The Thread of a Dream

When I was researching the history of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge as a major illustration for the ideas of success and motivation, I became engrossed with the story of how the first bridge was built over the Niagara River near Niagara Falls. You see, to build a bridge over a giant gorge, first you have to get a line over the canyon, from one side to the other. Easier said than done at Niagara Falls.

The engineers couldn’t cross the river in a boat to take the line from one side to the other because the boat would go over the falls. And the airplane hadn’t been invented yet. The distance was also way beyond the bow-and-arrow range, which had been a common method at the time of getting the first line across to build a bridge.

The designing engineer, Charles Ellet, pondered the question until he came up with a revolutionary idea. He decided that, while solving the problem, he would also have some fun and generate some publicity for the project. Ellet sponsored a kite flying contest and offered five dollars to the first person who could fly a kite across the gorge and let it go low enough to the ground for someone to be able to grab the string. In 1849, five dollars was a prize similar to a small lottery today. The boy who won the prize relished his accomplishment until his death, nearly 80 years later.

It all began with an idea and one thin kite string. The kite string was used to pull a cord across, then a line, then a rope. Next came an iron-wire cable and then steel cables, until a structure strong enough to build a suspension bridge was in place.

I’m struck by how that string is like a single thought. The more vivid and clear the thought, and the more you come back to it, the stronger it becomes—like the string to the rope to a cable. Each time you rethink it, dwell on it, or layer it with other thoughts, you are strengthening the structure on which to build your idea, like building a bridge over Niagara Falls. But unlike a kite, there is no string attached to how high and how far your goals may take you. They are limited only by the power of your imagination and the strength of your desire.

Denis Waitley

You Can't Just Sit There

Lawn Chair Pilot

Larry Walters always wanted to fly. When he graduated high school, he joined the service with the distant hope that somehow he might someday end up piloting a military plane. However, his dreams were cut down when an eye exam he took as a new enlistee revealed that, even though his eyesight wasn’t terrible, it wasn’t quite good enough to qualify him for pilot training. So, after a minimum stay in the service and a brief stint in Vietnam, Larry turned to a more down-to-earth career–truck driving–and had to content himself with watching others steer planes across the sky in his hometown of Long Beach, California.

But Larry never forgot about flying. And finally, one day in 1982, he decided to do something about his dream. He went on a little shopping excursion that day. His first stop was the local Sears store, where he bought a sturdy aluminum lawn chair. He then rode over to his local Army-Navy surplus store and bought a heavy-duty 50-foot cable and forty-five heavy-duty weather balloons. (Each of those balloons would measure six feet across when inflated.) Finally, he bought several tanks of helium.

With the help of several friends, Larry planned his “flight.” The next morning, one week before Christmas, after tethering his lawn chair securely to the ground and to his Jeep, he and his friends inflated the 45 balloons with helium and attached them to the lawn chair with the 50-foot cable. Then Larry gathered together some unusual “supplies”–a parachute, a large bottle of soda, a camera, a pellet gun, several gallon jugs filled with water, and a portable CB radio–and climbed aboard the lawn chair which he had now named “Inspiration One.”

You see, Larry’s plan was for the helium balloons to carry him slowly up into the Long Beach sky, to an altitude of a couple hundred feet, where he would drift around for awhile and enjoy the cool, crisp December air, take some photographs, and fulfill his dream. The gallon jugs of water were for ballast, to keep the craft steady; and Larry figured that, when he was ready to end his flight, he would use the pellet gun to pop the balloons, one at a time, until he started to drift down again. So, after securing himself in his Sears lawn chair, Larry signaled to his friends to release the tethers.

Minutes later, he was calling for help over his CB radio.

You see, instead of drifting up lazily into the air, Larry Walters streaked into the Los Angeles sky as if shot from a cannon. Instead of leveling out at a couple hundred feet, he continued to climb until he 16,000 feet–more than three miles–above the ground. Oh, he tried to do what he originally planned–shooting out some of the balloons with his pellet gun–but he only got through a couple of them before he lost his gun overboard. So there he was, scared and cold (even though December is mild in Los Angeles on the ground, it tends to be a little chilly three miles up in the air)–and, to make matters worse, he soon drifted into the approach corridor of Los Angeles International Airport. He was spotted first by a Delta pilot, and soon thereafter by a Trans World Airlines pilot; these pilots had the “interesting” task of radioing LAX and informing the tower of what they had seen. (The FAA would later try to bring charges against Larry for violating the Federal Aviation Act, but they weren’t really successful because they could never decide exactly which part of the Federal Aviation Act he’d broken.)

Well, anyway, after a couple of hours the helium in the balloons began to dissipate, and Larry’s contraption slowly floated down to earth–where his adventure continued, as he drifted right into a set of power lines, knocking out all the power in Long Beach for half an hour. The chair dangled some six feet above the ground, and Larry jumped down, and of course was promptly led off by law officers.

A reporter stepped in and asked Larry Walters, “Why did you do it?” His answer was a classic: “Well, you can’t just sit there, can you?”