Motivational Posters and The Dreamliner

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I fell flat on my face my first year in engineering.

Within two weeks, I knew I based on the difficulty I was experiencing in my coursework that I wouldn’t be keeping my scholarship and by the second semester, I was struggling to pass. I squeaked by to second year and the problems got worse. My profs were merciless, I sought help from the math center, I tried to lock myself in my room until the material would sink in. It didn’t.

All this time, I saw a distant and loose connection between what I was learning and what I wanted to do… design airplanes. I had drawn airplanes since I was little and had even written to Boeing when I was 8 years old, asking why they didn’t put ejection seats in commercial planes.

After a horrible first semester of second year, I was looking to switch programs altogether. However, with my low GPA, I wasn’t allowed to switch. I was stuck in aerospace engineering and I would either get off of probation or be suspended.

Almost nothing I was learning was focused on aircraft. The only course that mentioned airplanes or spaceships didn’t start until the second semester of third year. You really had to see the light at the end of the tunnel when learning the concept of Laplace Transforms.

Like a competitive body builder or a kid who dreams of playing in the Big Leagues, I plastered my room with posters. When I was stuck on a problem, I could daydream how I’d be involved in projects for any of these aircraft and perhaps get to fly on them. I knew that my ticket to this was in the books that lay in front of me.

Maybe just through sheer willpower or just being exposed to the same material over and over again, I was able to slowly pull up my grades, get off probation, and with several victory laps, finish my degree. And by that point, I realized that aerospace engineering was mostly mechanical engineering. And mechanical engineering wasn’t that exciting to me. I loved aircraft and flying in them and going places, but I didn’t have to build the planes to enjoy that experience.

What I did enjoy was creating new things and looking at the future. One of the projects I signed up during school for was Boeing’s crowdsourcing design for the 7E7, soon to be renamed the Dreamliner. They would send a questionnaire every month or so starting around 2003. Their questions would range from how the toilets to flush, to how the cabin should be lit.

I relished this opportunity to fantasize about a new type of jet and to be able to influence its design. It helped me see where my interests actually lay and what I’d end up wanting to do in the future.

Fast forward about 10 years and I was working sales for a company that sold experiments for university labs to help motivate failing students like the one I was. It was a dream job and it took my across North America to see research and teaching labs in universities. The real perk was that I got to travel a lot. Every two weeks, I was off to another city for a one or two night trip. Sometimes, I’d even do a single day trip — I’d dub them Rockstar Tours — to cities that were 3 hour flights apart.

The result of all this flying was that I became an Air Canada Super Elite with access to Air Canada’s concierge service during travel and frequent upgrades. One benefit was an invitation by Air Canada to tour the Boeing 787 before it was delivered to the airline. It was a future that I, in a very tiny way, got to influence and I only took that route of looking for motivators like the Boeing program because I had struggled so much in school.

Touring the Boeing 787 at Pearson Airport in 2012. Photo by author.

What’s my take away?

• We might be working on things we hate but there might be motivators to help us get through
• External motivators can have a positive influence (e.g. posters)
• There is always something we can take away from learning a craft that is beyond actually performing that skill
• We don’t have to continue doing something after we’ve hit a milestone just because we worked so hard to get there, i.e. Sunk Cost Fallacy.
• Planes are cool.

PS… it would be two years before I actually flew in the 787. It was a quick flight on a nearly new 787 between Montreal and Toronto… and I was sitting in the best seat.

Photos of an Air Canada 787 at YUL in 2014 taken by author.