The BIGG Successs Show
Overcoming Adversity: How Stephen Hopson Opened the Runway for Deaf Pilots
From his lips to your ears, a story that will inspire you. Read our show summary at biggsuccess.com.
Welcome to The Big Success Show. Today, we'll talk with Stephen Hobson, who opened the runway for Deaf Pilots. The Big Success Show with George and Mary Lynn. Our guest today on The Big Success Show is Stephen Hobson, former Wall Street stockbroker, turned pilot, author, and speaker. And Mary Lynn, we met Stephen at the Successful and Outstanding Bloggers Conference, and I'd have to tell you he's one of those people when you meet Stephen, you'll never forget him. No way. He's the founder and professor at Adversity University, and Stephen knows a lot about overcoming adversity. He's been Deaf since birth, but as he says, we all face our own adversity in life. And there were many things about Stephen that intrigued us, and one of them is his story about following his dream to become a pilot. Let's listen in on the conversation. Why did you decide to become a pilot? Well, being a pilot, I've always been in my blood. I don't know why. Nobody in my family flies, so I might have been born with an inner desire to be up there, and wanting to be with the big boys. I found an eco-venty mother to take me to the airport, and then I could walk and take off and land. I was about four or five at that time, and at that age, I had very low self-esteem, and now I had a hearing-end box that was dropped around my chest with hearing-encours the rain up to the air, and I was very thin. I was a scrawny little boy, but a boy with a dream, and that was to be a pilot. So I finally convinced my mother to take me to the airport once a week, so we would do that. You clean out on Sunday. The minute we arrived at the airport, the moment we pulled up to the fence that surrounded the airport, I would run out of the car, and run up to the fence, and put my fingers down the wire, and wait for a plane to come out, and the moment a plane would come out, I would run back to my mother's car, and I would put my hand on the hood of her car with my face looking out to the airport, so I could see a plane getting ready for takeoff, and the moment a plane took off, the little car would vibrate, and that is how I heard the sound of a plane, quote-unquote. He would vibrate like you're watching me turn, and that's how I had a dream, and it burned brightly for many, many years, but I did not pursue it until many years after I got out of college, and after I caught a career on Wall Street. And Stephen, tell us how you actually ended up getting your pilot's license, and you were talking about the conditions you had to be trained in. Okay, well, one day I was on the computer, and I found out about other deaf pilots, I did not know that deaf pilots had been flying since 1938. Most people don't know that, and I did not know that, so at that moment my childhood dream came growing back to life, and I went around town looking for a flight instructor, and many of them were not aware that deaf pilots were capable of flying, so many of them did not want to fly, simply because they did not know, but finally I found one, and I began to fly. The requirements are nothing more than, you have to fly on good weather days, like today, beautiful outside, and deaf pilots can navigate by referencing landmarks on the road, and by that I mean cities, lakes, highways, and so forth, but the moment a weather turns bad, deaf pilots up until 2006 were not allowed to fly in bad weather, because you have to use the radio. But you can still fly, but you just can't fly alone. Well, in the year 2006 I became the first deaf pilot to fly in bad weather, and when you fly in bad weather it's like flying in a milk bottle, because you can't see where you're going, and so I became the first deaf blind pilot. In fact, I've been thinking about starting Helen Keller Airways. Okay, so I became the first deaf pilot to be able to do that, and so other deaf pilots are now starting to follow in my footsteps. It's very difficult to fly in bad weather, because you have to communicate with your co-pilot whose job is to translate what the controllers are telling us, and he had to write it down on a dry erase board and then give it to me, which is very challenging. Man, what an amazing accomplishment George. Incredible. And look at the door Stevens opened for others. You know, it always feels so good to reach one of your personal goals, but it's even more fulfilling when you know that it's blazing the path for people like you. And coming up, Stephen shares what he calls the "here principal" for overcoming adversity. Today we're talking with one of the coolest people you could ever meet, Stephen Hopson, and Stevens told us already how he became the first deaf pilot to fly in bad weather. Then we asked him to share his "here principal." It's an acronym for overcoming adversity. So let's listen in again. Very quickly, the "here principal" is made up of four components. In order to overcome adversity, I believe you have to follow the here principal. H means having a patent for what you do, because if you don't have a patent for what you do, then anything that comes in you right will seem difficult to overcome. So you have to be passionate about what you do. "E" means entertaining the possibilities. Be willing to entertain the possibilities that are available to you. If you have a patent for doing something, then you're more than likely capable of entertaining the possibilities. "A" is authentic. Being authentic. Being who you are. Accepting who you are for the world to know who you are. Yeah, you know who you are, right. And "I" means remember who helped you. And so when I do the here principal, for my features, I have a story for each and every one of them, each and every part of the component. It's amazing. And you're very inspirational. Congratulations for all of your accomplishments. Oh, thank you. And an overall fantastic guy. Oh, thank you so much. All right, thank you. I really appreciate it. To learn more about Stephen, check out adversityuniversityblog.com or sjhobson.com. And we have both of those links at bigsuccess.com today. That's a lot of dot counts. Yes, it is. And again, we thanks Stephen for sharing his inspirational story and his incredible insight with us today. Next time, we'll talk about 12 ways to make your next meeting your worst meeting. I guess you got to have goals, huh? That's right. Until then, here's to your big success. The Big Success Show at B-I-G-G Success.com. [BLANK_AUDIO]