Tag: Stewardship

Categories
Aircraft

Living History on the Wing

This week the warbirds are gathering at Oshkosh. I’m not there on the grass, but I can still hear them: the uneven throb of big radials, the higher urgent song of Merlins, the deep rumble of a bomber turning final. Hundreds have flown in. They are not museum pieces behind glass. They are still flying.

The lineup this year is rich — multiple P-51 Mustangs, a rare cluster of P-38 Lightnings, the B-29 Doc, the B-24 Diamond Lil, Corsairs, a P-40, an SBD Dauntless, a Privateer.

One airplane pulls at me more than the others. I first saw a P-38 in flight at Oshkosh in the early 1980s — the twin booms, the central nacelle, a purposeful elegance I hadn’t expected from a machine built for war. It was one of Kelly Johnson’s early masterpieces, born from the same inventive culture that later became the Skunk Works. This year one of those rare P-38s has come back across the Atlantic with Austria’s Flying Bulls, its only public American appearance of the season. Watching even a video of it feels like a small closing of a circle.

The airplanes do not maintain themselves. Jim Tobul still flies the F4U-4 Corsair he and his late father spent a decade restoring. At Warbirds in Review, owners and veterans stand in front of their airplanes and tell the stories — sometimes their own, sometimes a father’s or grandfather’s. Daughters and sons speak. The sessions are informal, human, often moving.

The pilots who fly these airplanes are not reenactors. They know the systems are old, the parts scarce, the consequences of a mistake permanent. They keep showing up anyway.

I’m following it all from California — streams, photographs, mass formations, the occasional longer Warbirds in Review session. It is not the same as standing under a wing. But a Merlin still sounds like a Merlin. A P-38 still looks like the answer Lockheed once gave to a desperate wartime need. The people who keep them flying are not claiming the original heroism. They are refusing to let it become abstract.

History is still flying. Even at a distance, that amazes me.

Categories
Living Productivity

The Architecture of Arete

In the modern landscape of productivity, we are drowning in “how-to” guides and “ten-step” frameworks. We treat our lives like machines that need oiling, rather than gardens that need tending. But David Sparks’ recent work on an updated productivity field guide brings back a much older, more grounded philosophy: the marriage of roles and arete. This is the third edition of his field guide with refinements that he’s made along the way.

To understand why this matters, we have to look at how we usually define ourselves. Most of us operate via a chaotic “to-do” list—a flat, untextured pile of tasks. “Buy milk” sits right next to “Finish the quarterly report,” which sits next to “Call Mom.” This flatness is where burnout lives. It lacks a sense of who we are being when we do those things.

“A role is not just a job title; it is a container for responsibility and relationship.”

This is where Roles come in. When we organize our lives by roles, we stop seeing tasks and start seeing stewardship. We aren’t just checking boxes; we are fulfilling a duty to the parts of our lives that actually matter. But roles alone can become burdensome—mere masks we wear—unless they are infused with arete.

The Greeks defined arete as “excellence” or “virtue,” but its deepest meaning is “acting up to one’s full potential.” It is the act of being the best version of a thing.

However, a warning from the 2026 guide: Do not treat Arete as a yardstick to beat yourself up with when you fall short. Instead, treat it as a compass bearing. You will never perfectly ‘reach’ North, but you can always check to ensure you are rowing in that direction . Success isn’t matching the ideal; it is simply making progress from who you were when you started .

When you combine a defined Role with the pursuit of arete, productivity shifts from a mechanical burden to a philosophical practice. You are no longer just “writing an email”; you are practicing the excellence of a “Clear Communicator.” You aren’t just “doing the dishes”; you are practicing the excellence of someone who “Values a Peaceful Environment.”

To keep these roles authentic, we must also identify their Shadow Roles. If your Arete is the ‘Present Father,’ you must recognize the Shadow Role of the ‘Distracted Dad’ who is physically in the room but mentally scrolling email. Identifying the shadow doesn’t make you a failure; it gives you the awareness to course-correct before you hit the rocks .

Implementing this requires what Sparks calls the Arete Radar. In a world demanding instant responses, we must cultivate a ‘meditative gap’—a pause between a request and our answer . In that gap, we ask a single question: ‘Does this commitment serve my Arete, or does it distract from it?‘. This turns the act of saying ‘no’ into a strategic ‘yes’ to your deeper purpose.

This framework rescues us from the “productivity for productivity’s sake” trap. It suggests that the goal isn’t to get more done, but to be more present and excellent in the specific seats we have chosen to occupy. In the end, we don’t need better apps. We need a better understanding of our station and the virtue required to fill it.

Finally, we must stop solving for speed and start solving for meaningfulness. Efficiency is the enemy of Arete internalization. Sparks suggests the ‘Blank Page Ritual’: rewriting your Arete statements from scratch every quarter rather than just editing an old file. This intentional slowness forces the values out of your computer’s storage and hard-codes them into your soul’s permanent memory .