Forming a PAC to support the best candidate to represent you.

Builders:

The title above may sound like politics, but it is just the reverse. My own version of “PAC” is “Personal Aviation Constitution”. It is your own individual written document where you define what your personal goals in aviation are.

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Most people in homebuilding spend several hundred hours a year, listening to other people’s ideas about people in aviation should be doing, or be envious of. I am merely proposing that it is more productive to start the new year, investing several hours in yourself, defining your own path, and affirming your right to do so, even in the face of almost certain criticism and peer pressure. If someone tries to mock or judge your work to define your own goals in writing, quietly know this: They are the enemy of your dreams and plans, no matter how strongly they portray themselves as ‘helpful.’

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You don’t need the prose nor the penmanship of the founding fathers; start by writing down the things you plan to do this year. This can be broken down into books you read, events you attend, and things you will build.

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Be bold enough to write down the next 3 planes you will build and finish. Ignore the inner negative voice, trained by others, which interjects pessimistic budgets or possible negative outcomes. This is a valuable exercise in believing in yourself, and taking a moment to notice how everyone, you included, have unconsciously absorbed many of the attitudes of pessimistic people.

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Go ahead and write down the 8 airports you will fly your airplane to when it is done. Get maps of these places, print Googe earth satellite views of them, and make it a goal to visit two of them by land this year, and arrive at one of them in a plane (flying in with a friend in his C-172 is just fine) This will keep you focused on what you will be doing with the plane when it is done.

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Last actually write down a pledge to yourself that you will not take advice from anyone this year unless they have personally built and flown a homebuilt 100 hours. This includes not even reading posts from alleged people like “Flyboy26@stupid.com” Go ahead, and write down the names of one magazine, one website, and one discussion group, that because of their alarmist or negative attitudes, you will not read once in the next year. While your at it, make a list of the four people who have built and flown the exact same airframe/engine combination you are working on, who you will follow, get to know by asking polite and thoughtful questions by email, and decide to meet at least one of these people in the next year

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Thinking that this all sounds funny, like work, and worse like thinking? That line of thinking sends you back to blindly wasting hours reading about “industry trends”, makes you feel like a spectator, and gets you to alter your path instead of carefully defining it, then you have sold your dreams to another person for the great sum of….. absolutely nothing. I may never have met you, and I may sound like I have strange ideas, but I think your dreams are valuable, and that makes me a better friend to you than anyone who though direct or subtle attack, or infusion of negativity would have you give up or mutilate your dreams, just because they gave theirs up long ago.

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Forming your  “PAC” to support the best candidate to represent you, is merely defining how you will come to be the champion, protector and provider of your own dreams and plans. Making this transformation to be in charge of this facet of your life is an enormously important benefit of successful homebuilding.

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A young person in my family recently asked me about Jimmy Carter. All they knew of him was repetitions of judgments pundits had made 35 years ago.  I surprised them by saying I admired the man, not because I agreed with everything he did, but because he wasn’t fake. He promised only to be an honest simple man, and even if you don’t like some of the things he did, one must admit he kept his word.  I pointed out that he was followed by a man who traded arms for hostages, a pathological philanderer, a man who stated the longest and most expensive war is US history, and a man who proved to bring very little of the change he spoke of. There are good things about each of these men, but they didn’t set the bar on honesty, Carter did. When the people get really tired of politics, the most frequent cause is being near continiously  lied to to, not the lack of effective action.

If anyone is tempted to consider the positive works of a leader first, please take a minute to read this story: Thought for the day: Virtue vs Depravity , it includes the quote below and some good notes on who not to get into a plane with.

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 “One should judge a man by his depravities. Virtues can be faked. Depravities are real”

Klaus Kinski, German actor and artist, 1926-1991.

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-ww.