Life doesn’t always pan out like you thought it would

I don’t really talk about aviation a whole lot, mostly because the topic doesn’t generally interest me anymore. But from about the age of 3 to 35, I was obsessed with aviation and flying. It was all I thought about, and all I wanted to be was a pilot.

How bad?

I started taking flying lessons when I was 15 and soloed at 16. I only applied to one university program, and it was the Professional Aeronautics program at Kansas State University. Thankfully, 18-year-old me saw the roadmap to becoming a commercial pilot and realized it wasn’t really something that looked appealing (at the time, circa 2001, the average annual earnings of a brand new First Officer was like $20k). Also, thankfully, I had flown enough as a teenager to realize it wasn’t something I loved enough to do for a living. Plus, being a professional pilot is a LOT of work. But I digress.

Instead, 9/11 happened, and I found the Air Force recruiting office. My best friend was a crew chief on CH-47 Chinooks in the Army Reserve, so that type of work appealed to me. Off I went to Central Texas to work on B-1B bombers.

Fast forward to the mid-2010s. My time in the Air National Guard was up, and I was working full-time for the Department of the Army, still in aviation. But there was something really unsettling about it all. See, in my job (airfield/airport manager); you are basically the SME for all aviation-related situations on the entire Post. While it was cool, it was also completely stove-piped. The only way to move up was to move on to somewhere else, and I didn’t really want to move. But more than that, and this is relatable for basically all W2 jobs, was that there wasn’t anything more I could do to scale my worth than to try and get hired somewhere else.

Essentially, my career was always in someone else’s hands, and I didn’t like that. I like it even less today.

So, that brings me up to the topic at hand: I don’t care much about aviation anymore these days because my interests changed. It turns out that I’m a lot more interested in working on my own terms and scaling my career as I please than waiting for someone else to give me the green light finally. And I’ll bet you feel the same way. It isn’t anyone else’s job to make you fit; that’s on you! No one else can make you eat healthy. No one else can make you get up early and hit the gym when you don’t want to. So why is your job any different?

Instead of striving for just enough to stay employed, wouldn’t you rather take matters into your own hands and scale your earning power based on your skills and savvy?

It’s not for everyone, I’ll tell you that much. But once you get a taste of it, it’s hard to ever go back.

P.s.-I don’t plan to ever return to the aviation industry, but I still run outside whenever I hear an airplane or helicopter. And that ain’t gonna change 😎

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