Providence, RI -
How prepared are you to meet the moment? There’s good reason why the greats across most disciplines know how to improvise when the moment demands it.
Just ask astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the second person ever to walk the Moon. And yes, he’s still with us at age 96. In 1969 during the first successful effort to place humans on the Moon, Aldrin and Neil Armstrong were preparing to leave the lunar surface. Aldrin in his bulky life-support backpack accidentally bumped into the circuit breaker that controlled the Lunar Module’s ascent and deactivated it. Without the circuit breaker engaged, he and Armstrong would have been stranded on the Moon.
Aldrin could not stick his finger into the live electrical panel, for obvious reasons. Nor could he fabricate a piece of metal to do similarly, for equally obvious reasons. Instead, he used the hollow, non-conductive end of his plastic Duro Rocket, felt-tip pen to manipulate the internal mechanism and re-engage the circuit. That inexpensive pen - actually it was Aldrin’s improvisation - may have saved their lives.
No wonder Buzz Aldrin’s pen sold for $857,000 at a Sotheby’s auction this week. Don’t worry; it also came with the broken piece of circuit breaker, too.
Could any of us have met that moment, especially since jamming a pen into that device might have made matters worse? It certainly requires balancing between confidence and humility and investing a lifelong accumulation of creativity, wisdom, and expertise.
