There is a stretch of heathland behind my house named Caesar’s Camp. It is my playground. Some days I am on foot, running through the surrounding patches of pine forest. Other days, I take my two boys down to "Horse Pond" with a pot of worms and light tackle, hoping to pull out a perch or two.
The sky above this heather is rarely silent. Usually, it’s filled with the morning song of a diverse mix of birds. Other times, being caught in a heavily military area of the country, we see the hippo-like shapes of Chinook helicopters exercising among the clouds. However, the wooded trails offer peace - most of the year.
Just not in these fleeting July days.
Nearby, Farnborough is hosting the International Airshow and the quiet isn’t just broken; it shatters. Practice week is spectacular, especially when working from home. My wife’s purpose-built office sits at the end of our lawn, visible from my office window inside the house. Her reaction to the roar of jets barrelling toward us from behind the giant sycamores framing our garden is pure joy. Filled with a boundless excitement, she launches from her chair onto the grass, eyes shielded and chin lifted.
A low rumble begins to vibrate deep in your collarbones before you even see them.
“There they are!” she shouts, pointing toward the canopy.
A moment later, an F-35 tears through the clouds, or perhaps the clean, nostalgic roar of a vintage Spitfire sweeps overhead, tracing the flight paths of history.
I spend my days reviewing the cost of building supercars and hypercars for McLaren. I see both the vehicles we build on the ground and these machines in the sky as ultimate triumphs of human ingenuity. Titanium and carbon fibre bent to our will, filled with the forces of fire and motion, unleashed as our modern steeds.
The Ancestor of Grit
The cars I see built at McLaren are like lightning across the asphalt, but they - and the machines tearing through the sky over Caesar's Camp - share a common DNA. They exist because of pioneers who chose grit over gloss. My daily world is built on the legacy of Bruce McLaren, a man who started in a grease-stained garage with a fierce, relentless passion for motion. And the spectacle in the sky above my house stems from the same raw lineage.
This week marks the birthday of another ancestor of that grit: Amelia Earhart, born on the 24th of July.
Today, history has smoothed over her edges, turning her into a sterile icon found in flat, black-and-white photographs. But the reality of her sky was anything but clean. Aviation in Amelia’s era was a brutal, bone-chilling business of open-cockpit biplanes, oil-spattered goggles, heavy leather jackets that smelled of fuel and sweat, and fingers frozen stiff against the controls. She didn’t have GPS or digital autopilots; she had dead reckoning, a compass, and raw intuition. She accepted the mud on her boots and the grease on her hands because she knew that the only way to touch the horizon was to endure the elements guarding it. She didn't wait for the technology to be perfect; she simply had the courage to fly.
Bruce and Amelia were cut from the same cloth. Where he comments, “to do something well is so worthwhile that to die trying to do it better cannot be foolhardiness,” she echoes this sentiment by saying “adventure is worthwhile in itself.”
The Convergence: Launching in the Storm
I see this same tension play out in my own modern arenas. July is the incredibly tight, intense window when we pull together our 6+6+12 corporate budget forecast. In the world of high-performance corporate finance and cutting-edge operations, it is easy to mistake the preparation for the achievement.
"Gloss" is the flawless PowerPoint slide we present to the executives at the end - the pristine monthly forecast. All of this is merely the shiny, static aircraft sitting on display at the Farnborough exhibition stands. It looks perfect because it is motionless.
"Grit" is the actual launch. It is the moment my team and I must execute under severe time constraints and extreme demands for accuracy, adjusting to sudden organizational shifts the way a pilot reacts to sudden wind shear. Precision and calculations are vital, but they are useless without the courage to act. We can analyze the metrics forever, but eventually, you must push the throttle forward and trust the craft you’ve built to stand the scrutiny of the storm.
Cultivating the Pioneers of Tomorrow
As the Farnborough Airshow closes its gates this week with a focus on the Pioneers of Tomorrow, my mind focuses on the next generation. This is the youth I lead in our community as a Scout Leader and the two boys my wife and I have been blessed to raise at our own table.
But how does one forge a pioneer?
Not by wrapping them in cotton wool or letting them drift through life behind the polished, sterile glass of a screen. Shielding them from stress or discomfort is not a true kindness. As parents and leaders, we are a finite shield; eventually, we fall away. They need to build the internal resilience to face their own storms.
So, we teach them how to read a map when the rain is slicking the paper, how to pitch a canvas tent in a gale and how to look at a steep mountain climb not as a hardship, but as a boundary to be crossed.
Most importantly, we teach them the value hidden in failure, because we learn so much more from a hard loss than an easy win. We even teach them the beauty of boredom, because it is in those quiet moments - when the brain searches for distraction and finds no screen to satisfy it - that a beautiful bloom of original creativity opens from within.
This philosophy of letting them face the world was put to the test this past week. I dropped my eldest son, now fifteen, at school at four o’clock last Saturday morning. He is now somewhere in Borneo. He has two weeks of total independence, learning firsthand about the conservation challenges faced in that living cathedral of ancient rainforest, where mist-draped jungles teem with unparalleled biodiversity. He is learning to face challenges on his own two feet, whilst back home, we are getting a taste of the raw worry all parents must endure when the world becomes the child’s new teacher.
The Lughnasadh Horizon
The year has been full-packed and fast-paced, but I keep my eye on the turning of the wheel. We are standing in the liminal week leading up to Lughnasadh on the 31st of July. In the old Celtic calendar, this is the threshold where summer's wild growth must be harvested and forged into survival. Down on my allotment, the plants that survived the early scorching will soon bear ripe crops. For the earth and for ourselves, the energy is shifting from raw potential into deliberate action.
Lughnasadh is named for Lugh, the master of all crafts; blacksmith, warrior, poet and navigator. Whether we are managing complex financial frameworks, leading youth into the wild, parenting, or crafting words on a page, we are all simply honing our skills for the harvest ahead.
Anticipation is the vibe right now. The wild summer sky has put on a dance of engineering mastery overhead, my boy is on the other side of the world, the heavy budget has been delivered to the executive room and if I keep strong and focused, I might even get a few clean ears of corn before the allotment rats claim them.
There is a subtle, heavy calling to action right now. It’s time to take what we have cultivated, step out of the hangar, and launch.
Bones
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