People Watching

For the eighth time in a week your humble reporter found himself at the Atlanta airport. Ahem, I should say, of course, the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.

It’s a perfect place for people watching. New statistics out today have shown that in 2006 it held its position as the world’s busiest airport, followed by O’Hare in Chicago and London’s Heathrow.

I was chastened to realize that I have been in every one of the top ten airports in the last year or so. For people who like such things, here’s the list of the top ten busiest airports with the number of millions passengers who’ve been through each:

1. Atlanta    84.8
2. O’Hare    76.2
3. Heathrow   67.5
4. Tokyo’s Haneda    65.2
5. Los Angeles International    61
6. Dallas/Fort Worth    60
7. Paris, Charles de Gaulle    56.8
8. Frankfurt    52.8
9. Beijing Capital International Airport    48.5
10. Denver International    47.3

Spending a lot of time in airports can stress the physical, psychological and subtle systems of the body, as well as making it easy to lose touch with your spirituality.

I’m going to let you in on a secret: for over two decades I had learned and then taught methods for building resilience and bouncing back from adversity. But it wasn’t until I started flying a quarter of a million miles a year that I got the chance to test and refine the methods under the most extreme conditions. Engineers often talk about taking their constructions and “testing them to destruction.” I did the same thing with the methods I teach. If they couldn’t help people cope with flights, illness or job loss, then I discarded them and looked for something else. And if they didn’t also have another piece – a way to grow in response to adversity, they were out too.

The result has been a whole raft of techniques and methods that have been tried and tested again and again. Over the next year I shall be rolling out a great many of these techniques in a novel format.

Watch this space!

“Every adversity carries with it the seed of equal or greater benefit.”
–Napoleon Hill (American Founder of Personal Success Literature, 1883-1970)

“From the withered tree, a flower blooms.”
–Zen Buddhist Saying

“How you handle adversity in the workplace tends to have much more impact on your career than how you handle the good stuff. The people who know how to overcome adversity are the ones who rise to the top of the organization."
— Martin E. P. Seligman (American Psychologist, Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Former President of the American Psychological Association, 1941-)

“Adversity is the diamond dust with which Heaven polishes its jewels.”
— Robert Leighton (Scottish Presbyterian Bishop and Classical Scholar, 1611-1684)

“Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents which in prosperous times would have lain dormant.”
–Horace (a.k.a. Quintus Horatius Flaccus, Roman Poet and Satirist, 65-8 B.C.E.)

“Adversity is not undesirable. Because, it is only when you are down and out in life that you can realize its true value.”
–Swami Ramdas (a.k.a. Papa Ramdas, Indian Spiritual Teacher, 1884-1963)