Words For Our Youth…

In school, grades are based primarily on individual performance, but once you graduate from school, your success or failure will almost certainly be based on the performance of a team. This is because almost everything worth doing requires the complete attention of a group of people, all bringing different skills, different backgrounds, and different approaches to the problem.

The StratEx team was a great example. when I started the project, I knew nothing about high altitude balloons and balloon launches, space environmental systems, space suit design, tandem parachute systems, drogue parachute systems, data uplink and downlink capabilities, gps loggers, fai world record processes, radio’s, helicopter and ground recovery teams, and aviation and space medicine. There was no way I could do this alone! Our project succeeded because we brought together experts in all of these areas, and each contributed their experience, creativity and world class designs. We worked together to build the scuba-like system that allowed me to explore the stratosphere. Along the way, we broke the world record for the highest freefall parachute jump, at 135,89 feet, or almost 26 miles.

At Google, it was much the same. We succeeded because the company recruited and hired great people, and these people came together and rallied around our mission “to organize the worlds information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It was too big a goal for one person. It required the best talents of thousands of people.

My advice to the youth of today is that the goals that are most important require teams of people to solve them. Success requires you to have great skills, but also to be a great teammate.

Alan Eustace
Director of Opener/Blackfly
Previous VP of Knowledge of Google
World Record Holder