There are probably many people in your life who believe in your ability to succeed. Mom or dad or the significant other. But those individuals’ own lives consume the bulk of their time. They are too busy…

How do you feel when you walk outside to a bright blue sky? Does it feel good? It does to me.

What if the day is dark, with rainclouds hanging low? Different feeling, right? I like it sometimes if…

When I started training for my pilot license, I was amazed at how I felt after a flight ended. If I ever lifted off from...

“Stop staring at the instrument panel,” my flight instructor said, finger pointing to the blue stretch of sky beyond the windshield. “Everything that makes flying worth it is...

Summer always reminds me of childhood when I’d play outside with friends until dusk and beyond. Many evenings, when the light faded, the soft glow of fireflies pulled us from…

Life on the ground is often rigid. We spend the better part of our days living between the lines, whether it’s the boundaries of a house or office, the narrow edges of a sidewalk, or the slightly wider lines of a…

This week I have a guest post on EXTRAordinary! Inc., the website of an excellent friend, Rich Schlentz. I first met Rich after he hired my wife as a wellness coordinator for one of the...

Several years ago I drove to a friend’s mountain cabin near West Jefferson for ten days to get my novel jump-started. I’d dabbled…

Last Friday morning I flew the Cirrus to Charlottesville, VA to visit a buddy of mine, John Hart. John is an excellent friend and wonderful writer who’s had four books on the New York Times Bestseller List including…

There is a person you are meant to be. You know this because you’ve dreamed of it. Perhaps that person is a painter or a photographer. Maybe it’s an entrepreneur or a scientist. But whatever the goal, many of us have…

Who knows why most pilots felt the urge to learn to fly? Perhaps some grew tired of staring at cloud bellies and wanted to see their tops. Maybe others vowed to…

Aviators come from all walks of life with wildly varied personalities. But one thing I’ve noticed is, they all tell great stories. Typically, the longer they’ve been flying, the grander the…

There’s an old aviation joke that gets passed down often. It usually surfaces during the required night flight that every student must take during training. Night flights are stressful in a single-engine plane…

If you read Don’t Look Back, you know I don’t spend much time fretting about the past. I’ve made enough stupid mistakes to fret over—trust me on this—but I try not to get…

I love to fly. But unlike career pilots with thousands of hours of flight time, I do it for fun and personal growth. Yet, I’m continually surprised how…

What do you want to do with your life? What do you really want to do? Why aren't you doing it?

My youngest son, Cort, didn’t enjoy his first airplane ride. He was four and from the moment we took off, he kept asking…

When non-pilots see the plane I fly, they assume it carries a lot. But everything in life, love, and lift is a tradeoff. If I want to take four people on a trip with…

Several months ago I flew the Cirrus to Montgomery Executive Airport at Virginia Tech to visit my wife on a Saturday night. She spent the weekend training the college's group fitness instructors in…

I miss summer already. Perhaps it’s a holdback from childhood when the last school bell rang and the doors flung wide to…