Buzz Aldrin - No Dream Is Too High

Second, it is important to understand that innovation usually takes time. Great ideas rarely move from the mind to the Moon, or to the marketplace, overnight. They need time to percolate, to improve, to develop. At NASA, we were constantly working to make improvements on our spacecraft, as well as ourselves, as we pursued our goals. Innovators need a place to do that, and in most cases, nowadays, great innovation necessitates somebody providing a physical place and the financial resources that allow creativity to thrive. Personally, I love living at the beach; the environment itself helps stimulate my thinking. For me, dull, drab, gray walls are not normally conducive to my creativity. But whatever your preferences, recognize that your physical space will be an important component in stifling or fostering your creative juices. Even if you live in a small, one-room apartment, create a space around you where creativity can thrive.

Innovators must be encouraged to experiment with new ideas, new ways of doing things. Rather than being punished for mistakes or failures, they should be applauded for attempting to go where human beings have never gone before. That means innovators must be given the freedom to challenge the status quo. Certainly, this requires a great deal of patience and trust on the part of parents, educators, and CEOs, but as you look around our society, businesses as well as scientific cultures that encourage innovation are thriving. Companies such as Google and Apple have created a culture that empowers their employees to stretch, to attempt the “impossible dream,” to explore, to go after opportunities that may not always work out.

Third, to encourage innovation, we must model and communicate that “thinking” is not wasted time but is integral to the innovation process. Unfortunately, most educators and almost all employers expect thinking to be done on a person’s own time, not on the clock. Imagine you are sitting at your desk, ruminating about an idea, when your boss comes along. What’s the first thing most of us do? We try to “look busy.”

Allowing a person time and freedom to peer off into space, to daydream if you will, about an idea’s potential is not permitting that person to be idle or unproductive. It is allowing him or her to think creatively. Allowing for the thinking process to develop in a person’s mind is essential if we ever expect that individual to provide us with those voilà! moments. People who achieve the great breakthroughs in our world have usually already experienced those breakthroughs in their mental processing; they’ve seen the idea working in their mind long before they ever tried it in “real life.” Before I ever took my first walk in space, I saw it in my mind many times, imagining what it might look like, feel like, sound like—all in my mind. If we want to foster innovation, we must encourage an atmosphere that allows for creative thinking, even if, to some people who may not understand, it looks as though nothing tangible is being done or accomplished.

Innovators view change as an opportunity rather than an inconvenience or an interruption. At 86 years of age, I decided to move from Los Angeles back to near Cape Canaveral in Florida. Sure, it is challenging to deal with change, but I always want to be open to new opportunities. Most people don’t like to move out of their comfort zones, but as we all know, change is inevitable. You can resist it and complain about it as an inconvenience, or you can regard change as your chance to do something new. Keep that parachute open. Use your mind to ponder the possibilities rather than to pooh-pooh the interruptions change brings to your “normal” way of doing things.

Albert von Szent-Györgyi, the Hungarian Nobel Prize–winning physiologist who first discovered the benefits of vitamin C, was fond of saying, “Discovery lies in seeing what everyone sees, but thinking what no one else has thought.”

That was a man who kept his mind open to the possibilities, and that’s the kind of man I have tried to be, and always want to be.

Choose your heroes wisely, and be careful who you idolize. Why? Simple: You will become like the people with whom you most often associate. The people with whom you surround yourself will have an impact on you, either positively or negatively. It is a timeless truth that bad company corrupts good character, but if you walk with the wise, you will become more like them.

I’ve been blessed with some great friends, people who have not only given of themselves to help me, but who have helped to bring out the best in me. Other than my father, one person who was a great friend to me, as well as my most influential mentor, was Jimmy Doolittle, the famous aviator. When my dad introduced me to Doolittle, I was just a kid, but the world-renowned pilot took time with me and encouraged me to pursue my own dreams of flying.

When my father passed away, Jimmy Doolittle, more than any other person, encouraged me and helped me to deal with my dad’s death, and to keep moving forward with my own life.

Another of the places where I experienced that sort of friendship and camaraderie was in the Air Force.

A year before I graduated from West Point, I went along with my fellow cadets on a social science tour of the Far East, studying General Douglas MacArthur’s occupation of Japan. When I awakened after my first night in Tokyo, the newspaper headlines read: “NORTH KOREA ATTACKS SOUTH KOREA.”

To the world’s surprise, 75,000 North Korean soldiers had poured across the 38th parallel, the boundary between the Soviet-backed Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to the north and the pro-Western Republic of Korea to the south. As an ally of the United States, South Korea sought our help, and the United States was determined to come to the aid of our friend. As far as Americans were concerned, North Korea’s unprovoked attack against South Korea was an example of communist aggression, and many people felt certain that the communists would not stop at Korea, that this was a blatant step toward communist world domination.

Consequently, by July 1950, American troops entered the war on South Korea’s behalf. Although I still had another year to go at West Point, I knew that if the war continued, I would soon be fighting in Korea.

My father had urged me to attend the Naval Academy—“You can still fly in the Navy,” he said, but my friends and I wanted to be where the action was—and that was in the skies above Korea. Of course, my natural interest in aviation nudged me more toward enlisting in what had until recently been known as the Army Air Corps and eventually became a separate branch of the military, the U.S. Air Force.

By the end of the summer, U.S.-led allies pushed the North Koreans out of Seoul and back to their side of the 38th parallel. But as American troops crossed the boundary and headed north toward the Yalu River, the border between North Korea and communist China, the Chinese started squawking about what they called “armed aggression against Chinese territory.” Chinese leader Mao Zedong even sent troops to North Korea and warned the United States to keep away from the Yalu boundary unless we wanted to engage them in a full-scale war. With China threatening to get involved and images of World War II still fresh in our minds, many people worried that we were getting dangerously close to World War III.

I graduated number three in my class at West Point, and by December 1952, even though negotiators were trying to bring the war to a close, I put in for combat duty stationed in Korea. I had already earned my wings and qualified as a pilot of the Sabre F-86; I soloed in prop T-6’s at Bartow Air Force Base in Florida and then flew jets at Bryan Air Force Base in Texas, so I sure didn’t want a desk job!