The Test

Back in the early ’70s, shortly after I was released from active duty as a tank platoon leader, I found myself in a graduate-level course in English at the University of Michigan. (In cockpit conversations, stories like this usually begin with, “In a previous life….”) How that happened, and why, and where it went from there, is not terribly important. What is important is something I learned in that course, something that had very little to do with the study of English per se, but an awful lot to do with life in general.

The course itself was a comparison of the works of Henry James and Mark Twain, two 19^th century authors about as far apart as the Army was from graduate school. Both were master story tellers, but where Twain’s stories were full of action on the surface but with much more complex and even sinister currents underneath, James’s were enormously subtle, even, at times, tedious, on the surface, but with powerful, slow moving currents underneath. Twain was far easier and more enjoyable to read, to me anyway, and to most of the other students in the class, while James was a bit of a struggle—his slow-paced, somewhat archaic character studies didn’t appeal to our need for action and drama.

The professor knew this—I’m sure he dealt with it each time he taught the course—and he was ready with a defense of James. He asked the question, “How do you know when someone is really good at something—better than almost anyone else? Not just good at writing novels, but anything: baseball, music, art, acting, raising kids—anything.” That was quite a question. I don’t know what we said; whatever it was we clearly didn’t have the time to come up with a well thought-out answer, so he answered it for us.

“I think,” he said, “We know when someone has done something exceptionally well when he, or she, makes it look easy. The outfielder, for instance, who always seems to be standing right where the ball is hit makes it look easy. The outfielder who needs to make a spectacular diving run to catch the ball makes it look like he is good, and he is to an extent, but the better player is the one who was standing there already. And the same applies to writers, Henry James, in this case. It seems like nothing actually happens in his stories, but in fact we are mislead because he makes something that is actually very difficult, a story that centers on character, not action, seem so easy. We are tempted, with James, to think that nothing is going on, just as we are tempted to think that the outfielder who is always in position is just lucky. But, in fact, both are actually making something very difficult look easy, and they are able to do that because both are so good at what they do.”

That class was a long time ago, so I’m not quoting his exact words, but that is more or less what I remember, and I remember it well because it was, I thought, a tremendously significant insight. It applies, of course, to aviation as well: The good ones make it look easy, the not-so-good ones make it look hard. The good pilots always seem to have easy, even boring flights; up and down, the same old thing every day. Once in awhile a curve ball gets thrown, a long line of thunderstorms has to be circumvented, an aircraft system malfunctions, a medical emergency occurs, but the good ones seem to just take care of the problem and move on. The not-so-good ones bark orders, change their minds, focus on a small part of the problem and let the big part get worse and often compound the problem before finally solving it. Their flights are seldom uneventful and are usually full of drama. Ironically, often they, and sometimes others, think that they are the good ones, taking charge, making decisions, barking orders, and that the ones who make it look easy are just lucky or lazy.

There are, of course, times when every pilot needs to get busy, take charge, and, if not bark, at least issue some orders. Making it look easy is not the same as doing nothing, and making it look hard doesn’t mean it isn’t actually sometimes hard. Just as it’s sometimes difficult to distinguish between a sales pitch and good information, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between making it look easy and being easy, and making it look hard and being hard. But it usually doesn’t take very long to figure it out. The lazy pilot will get in trouble at some point—his, or her unwillingness to do what is required will eventually result in a small problem becoming a bigger problem. And the pilot who lacks the ability or the willingness to make the solution look easy will always make it look hard, even when it isn’t. Sometimes, he or she may even want to make it look hard to show to fellow crewmembers what a terrific pilot he or she is, afraid that no one will notice otherwise.

So what I learned in that English course almost forty years ago stuck with me and has formed the basis for what I call The Test: Are you making it look easy, or are you making it look hard? If you’re not making it look easy, as easy as it can be anyway, then you’re on the wrong path.

The Test itself is simple—a question you can ask yourself to see how you are doing. Getting on the right path is the hard part, and that will be the subject I will take up in the next post, to be called The Way.

Edited by Nicole Clausing