Even if everything is wrong, fly the Tank, a lesson learned watching the A Team movie

I don't normally watch TV, but the other night during the weekend, I found myself flipping through the channels while waiting for something else I was working on to finish and accidentally caught part of the movie The A Team, with Bradley Cooper, which is a reboot of the old television show, which I have never seen, so it wasn't as if I was looking for it, it was just there when I turned the television on, and trust me, not a soul staggering work of art, but kind of weirdly entertaining, and what made me stick was that I caught a scene that made me laugh so hard and then made me think.

In the scene, the team is in a cargo plane loaded with a tank and the plane basically gets shot out of the sky, and to survive the explosion they climb into the tank and they end up falling through the air inside a tank with three parachutes to slow them down.

Then two of the three parachutes get shot up.

The tank then plummets down towards the hard cold ground with only one chute, which slows the heavy tank only slightly, and the team in the machine is obviously on their way to crash. No way out.

Then the team inside starts angle the tank gun and to shoot the cannon at different angles to make the tank go a certain direction towards a lake.

Shot and after shot, and the tank moves towards the water.

Once on target, they then spun the cannon downward and fired the cannon repeatedly. as it was pointed straight down, the recoil slowing the speed of the fall.

They were crashing towards the earth and then they did the impossible.

They flew the tank.

I loved that idea, flying a tank, doing the impossible, and it is such a great idea and metaphor.

Many times in my career and life, things have gone bad and I was well on my way to crashing;

With a project crashing around me,
Or things and people not going as planned,
A idea not working and everyone watching me fail, and each time, I never gave up.

Each time it got bad, I didn't give up, instead I found ways to not only make it work, but usually come out ahead.

I flew a tank.

I think most people give up too easily. When things get hard, they fold, or run, losing it all, when just a little persistence, some creativity, and intelligence, they could have pulled it off.

The result may not be as planned, the end result never matches the plan, and sometimes it is even better than planned, but the world always goes the way of those that don't give up.

Fly a tank. Don't give it up.

D