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Understanding Who Doesn’t Want You to Succeed is Just as Important as Knowing Who Your Raving Fans Are: How a Good Idea Can Get Torpedoed
A small company up in Fort Collins, Colorado, makes a product that I use. It has in many ways saved my life, in fact. It’s an oxygenation machine, with multiple settings, which allows me to do bike sprints at the equivalent of running full-tilt on the summit of Kilimanjaro.
Without going into lots of unnecessary detail, the product works. I need it because I’ve had so many concussions. Military folks who’ve been on it report- as have I- a return of function across the board. Folks with PTSD, concussions like mine, and the need to heal fast after an injury. This thing rocks.
Let’s discuss this. At any given time, the elite forces of the military have folks who have been sidelined for months or more due to catastrophic injury or mental stress. Anything that can put a pilot back into the cockpit, a Special Forces soldier behind enemy lines, is not only going to help that soldier out, but also allow the military to get a return on the enormous investment it has made in their skills. Sidelined pilots can’t fly. The average cost to train a military cockpit jockey ranges from $5.6–10.9 million, especially when it comes to high-performance aircraft.