“Welcome aboard! On behalf of Delta Airlines and our code-share partner, AeroMexico, our Cincinnati-based flight crew would like to welcome you aboard flight 176, service to Dublin, Ireland.”

Let’s see, I’m traveling to Atlanta on an AeroMexico flight from Orlando, Florida to Dublin, Ireland with a flight crew from Cincinnati, Ohio. That’s gotta qualify as a Daily Miracle.

I read a riddle once that posed the question, “If you look at the very center of the arc of a rainbow, what will you see?“

The answer is, “Your shadow.”

From aircraft I’ve had the pleasure of seeing full circle rainbows several times, and sure enough, there’s the shadow of the plane in the middle. I often wonder if the plane were banked a the right angle, if I would be able to see the shadow of the plane, within that light of the sun shining through the windows of the plane, with the silhouette of my head in the light of the window in the shadow of the plane in the middle of the rainbow!

A little while later, I look to my right out of the window (flying from ATL to EWR I was looking east) and there was a shadow of the plane in the middle of a bright bullseye-rainbow! Rainbows are visually pretty large; more than 80 degrees of your field of view. This was much smaller, and as the clouds reflecting the rainbow came closer, the shadow of the plane grew HUGE. Really, really a cool sight to see. It looked exactly like an archery target.

Definitely not the 40~ (x2) span of a rainbow. Which cause me to look it up when I got home. I found a picture of something similar, but not as spectacular. Here is a picture. It’s called a glory (or pilot’s glory, or solar glory), and I don’t quite understand why you see a glory sometimes (I’m sure I’ve seen them before and just didn’t realize what it was) and sometimes a rainbow. I will figure it out one of these days. I’m currently thinking it has to do with the distance from you point of view to the point of refraction. Far away = rainbow, closer = glory.

One of these day’s I’ll talk about sun dogs, which I’ve seen twice in my life, but one time it was like looking at a crystal fortress in the sky.

Another thing is that when a cover band plays, they play only the most popular songs recorded by the original band. That way, the listener always gets something they want (or at least something they wanted once upon a time). The original band may have recorded hundreds of songs, but cover bands pick only the hits. No “B” sides for them!

The The Physics of Success is an original work. There’s not much in the way of “feel good” success stories, or “turn your life around” formulas. It’s like listening to music you’ve never heard before – you need to think.

I do include a “How-To” chapter, but it’s pretty cut-and-dried. Do these five things and you will succeed. Ta-da. I suppose if I wanted to sell more books, I’d fluff it up a bit. Which sort of brings us to the point.

I do want to sell more books. This gets us to the bit about the title here, namely The Future of the Physics of Success. So, you can look for a website coming soon that has a lot of fluff and stuff. Or at least a bit.

I’ll keep you posted.

They tore the place up. Packed house, kitchen open and cooking all night, three bartenders couldn’t pour the drinks fast enough.  They were turning down jobs by the end of the night.

Meantime, Big Bands all over are struggling for jobs, at the Atlanta Wind Symphony we are struggling to maintain finances and improve audiences, and Duke Fame, a band with two CD’s and air play will take a gig for beer at this point.  What’s up with that?  And what does it have to do with The Physics of Success?

Well, The Physics of Success pretty much explains everything, so it must explain this. It does, but that’s not the point. The point is I feel the same way about the success of an amateur garage band compared to the plight of professional musicians as I do about the success of a lot of success books based on pretty flimsy science. The Physics of Success is not based on flimsy science.

I saw an interview with one of these fellows, who mumboed a lot of jumbo about quantum mechanics. A real, live, physicist asked him a couple of questions, all of which were answered in vague, fluttery language having to do with consciousness. The physicist said, “You keep attributing everything to consciousness, but the last I heard, nobody knows what consciousness is.“

[Three cheers for the physicist!] The answer was something like, “Consciousness is the superposition of quantum probabilities that expresses the infinite possibilities of being.”

When asked if he knew what that meant, the physicist replied, “I know what all of those words mean, but I’ve never heard them put together quite like that, so no, I really don’t know what that means.”

I would have just called baloney.

The correct answer is that we don’t know what consciousness is, period.  I hope I made that clear in The Physics of Success. If not, I’d like to make it clear now. True enough, physics must be able to explain consiousness, and also explain why success principles operation, because eventually physics must be able to explain everything by definition. I like to think I figured it out a bit earlier that some other people.

The reason crowds like cover bands is because they don’t have to think. There’s nothing to learn. The reason people like the fluffy success books is because the books just tell them what to do, and people don’t have to think.

More to come…

Nice guy, pretty good sized black kid, late teens, with all-new clothes.  The tags were still on.  He was wearing a Pittsburg black-and-yellow theme, from the “P” ball cap to the new white shoes with black-and-yellow trim.  He didn’t know how to find his seat, which was a clue he was pretty new to flying.  He’s headed to see family in Dallas, flying through Atlanta, and the first plane he ever rides is an hour and a half late taking off.

Okey-dokey.  He’s a bit nervous.  We have a chat about flying.  The flight attendant had to explain that he not only had to stop texting, he had to turn his phone off – both of them.  I had to explain after we were taxiing to the runway that no, he could not get off the plane, it was too late to do that.  He was fairly convinced it was time to die.  I explained that was not going to happen.

Takeoff was uneventful, except that he was clinging for dear life to anything he could grab.  I explained all of the noises and so on.  When we got some altitude and he relaxed a bit, he asked how fast we were going.  I told him probably pretty close to 500 mph.  He was all, “No Way!” and I was all, “Uh-huh – WAY!” and showed him the plane specs in the magazine.

As I peeked out the window, I saw we were coming up on a cloud layer, so I told him to check it out and warned we’d feel a couple bumps in the cloud.  When we went through the clouds, you would be able to see how fast we were really going.

Well, it was late evening, and we were headed almost due south with the sun coming from the other side of the plane.  We zipped through the layer and the view was absolutely stunning.  It got a “wow” from both of us – him because he’d never seen anything like that, and me because it was a reverse view of the dream I described in the last post.

He was much more relaxed after that, as he figured out that the sun was shining on top of all the nasty weather, and no matter how ugly it was below, it was beautiful above. I’m not waxing poetic, by the way, he actually said that. It’s a good idea to get yourself a fresh viewpoint now and then. After we landed, he was pretty sold on this whole “flying” thing.

Just for jollies, since I was home, and he was really late for his connection in the busiest airport in the world, I took him to the connecting gate. His connection was also late, and he got on his flight to Dallas.

I was flying into Montgomery field east of San Diego, coming down out of a bank of clouds into the Cuyamaca Mountains on a gorgeous afternoon with the sun illuminating the clouds from below.  It’s quite a sight.  I distinctly thought, “That’s a daily miracle I need to put in the blog.”

Then I woke up.  Ah. 

That would be me telling myself that there’s plenty of things to be blogging about, so here I am.

But…

…that was more of a memory than a dream.  I’ve seen clouds lit from below (while I was above), planes dipping in and out of city-lit fog at LAX at night, rainbows that were a full circle (with the shadow of the plane in the center, against the cloud), the Air Force Thunderbirds pacing my airliner at 39,000 feet,  and hundreds of other beautiful sights that can only be described as miracles.

I guess all of those amazing sights seen from the cockpit and windows of many planes are little daily miracles I can share with you.

Sit by the window.

I left off with… “What strikes me as especially interesting is that I had once before been involuntarily unemployed, with a distinctly different frame of mind, and it was that experience that ultimately led to writing the book.”

I’ll start this installment by saying The Physics of Success is not the story of how I saved myself by “doing something marvelous” that is described in the book.  Actually what I did was stuff other people wrote about, and the physics in the book is stuff that other people figured out.  I just put them together – the reason I wrote the book is covered in this entry.

Eight or nine years ago, I already knew about success principles (read about them here). I just hadn’t been using them.  I was all wrapped up in the day-to-day business of life, job, kids, and lousy economy.  Then, when it all caught up with me, my career, family life, finances, health and pretty much everything went down the crapper.  Then (as noted in the recommendations in the book) I saw something that reminded me that I actually had control of my own life.  The reason my life was out of control was that I gave up control, and let myself  be controlled.

When I changed that attitude, my life got better.  Not that everything got suddenly wonderful, but everything got better from one day to the next (and continues to do so). 

What bugged me was why I got trapped in a negative cycle when for all intents and purposes I knew better!  I had pretty much written this off, and just continued to pay attention to my life.  Then, as described in the entry referenced above, when it dawned on me that the physics I knew actually explained why success principles work, I realized that it was the success princples that were the primary factor in determining the direction of my life, and that everything else was secondary to that.

In other words, to get to where you want to be from where you are, you may pass through uncharted territory.  However, if you know you are on the road to where you want to go, passing through a bad part of town is not much of a concern.  The only time being in a bad part of town is a cause for worry is if you are LOST in a bad part of town, and don’t know how to leave.

So, a few months ago the same thing happened to me that happened to me nine years ago.  This time, it didn’t even faze me.  I had a book to write, and I planned to complete that and go back to work.  So, I completed the book and then went back to work, exactly as I had planned, even though the economy is worse, jobs are tighter, bills are higher, and so on. 

[As a side note Andrea was a little bit stunned when things actually worked out exactly as planned.  I had to ask her if she thought that I had spent half a year just writing down B.S.  She answered that she believed me, but didn't expect things to work out quite that exact!]

So, getting back to Ken; he was picturing himself in the place that I was nearly a decade ago – out of work without a lot of prospects.  And my mindset back then was pretty unhappy.  Thus, his surprise when I was not only not unhappy, but I appeared to be happier than most of the people who were still working.

Which brings us (finally) to the finale. 

<-sorry, couldn’t resist->

Last October I wrote down what would happen.  In November, December, January and February, many things happened, not all of which seemed connected to what I wrote down in October.  By March 1, what I wrote down in October had happened, and all the seemingly unrelated events suddenly made sense.

In one sense, you might say I achieved my goal.  In another, I had written down the future on that piece of paper.  If that is the case, then I had, with surprising accuracy, actually predicted the future.  That means that The Physics of Success describes how you can predict the future, at least for yourself.

Most important, I think, is the state of mind that I was able to maintain simply because I understood what was happening around me.  That, more than anything, is worth the knowledge.

I wrote: ” ‘Ostinato’ has three meanings.  It refers to an out-of-production British car, the ostinato, the most common of which is the Sprite.  This is not to be confused with the astinoto, which was a car driven by James Bond. 

“Ostinato also means ‘stubborn’ in the Italian language.

“In music, it is a repeating (or stubborn) phrase, such as ‘DA-dum da-DUM DUM DUM DA-dum da-DUM DUM DUM DA-dum da-DUM DUM DUM’ “

It’s a pretty cheap shot, but it was one of the better straight lines I’ve had lobbed at me.  The ostinato illustrated in the explanation is from Take Five, by Dave Brubeck.

I left off with: “…our present is the result of our actions. What we do today determines our future. The extension of that concept is that we can predict our future based on what we do today.”

Before going any further, let’s discuss what “predicting the future” means.  Let’s hold a heavy object like a brick about a meter directly over your toes.  Let go of the brick.  Can you predict the future?  Sure you can – the brick is going to fall.  After that, you can further predict the future, based on what you do.  If you yank your foot out of the way (chicken!), it’s going to land on the floor or ground.  If you don’t, you end up in acute pain after the brick lands on your toes.

Okay, that was pretty easy and not so mysterious.  The point is that you can change the outcome, even though you have no control over the actual brick once it has been dropped.  What we often misunderstand is that we have similar control over our entire world.  Sure, the economy may suck, your boss is a jerk, the weather is lousy, and so on.  Whether those things have a desirable impact on your life is entirely up to you.

In The Physics of Success I describe a process by which you select your future.  Like a road trip, you can select a destination, a time frame, and a course.  Once you are on your way you may encounter detours, setbacks, or you might even make better time than you expected.  You can’t really predict whether you get a flat tire, or whether the car breaks down, or what kind of good/bad/indifferent experiences you are going to have along the way.

However, with very good accuracy you can predict where you are going to end up and when you are going to get there.

That was precisely the case for me when I had talked with my friend Ken earlier in the year.  I knew where I was going to end up, so I wasn’t particularly worried.  What strikes me as especially interesting is that I had once before been involuntarily unemployed, with a distinctly different frame of mind, and it was that experience that ultimately led to writing the book.

(more to come . . .)