Life in Small Bites

Petition by STEVE FARBER

We, the undersigned, have devoted ourselves–personally and professionally–to changing the world, in some way, for the better.

We strive to use what we have–passion, talent, desire, resources, imagination, time–to make a difference, to expand the rightness of things.

We don’t consider ourselves to be naive or idealistic–although others certainly may.  We are pragmatists of the highest order: we believe there is nothing more eminently practical than looking at the world, asking, “how can this be better?” and then holding ourselves personally
accountable for getting it done.

We recognize that big, broad, systemic changes need to happen in our society: policies need to shift, attitudes need to evolve, and priorities need to change—and we’ll do whatever we can to contribute to those transformations over time.

In the meantime,

Regardless of what is or is not happening “out there”, and regardless of what other people are or are not doing to change things for the better, we commit to making a difference in the way we lead TODAY.

We are business people, educators, volunteers, friends and neighbors who share a common desire: to help each other to help each other–and we’ll take a Radical Leap to do so.

We are today’s Extreme Leaders, and we invite you to join us.

by Chris Higgins – December 17, 2012 – 11:15 PM

In times of tragedy, we look to teachers for guidance and hope. I can think of no better teacher than Fred McFeely Rogers, better known to us as Mister Rogers–our friendly neighbor–for his gentle wisdom on children, humility, grief, and the specialness of every person. Many of these quotations are collected in the posthumous volume The World According to Mister Rogers, though they come from various sources, including his many television appearances.

1. On Heroes Without Capes

“When I was very young, most of my childhood heroes wore capes, flew through the air, or picked up buildings with one arm. They were spectacular and got a lot of attention. But as I grew, my heroes changed, so that now I can honestly say that anyone who does anything to help a child is a hero to me.”

From The World According to Mister Rogers (Kindle Locations 501-503).

2. On Sharing Responsibility

“We live in a world in which we need to share responsibility. It’s easy to say, ‘It’s not my child, not my community, not my world, not my problem.’ Then there are those who see the need and respond. I consider those people my heroes.”

Spoken in 1994, quoted in his obituary in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

3. From a PSA Following September 11, 2001

If you grew up with our Neighborhood, you may remember how we sometimes talked about difficult things. There were days … even beautiful days … that weren’t happy. In fact, there were some that were really sad.

Well, we’ve had a lot of days like that in our whole world. We’ve seen what some people do when they don’t know anything else to do with their anger.

I’m convinced that when we help our children find healthy ways of dealing with their feelings–ways that don’t hurt them or anyone else–we’re helping to make our world a safer, better place.

I would like to tell you what I often told you when you were much younger: I like you just the way you are.

And what’s more, I’m so grateful to you for helping the children in your life to know that you’ll do everything you can to keep them safe and to help them express their feelings in ways that will bring healing in many different neighborhoods.

Also, regarding the anniversary of the attacks: “[Children] don’t understand what an anniversary is, and if they see the tragedy replayed on television, they might think it’s happening at that moment.”

From The World According to Mister Rogers (Kindle Locations 596-606) and as quoted in his obituary.

4. On What We Do

“What matters isn’t how a person’s inner life finally puts together the alphabet and numbers of his outer life. What really matters is whether he uses the alphabet for the declaration of a war or the description of a sunrise–his numbers for the final count at Buchenwald or the specifics of a brand-new bridge.”

From The World According to Mister Rogers (Kindle Locations 621-623).

5. On Looking for the Helpers

“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’ To this day, especially in times of ‘disaster,’ I remember my mother’s words, and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers–so many caring people in this world.”

From The World According to Mister Rogers (Kindle Locations 645-647).

6. On Helping

“I hope you’re proud of yourself for the times you’ve said ‘yes,’ when all it meant was extra work for you and was seemingly helpful only to somebody else.”

From The World According to Mister Rogers (Kindle Locations 390-391).

7. On Pain

“There is no normal life that is free of pain. It’s the very wrestling with our problems that can be the impetus for our growth.”

From The World According to Mister Rogers (Kindle Location 389).

8. On Accepting Our Feelings

“There’s no ‘should’ or ‘should not’ when it comes to having feelings. They’re part of who we are and their origins are beyond our control. When we can believe that, we may find it easier to make constructive choices about what to do with those feelings.”

From The World According to Mister Rogers (Kindle Locations 131-133).

9. On “Disabilities”

“Part of the problem with the word disabilities is that it immediately suggests an inability to see or hear or walk or do other things that many of us take for granted. But what of people who can’t feel? Or talk about their feelings? Or manage their feelings in constructive ways? What of people who aren’t able to form close and strong relationships? And people who cannot find fulfillment in their lives, or those who have lost hope, who live in disappointment and bitterness and find in life no joy, no love? These, it seems to me, are the real disabilities.”

From The World According to Mister Rogers (Kindle Locations 142-146).

10. On Facing Sadness and Anger

“Confronting our feelings and giving them appropriate expression always takes strength, not weakness. It takes strength to acknowledge our anger, and sometimes more strength yet to curb the aggressive urges anger may bring and to channel them into nonviolent outlets. It takes strength to face our sadness and to grieve and to let our grief and our anger flow in tears when they need to. It takes strength to talk about our feelings and to reach out for help and comfort when we need it.”

From The World According to Mister Rogers (Kindle Locations 111-114).

11. On Love

“Love isn’t a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now.”

From The World According to Mister Rogers (Kindle Location 214).

12. On Humanity’s Intrinsic Value

“As human beings, our job in life is to help people realize how rare and valuable each one of us really is, that each of us has something that no one else has–or ever will have–something inside that is unique to all time. It’s our job to encourage each other to discover that uniqueness and to provide ways of developing its expression.”

From The World According to Mister Rogers (Kindle Locations 463-465).

14. On American History

“A high school student wrote to ask, ‘What was the greatest event in American history?’ I can’t say. However, I suspect that like so many ‘great’ events, it was something very simple and very quiet with little or no fanfare (such as someone forgiving someone else for a deep hurt that eventually changed the course of history). The really important ‘great’ things are never center stage of life’s dramas; they’re always ‘in the wings.’ That’s why it’s so essential for us to be mindful of the humble and the deep rather than the flashy and the superficial.”

From The World According to Mister Rogers (Kindle Locations 496-500).

15. On Life Not Being Cheap

In February of 1999, Fred Rogers was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame. This is an excerpt from his speech (emphasis added).

Fame is a four-letter word; and like tape or zoom or face or pain or life or love, what ultimately matters is what we do with it.

I feel that those of us in television are chosen to be servants. It doesn’t matter what our particular job, we are chosen to help meet the deeper needs of those who watch and listen–day and night!

The conductor of the orchestra at the Hollywood Bowl grew up in a family that had little interest in music, but he often tells people he found his early inspiration from the fine musicians on television.

Last month a thirteen-year-old boy abducted an eight-year-old girl; and when people asked him why, he said he learned about it on TV. ‘Something different to try,’ he said. ‘Life’s cheap; what does it matter?’

Well, life isn’t cheap. It’s the greatest mystery of any millennium, and television needs to do all it can to broadcast that … to show and tell what the good in life is all about.

But how do we make goodness attractive? By doing whatever we can do to bring courage to those whose lives move near our own–by treating our ‘neighbor’ at least as well as we treat ourselves and allowing that to inform everything that we produce.

Who in your life has been such a servant to you … who has helped you love the good that grows within you? Let’s just take ten seconds to think of some of those people who have loved us and wanted what was best for us in life–those who have encouraged us to become who we are tonight–just ten seconds of silence.

No matter where they are–either here or in heaven–imagine how pleased those people must be to know that you thought of them right now.

We all have only one life to live on earth. And through television, we have the choice of encouraging others to demean this life or to cherish it in creative, imaginative ways.

From The World According to Mister Rogers (Kindle Locations 540-558).

16. On Peace

“Peace means far more than the opposite of war!”

From The World According to Mister Rogers (Kindle Location 613).

17. On Solitude

“Solitude is different from loneliness, and it doesn’t have to be a lonely kind of thing.”

From The World According to Mister Rogers (Kindle Location 158).

18. On Strength

“Most of us, I believe, admire strength. It’s something we tend to respect in others, desire for ourselves, and wish for our children. Sometimes, though, I wonder if we confuse strength and other words–like aggression and even violence. Real strength is neither male nor female; but is, quite simply, one of the finest characteristics that any human being can possess.”

From The World According to Mister Rogers (Kindle Location 161).

19. On Generations

“One of the greatest dignities of humankind is that each successive generation is invested in the welfare of each new generation.”

From The World According to Mister Rogers (Kindle Locations 586-587).

20. On Forgiveness

“Forgiveness is a strange thing. It can sometimes be easier to forgive our enemies than our friends. It can be hardest of all to forgive people we love. Like all of life’s important coping skills, the ability to forgive and the capacity to let go of resentments most likely take root very early in our lives.”

From The World According to Mister Rogers (Kindle Location 296).

More from Mister Rogers

There’s a lot of wisdom packed into the book The World According to Mister Rogers. You also should look at Mister Rogers Humbly Accepts a Lifetime Achievement Emmy (warning: it may very well make you cry) and 15 Reasons Mister Rogers Was the Best Neighbor Ever. You can also watch Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood online.

Read the full text here: http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/156804#ixzz2FeLgG1BK
–brought to you by mental_floss!

• I believe I’m a work-in-progress, and there will always be a gap between who I am and who I want to be.
• I believe every day brings opportunities to learn and do something meaningful.
• I believe the true test of my character is whether I do the right thing even when it might cost more than I want to pay.
• I believe no matter how I behave, some people will be mean-spirited, dishonest, irresponsible, and unkind, but if I fight fire with fire, all I’ll end up with will be the ashes of my own integrity.
• I believe life is full of joys and sorrows, and my happiness will depend on how well I handle each.
• I believe pain is inevitable but suffering is optional, and if I can control my attitudes, I can control my life.
• I believe kindness really matters, and sarcastic comments and badly-timed criticisms can cause lasting hurt.
• I believe there’s joy in gratitude and freedom in forgiveness, but both require conscientious effort.
• I believe what’s fun and pleasurable isn’t always good for me, and what’s good for me isn’t always fun and pleasurable.
• I believe no one’s happy all the time, but in the end, I can be as happy as I’m willing to be.
• I believe the surest road to happiness is good relationships.

This is Michael Josephson reminding you that character counts.

Peter H. Diamandis

Dec 7, 2012  –  Public

In this blog, I want to share with you how I overcame the risks involved in taking the world-famous wheelchair-bound physicist Stephen Hawking on a zero-gravity flight.

Doing anything bold and significant in life requires taking risks. And one of the biggest risks I took this past decade was flying the world-famous physicist into zero-gravity.

This blog is the first time I’m speaking about the behind-the-scenes story of those risks and the countermeasures we took. What might have seemed easy from the outside world, was not in any fashion in its execution.

Back in 2007, I had the opportunity to meet Professor Stephen Hawking through the +X PRIZE Foundation. In my first conversation with him I learned that he was passionate about flying into space someday. I told him that while I couldn’t get him into orbit, I could offer him the chance to fly aboard our specially modified Boeing 727 and experience weightlessness. After all, the idea of flying the world’s “greatest expert in gravity” into zero-gravity was too good to be true. He said yes immediately — or for as long as it took him to type out the letters on his machine.

In 2007, I had been running Zero-G for almost 14 years. Co-founded in 1993 with astronaut Byron Lichtenberg and NASA scientist +Ray Cronise, it had been a very, very long startup. It had taken us nearly 11 years to get permission from the FAA to offer the general public the experience of weightlessness (our first flight was in September 2004).

Meeting with my team, we brainstormed making the flight into a fundraiser for ALS (Hawking’s motor neuron disease is related to ALS, or Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis). Hawking quickly agreed and we sent out a press release the very next day saying, “Zero G to fly Stephen Hawking into weightlessness to raise funds for ALS.” I had expected nothing but positive reaction. But what happened next shocked me. I received two phone calls. One came from our airline partner saying, “You’re crazy. You’re going to be flying this guy who has been in a wheelchair for 40 years and there’s a good chance he might get injured.” The other came from a friend at the FAA who said, “You know the rules under which you are operating require that anyone flying must be certified ‘able-bodied’ and I can’t imagine anyone here would view Prof Hawking as able-bodied.” On top of that, I had a number of people in the commercial space world approach me saying that this was a bad idea, that a major accident could set back everything we had been working toward for decades.

I was in a quandary. I had started Zero-G specifically to broaden the public for access to weightlessness. Commercializing space was all about giving the experience to a much broader audience, especially amazing people like Prof. Hawking. To be told “no” was all the more reason to figure out how to make it happen. The challenge was getting there without aggravating the FAA lawyers and also making sure the flight was indeed safe for the world’s most famous physicist.

It took me six months, many phone calls with lawyers, my friends at the FAA, our aircraft partner and a number of physicians… but we finally got there.

The first thing we did was ask the question, “Who determines if someone is able-bodied?” The second question we asked is how we could maximize Hawking’s chances of safety.

The answer to the first question, in our opinion, was that the only folks qualified to judge Hawking’s physical health status were his own personal physicians, and perhaps experts from the space-medicine world. So after purchasing liability and malpractice insurance policies for a few (not disclosed here) physicians, we were able to submit three letters to the FAA stating without question, that Hawking was “able-bodied” for the Zero-G flight.

Regarding the second question about safety, we decided to turn the forward half of the G-ForceOne (our special weightless 727 aircraft) into a mobile emergency room able to deal with any slew of medical conditions that might arise. We also decided to conduct a practice flight with a stand-in for Dr. Hawking on whom we would practice a series of zero-g healthcare maneuvers… everything from CPR to electroshock conversion.

With this plan in place and a final blessing from all concerned parties I set out to make this happen. Here’s what happened next:

– We sold about 20 tickets at $15,000 each from donors and raised about $150,000 for ALS. At the same time, we covered our costs for the flight and press conference. (The flight was also sponsored by Spaceport Florida and by Sharper Image.)

– We flew a practice run the day before the actual flight. All of the paying donors got to fly on this flight as well, and float around and enjoy the experience (the next day, they’d be concentrating on observing Hawking during the flight).

– As a stand-in for Hawking during these “medical test runs,” we found a 15-year old high-school boy who had a passion for physics and who was roughly the same height and weight as Hawking. He was put in a wheelchair, told not not to move a muscle, and we practiced what to do if Hawking had a heart attack and tachycardia or suffered a broken bone. These were things at risk: Hawking is very frail.

– Onboard we had four physicians and two nurses monitoring the 15-year-old’s heart rate, blood pressure, Po2 and breathing at the same time that they ran through all of their emergency medical procedures in zero g.

But the day of the flight was extraordinary.

The entire event took place at the +NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on the 15,000-foot-long Shuttle Landing Facility (SLF) — one of the longest runways in the world. That morning in front of hundreds of reporters, we held a press conference announcing our intention to conduct “a least a single 30-second parabola” (normally on a consumer zero-g flight, we do about 15 in total). We chose to do a pre-flight press conference because, frankly, we had no idea what shape Hawking would be in at the end of the day.

What stood out most in my mind that morning, was his answer to the press conference question: “Professor Hawking, why are you doing this flight?”

This was Hawking’s answer: “Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster…  I think the human race doesn’t have a future if it doesn’t go into space. I therefore want to encourage public interest in space.”

We boarded Hawking on his wheelchair using a scissor lift, then carried him off his wheelchair into one of the seats for takeoff. Once we reached cruising altitude of 24,000 feet, we carried him to the front of the airplane and lay him on top of pre-positioned padding and pillows. At Hawking’s feet was my partner and two-time astronaut Byron Lichtenberg. I was at Hawking’s head. As we entered the first parabolic arc and Hawking floated into the air, the entire airplane erupted into cheers. Thirty people in the back of the plane were hooping and hollering. Hawking was free of his wheelchair and the bounds of gravity for the first time in over 40 years. While his entire body is paralyzed, he does have use of a few facial muscles, and the smile that expressed his emotion was extraordinary. He looked like a kid floating in zero-g. After the first parabola, when we returned to normal gravity, I looked over to the lead physicians monitoring his vitals. Apparently everything was rock solid and I was given the thumbs-up to proceed.  While my original intention was to do at least one parabola, at most, perhaps three, Hawking wanted to keep going. At the end we finished up doing eight parabolas, with Hawking still raring to go.

Hawking was so filled with energy that after we landed he even did a post-flight press conference. The result was front-page press worldwide.

Again, doing anything significantly big and bold in life requires taking risks. This was a big one for me personally and for the company. One question people ask me is how do you know when to take a big risk? My answer is twofold:

1. If the risk is fully aligned with your purpose and mission, then it’s worth considering. In this case, flying people like Hawking is exactly why we had created Zero G.

2. Second, you need to do everything you can to retire as much of the risk as reasonable, such that you can honestly say that you covered all of the situations you were most concerned about.

I get demoralized by organizations that start off with a mission and pull back when they find it’s risky. I view risk-aversion as crippling America in many ways. Most people (and politicians) forget that 500 years ago, thousands of people risked (and gave) their lives to cross the Atlantic and settle America. And then, again, 200 years ago they did the same to settle the West.

For me, Stephen Hawking’s flight also allowed us to pioneer the ability to take handicapped people into weightlessness and a year later we had the opportunity to take a group of six wheelchair-bound teenagers into zero gravity. These were kids who had never walked a day in their lives. Their experiencing the ability to fly like Superman around the airplane without their wheelchairs was remarkable.

Ultimately when you are doing something new, you have to ask yourself is it worth the risk to you? Is it something that you’re willing to bet everything on? If you’re doing something big and bold that’s sometimes what it takes.

Zero-G today has flown over 12,000 people into zero gravity. The company operates flights in cities across the U.S. The ticket price is $5,000 — reasonable when you think of the 11 years of start-up time! If you’re interested in flying, you can find more on the company’s website: www.GoZeroG.com. It is a truly remarkable experience and worth every penny!