486: General Kip Ward, part 2: Not flying by choice, and smiling about it
A retired General doesn’t have to do anything he doesn’t want to. What he does, he’s going to do for his reasons, not for trends or as a dilettante.
Kip committed to a challenge many consider unreasonable and impossible (I know because they tell me): avoiding flying. As a General, he’s held the fates of a nation and hundreds of thousands of troops in his hands. When he speaks about his experience, I hear him speaking at a life level.
He spoke about his many opportunities to fly for business and pleasure, but not taking them. He could have. Besides his choice based on his motivation, he could have flown.
He didn’t. Yet he shares the opposite of complaints or feeling left out. How is that possible?
He describes handling the commitment with his wife, his conferences, what he learned from the pandemic, how it connected to his legacy with the future, and how he made it work.
Service
He speaks about service and helping your team and teammates achieving more than they would. Is helping our communities not what we want to do regarding our shared environment?
If we do our best and enable our peers to outperform their best, isn’t that our best way to achieve the best results we can? We can’t change the past, but we can do our best and help others do their best.
Systemic change begins with personal transformation.