4 minute read
Lachie Smart on knowing your 'why'
On 27 August 2016, at 18 years of age, Lachie Smart became the youngest person to fly solo around the world in a single engine aircraft. The journey took nearly two and a half years to plan, 54 days and 45,000km to fly through 24 locations in 15 countries, and around $500,000 to fund. Lachie didn’t undertake this incredible endeavour for personal gain, he did it to prove to his mates that they could achieve amazing things if they were willing to push through their limits.
SHANNON KING Digital Marketing & Communications Officer Lachie’s decision to embark on this incredible journey was first fuelled by his experiences at secondary school. A year younger than everyone in school, he was teased a lot for having to compete in sport with the grade below him, which he found puzzling. He couldn’t understand why being young was such a bad thing. Also, at the time, his friends had some ambitious goals but gave excuses as to why these weren’t achievable—it’s too hard, I’m too young, people don’t believe in me. One evening, 15-year-old Lachie was sitting on the couch with his mum watching a 60 Minutes episode called Flying Ryan about Ryan Campbell who, in 2013, became the youngest person to fly solo around the world at age 19. “All the little cogs just came together. I thought, ‘That's it! I know what I'm going to do. I can send this great message to young people and prove that being young isn't a bad thing. And this is how I'm going to do it, because I love aviation.’ That was the spark that lit the flame.” Setting the goal was the easy part. Planning the journey and raising the necessary funds proved more of a challenge. Lachie spent 12 months trying to find sponsors and received knockback after knockback. After a year of planning he’d raised $0 and was ready to give up. But his dad encouraged Lachie to give it one more month so he re-thought his approach. “When I talked to businesses, I was trying to be what I thought they wanted me to be. I wasn’t being authentic", he said. So, Lachie stopped trying to be someone else. “When I approached a law firm, I told them that I wanted to prove to young people that we can do anything we put our mind to it if we work really hard.” He finally secured his first sponsor and learned the key to what sponsors actually wanted which was what he could give them in value as opposed to what he was asking for. For each sponsor he gained, Lachie put a sticker on his plane. By the end of the second year his Cirrus SR22 was covered with stickers. Lachie can’t stress enough the importance of being true to yourself and knowing why you want to do something. The latter is called
Pictured (left): Lachie Smart presenting at this year's Mother Son Breakfast in July; and, with Lisa Delaney and Tim Kotzur.
value-based goal setting and Lachie talks about this in the presentations he gives at schools. “Most people jump straight to the goal when they're trying to figure out what to do. They’ll start with, ‘I want to climb Mount Everest or I want to go into space’, but they don't ask why they want to do those things first,” he explained. “Your values drive your decisions. And so, for me, I had to quickly determine that my values were around my friends, growth, and high achievement.” Knowing his ‘why’ became very important later when Lachie experienced some setbacks on his journey. His flight to Saudia Arabia was, apart from an incident over the Pacific Ocean, the worst of the trip. The leg was just under 11 hours long and Lachie was late to depart Egypt because the military had seized his fuel. After scrambling to find replacement fuel, he took off and flew over Saudia Arabia through the most backbreaking turbulence he’d ever experienced, for five and a half hours. “Every 20 minutes I thought, ‘I’ll get through this mountain range and it’ll be over, or, I’ll get to a lower terrain and it’ll cool down’, but it was never-ending and I was at my wit’s end. I just wanted to find the closest airport in Riyadh, land, and fly home on a jumbo jet.
“But it was the 13th of August and that’s my best mate Nathan’s birthday. When I was flying along, I opened my phone and saw 13 August just underneath the time ... so, I flipped over my flight plan and scribbled on the back of it ‘Happy Birthday, Nathan’ … and that just completely grounded me and my values of why I was doing this trip. When you know your motivation, and you know your values behind the decision that you made, it gives you almost unlimited motivation to push through the hard times.” Lachie’s world record has since been beaten, but his messages of persistence, knowing your 'why', and being authentic will continue to empower and inspire young people around the world.
