 That scene behind you is just a figment. It's not a moonlit night in Hawaii. In fact, it's a rainy afternoon. And I want to welcome you to episode one of season one of Figments. And I'll tell you today a story from my life about a figment that changed my life. Why am I talking about figments, you might ask? The concept of this show is to take a look at dreams and notions, figments, that start as an idea, but become reality. And in my mind, all great accomplishments, innovations, everything grand starts as a small idea in the back of our brain. So let's take a look at the definition of a figment. So a figment is in the imagination. Please, please, please don't say a figment of your imagination because they don't live anywhere. They're by definition in your imagination. You don't have figments of your elbows or your knees. So a figment is an idea. It can be good, it could be bad, could be a dream or nightmare, as it says on the screen, but they're that powerful seed that can become reality and they usually become reality through a combination of hard work, persistence and good fortune. So let me tell you my story and tell you why figments stick in my mind. I've had an amazing life. I'm a retired Air Force fighter pilot. I got to fly jets. I got to lead lots of people. I got to do things that never should have been possible. I should not have been a fighter pilot. And it shouldn't have been possible for a reason I'll explain in a minute. But I was raised in a small town in rural Wisconsin. And I've got a picture of my twin and I here to show you. That's my twin sister, Jeanette. She was the Spartan and still is and the better behaved one. Raised near Green Bay and yes, I'm quite sad about the outcome of the football game yesterday but let's not go there. So as a youth, I was not impressive and this isn't false modesty. Many of the folks I served with at senior levels in the military, I was somehow retired as a restart general were the kind of people who began life as Eagle Scouts and just went up from there. I was anything but that. I wasn't a good student. I wasn't a good attitude and I wasn't a very good kid really. But then this segment got into my imagination. Around age 12, it was born out of disappointment and then fed by anger. For our 12th birthday, my dad who was a good man and a busy guy promised my twin sister and I a flight in an airplane. I'd never been in an airplane. We were gonna go to the local airport, jump and assess and fly. I love the notion but somehow that never happened and my dad was very busy. He also had a total of seven kids which kept him even more busy and we never got that flight. That disappointment created this figment of desire to fly that just stuck with me. As a senior in high school, it was reinforced by anger because I was, as I said, not a good student. That would actually be an understatement and I applied to join the aviation club at my local high school, high school, Shano High School in rural Wisconsin. When I went to talk to the faculty advisor who was also the physics teacher, by the way, I didn't take physics because I knew I never could have passed it, frankly. He said, Leif, you can't join the aviation club because you don't have the requisite B average in your grades. That too was an understatement. I didn't come close to a B average. And then he said something that fueled the figment of anger. He said, it's obvious you have no future in aviation. I've made me mad to put it politely but I couldn't join the club. I didn't get to do some ground school as the members did or go out to that local airport and jump in an airplane and actually fly. Man, that made me mad. So after that, it was time to decide what to do post high school. I had a great idea, another figment. I wanted to buy a motorcycle and ride around the United States. My father who had a master's degree and was very, very bright, brilliant even, didn't think that was such a good idea and he was having none of that. So the first thing he did was insist that I apply to all of the service academies and the West Point Naval Academy at Annapolis and the Air Force Academy which kind of tweaked that little flight figment in me. He did that for a couple of reasons. One, altruistic. He knew I needed the discipline that one of those schools would provide. I needed the discipline that one of those schools would provide. And the other not so altruistic was he had seven kids and even in the dollars of the year of the tuition of the time, that's pretty expensive. So I dutifully, under duress if you will, applied for all three of the service academies. Oddly enough, despite my terrible grades, low test scores and bad behavior, did I mention a total absence of the athletic skill? They turned me down. So I was safe, I didn't have to go to school, but I still wasn't going to get to a military school. Still was not going to get that motorcycle. So I enrolled in the University of Wisconsin in the spirit of North, way North, very cold. Part of the reason I live in Hawaii now. And when I got up there in my freshman year with absolutely no ambition, really, if I were to characterize me as a youth, it would be directionless. I had no ambition. There wasn't anything I particularly wanted to do and except for the stigma of applying. My father insisted that I join Air Force ROTC, Reserve Officer Training Corps at the University of Wisconsin Superior, again, for the discipline and because there was a long shot of a scholarship to get me through the remaining years of college. And I did that. And much to my surprise, I liked it. I even liked the marching. You had to take a class in Air Force stuff. You marched around some and there were pilots on the faculty so I could hear them talk about flying. I liked it. As a part of that program in the fall of our freshman year, 1970, we were all told to take the Air Force Officer Qualifying Test. Now, the AFOQT as it's known is a part SAT, part aptitude test. Would you be successful as a pilot? Now, I knew how I'd do in the SAT part. I was not good at testing, but I had no idea about the aptitude because at this point, I still had never even sat in an airplane on the ground. So I took the test and waited for the results. Much to my surprise, among others, like everybody, the test results came back and I did okay on the SAT-like verbal math, et cetera, portion of it. But on the pilot portion, I scored very well, surprisingly well, shockingly well to me because I didn't have aptitude for anything at that point. And the Air Force quickly threw a scholarship at me. Now, this was a shock because prior to that in my academic career, the only things that had been thrown at me were books and erasers by teachers. But they offered me a scholarship to pay for the remaining three years of my education. And I was set. I wasn't going to have to have a job. I was just going to be a pilot. All I had to do was make it through college. I was in heaven. But the best part was yet to come because as part of accepting the scholarship and the commitment to serve the team with it, the Air Force decided to give me, and it was kind of pro forma, a flight in the backseat of a T-33 jet trainer. And that was my first flight in any airplane. Look at that beautiful jet. In the backseat of that jet in January of 1971, and I get chicken skin as we say in Hawaii, just remembering it because I can remember every detail, the cold of the fuselage because we're flying out of Duluth, Minnesota, the sense of sitting in the back cockpit there, the rear cockpit surrounded by instruments and controls and getting strapped into the airplane. I remember the canopy closing and the sound and smell of the engine starting. And I remember every second of that flight. It was love at first flight. So now I was set. I was good to go. I had my dream. My pigment had become reality. I had no worries except for one. And we'll get back to that. But first, let me talk to you briefly about some of the shows I will present to you in coming weeks. So I've got an amazing group of friends because of this life that I've had that I shouldn't have had. So I'm really excited about the people that I'll have on. Some of them will be peacemakers. Peace is a passion of mine. And you'll meet some remarkable people who do their best to make the world more safe, secure and peaceful. I'll talk to a couple of close friends who were given very dire cancer diagnoses but never lost the figment of recovery and did in fact recover. I hope to talk to you and I'm pretty sure I've got this locked in. Somebody who became an astronaut and set the record for the longest spacewalk person I've worked with at Air Force Space Command and talk about how you take a dream of being an astronaut and make that real. And then one that I know I've got lined up is with some award-winning Hollywood script writers because scripts are the quintessence of figments. And I've done them for years, they're wonderful people. You'll really enjoy meeting them. But they'll also share the hard work of getting something onto the screen. And I look forward to that. I do invite any ideas you have for figments we could imagine. So send an email to info at phase-one.com if you'd like. And I'll see if I can find anybody to talk about their figments. And now back to our story. All is well, I'm gonna be an Air Force pilot. It's a cool job, doesn't seem like much work to me as a young kid. And I love to fly, I've learned that. There's a small problem though. I had known as a youth that sometimes my socks didn't match. And I knew that thanks to the very helpful feedback, sometimes delivered with an edge from my twin sister. Especially a problem if they were green and brown because boy, I really couldn't tell. But I had passed a rudimentary color vision test as I applied for the military academies. It was very simple, sort of can you really stop at the light when it's red kind of simple? And I passed that, but I knew there wasn't something quite right, but I didn't think there was a problem. In the summer of 1972 though, I went off to a four-week training program, summer camp they call it. But it's not like, you know, it's not Club Med summer camp. It's basic training for officer candidates in the Reserve Officer Training Corps. And you do some physical training and you do some more marching, which I would never got really good at, but I still didn't mind it. And learn more about the Air Force and jobs you might have and so on and so forth. As part of that, you get your first real Air Force physical, which I thought was gonna be fine. You know, it's pretty healthy. Didn't have any real problems that I thought would impede my progress down this path to a dream. And then during the eye test portion of that, the technical sergeant, Air Force technical sergeant named King pulled out that damn book. The Ishii Heart Test. Now, y'all most likely can see the numbers that are supposedly in those collections of dots. But to 9% of men and a half a percent of women in the world, the numbers aren't there. Some might be, but generally, we don't see colors like you do. It's called color blind. That's not really an accurate description or color vision deficient. The world looks very different to us. And we can't discriminate. And all that's interesting, but what was important was it is fundamentally disqualifying to have a color vision deficiency if you want to be an Air Force pilot. So I sat at the gray steel desk of the day, the technical sergeant King, he opened that damn book. I didn't see any numbers. Then he said in a very sensitive way, Cadet, there's no way in hell you'll ever fly an Air Force airplane. Just like I remember that flight, I remember that feeling. And I was crushed because it had become a dream and seemed like it would be real, but it wasn't going to be real. So it was time for plan B. I didn't even really have plan A, so coming up with plan B was gonna be a challenge, but fortunately, the Air Force in its largesse allowed me to stay in the Reserve Officer training core program and to keep my scholarship. And that was important. Otherwise I'd have, well, I wouldn't have been in school. I probably would have been drafted in Vietnam. So plan B became, well, I'm gonna stay in the Air Force. I'm going to find something I want to do. And I probably better transfer down to the big University of Wisconsin at Madison and get a more marketable degree because I'm not gonna have this lifetime of being a pilot and not having to have a real job. So I did that. I transferred down to Madison. I eventually settled on a political science major, but what did I do most? Mostly what I did is wine like a box of puppies and lament my cruel fate, which was absolutely justified because of my color vision deficiency, but now it's kind of whining back then. I try to be less whining now. So I complained to everybody who had listened and many who wouldn't about how unlucky I was to have lost this dream of being a pilot. I was doing that whining, getting pretty good at, by the way, around the ROTC offices, the detachment as they're called in Madison, and a staff surgeon who was absolutely not your model NCO. As I recall, his name was Hansen, spoke up and introduced a figment of his own that was ridiculous, simply ridiculous. He said, you know, Cadet, you could go to a private optometrist and you see colors, right? Yeah, I see colors. And he could give you a test and say that you see colors and write a letter to the Air Force and maybe they'll let you fly. That's just ridiculous. But I was going to do it because this figment was still there. I hadn't let go of that seed. And I picked an optometrist out of the phone book. Y'all remember phone books, don't you? Almost randomly, it wasn't quite randomly. I got one near a bus stop because it was colder than heck in Madison and I didn't have a car and I didn't wanna freeze. And made an appointment and showed up. Serendipitously, the optometrist, whose name I don't remember, I'm sad about that, what had been a naval optometrist and served on an aircraft carrier as a naval officer. So he knew the government, he knew the military, he knew flying. And he gave me in 45 minutes, two things that were important, a series of tests that allowed him to document my condition and all the knowledge in the world that I'd ever need about color vision deficiency. And then he proceeded to write a letter. And it was a lovely military letter because he had the background to do it. He put it in the right pros and here's what it said quite simply. It said, dear Air Force, cadet leaf technically isn't color blind. And then a couple of paragraphs and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, incandescent light, fluorescent light, certain conditions, so on and so forth. Again, he technically isn't color blind, I think you should let him fly. But there's just one problem. Nothing in that letter made me qualified to fly. There was nothing that said he's good to go. Give him an airplane. So we sent it off anyway. I wasn't very optimistic about it, but guess what? The Air Force agreed and put me back on flying status. Back in the pipeline to go to pilot training. In some ways, that was the worst time of my figment's maturation because in theory, I was going to be an Air Force pilot. Externally, that's what I conveyed to everybody. That's what I wanted to feel. But I knew in my heart of hearts that I really at some point was most likely to get found out and not be able to fly. And so it was almost bipolar. That's an exaggeration, but not very much because I had this dream that was still alive, but I knew it was actually a terminal. So there were two physicals I had to take to get through to go to Air Force pilot training. The first was a pre-commissioning physical. While you're still in college, you go down and take a fiscal. At all military physicals, I can imagine everybody watching this. I hope somebody's watching this. Who has a military background thinking about the process and just the grind of getting physical in a military environment. And when I went down to do that at a base in Indiana, with one of my college classmates, we went to the eye test station, the area where we're going to get our vision and our color vision and all that tested. And as I got ready to see that damn book again, the Ishiar test, the MCO who was shepherding us through the line dilated our eyes and moved with problem. We're not supposed to do that before the color vision test. And I knew that because color vision, for people like me, those of us who are color vision deficient is very dependent on how close you are to the source of the color, how bright it is, et cetera, how close you are to the source. And I remembered that for my 45 minutes with the optometrist and I remembered that color vision never changes. Two key things to recall from that conversation. So I said to the sergeant, dude, well, dude hadn't been invented yet as word probably, but said, sergeant, you messed up, you dilated my eyes and I can't sit 10 feet away. I think that was a metric of this new test I had to take, the CTSV 64, they're all seeing 64 colored lights and having to get 54 of them correct to pass the test. I said, you can't sit me the full distance from the box because my eyes are all dilated. Truth of the matter is it drops and barely begun to have effect. And I'm not sure this is the right distance, but it seems like he sat me down about two feet in front of the box and proceeded to go through the 64 colored lights. And I got 57 correct. That, my friends and viewers, is the only Air Force color vision test I ever passed. Whew, but I'm still bipolar about this because I know that when I show up at pilot training, I'm going to have to take another very rigorous physical. And in the drawdown after the Vietnam War, the Air Force doesn't need pilots, it doesn't need people. So my pilot training class started 44 students. We only graduated 22 with us. There was a lot of attrition for flying for physicals. So I knew that I was going to get down to my base, record in, take the physical and be sent home. So on the first day of pilot training, we had another mass physical, 44 young lieutenants. We had one captain lined up and they decided to split us into separate lines. And because my last name starts with L, I was in the middle of the alphabet. In first, in fact, I was the first one in the second half that went down a different path to go through all the tests. That path for group two, starting with me, began with, what do you think? That damn book. I sat down and I told the young NCO, Sergeant Derman, I couldn't use that book. I'd have to take the CTSV 64. And if I did that, he'd have to set it up, take it down or administer the test, take it down and blah, blah, blah. And I really screw up his day. I also knew at the distance of 10 feet, I wouldn't pass him. And it was not a good moment. But I remembered what the optometrist had said. And then I said to the young guy who was probably two years younger than me, I was 22 at the time, said, son, I mean, my new lieutenant bars, I said, you know, this is a problem for you because of the delay is setting up, et cetera, et cetera. But you can write pass by record, right? Because color vision never changes. So why don't you do that? And so at Sir, they never tell. They tell us not to do that. We're supposed to give a test. Is that what's the regulation say? I asked him. It's what the regulation says, but you know, they tell us, it's that in writing, I'm telling you not to write pass by record. It's no, it's just what they tell us. Well, son, seems to me have a choice here. He puts his hand to his forehead and he rubbed it and I can remember this very clearly, young right-handed kid also from Wisconsin. He picked up his military skill craft, all-point pen and wrote pass by record the day to in the school. And I never again took an Air Force color vision test. And I went through pilot training and I did pretty well and somehow I graduated from flight school. And there I am with two of my brothers and my mom. That's a look of joy on her face. It's actually amazement because I've done something well and that's me with hair out of rags but also with shiny wings. I never should have gotten to where. The figment was now reality. And a few months later, I'm flying at fours. So we could show that at four picture because I look really cool in that. Yeah, that's me, the dreams come true. I took three lessons from this experience and the purpose of figments, the power of imagination is to entertain and hopefully we've done that so far in episode one, season one. It's also to inspire because what seems impossible often isn't. And I never should have been an Air Force pilot and everything in my life flowed from that experience and from the good fortune of it. The three lessons I took from this that I try to use and that I try to share, pretty simple. The first is obvious, never give up, never, never, never, never give up. There were many times where I could have let that figment die and frankly, given the kind of person I was at the time that I happened, but it just didn't because I got that flight in the backseat of that jet and I was hooked, never give up. The second one is I hope valuable. It's been valuable for me and it's how I have all these folks that I know that are gonna provide amazing discussions in future episodes. But the second one is pay attention, pay attention to what's going on around you and learn from it. And the internet, at least as far as I know, DARPA had not been invented when I was at the optometrist. So I couldn't just Google it. I remembered everything the optometrist told me, how the tests work, what test I might be able to pass, what the conditions were, that color vision doesn't change and you can write pass by record. If I had not remembered that, I wouldn't have known where to begin researching it and I never would have been able to get through that last physical pilot training. The final lesson is I think most important. Staff Sergeant Hansen was the opposite of a stellar NCO. He was somebody who seemed pretty worthless. He was overweight. He didn't wear his uniform well. He didn't work very hard. But he changed my life. But for him, I would probably be asking you if you went prized with your meal. I don't know if he changed anybody else's life, but his ridiculous figment, his ridiculous notion that I could go to a civilian eye doctor made everything else possible. And so as a leader, as a manager in business, as an educator, I look for Staff Sergeant Hansen's realm and want to get what I can out of them because there are good people and bad people in the world, but I believe that most people have an element of goodness and I believe they have value and your life will be richer, looking for the value in others and not deciding simply whether you like them or find them impressive. So thanks for watching this first episode of Figments. I hope you'll join me again in a couple of weeks and I look forward to your feedback by email or on the links for viewing. Thank you and Aloha.