what it's going to take or not?"
If you answer yes to both those questions,
then you owe it to yourself to try.
It won't matter.
It won't matter if you actually win or not.
Make it to decision time.
Have the chance to take that leap of faith.
Even if you don't accomplish exactly what you're after,
the pursue of that goal itself, just by doing that,
you'll enrich your life more than you'd possibly anticipated.
I strongly encourage you to do so.
Thank you.
(Applause)