Personal Philosophy / Photo Gallery

When I was young, my sense of self was physical. I could run fast, jump high, and excelled at sports. At age 11 I won the all-around Washington State Gymnastics Championship. In my teens, I had arm loads of water-skiing trophies, started mountain climbing, and began alpine and telemark ski racing.

I climbed Mount Rainier at age 21. That same year, I was diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis. By 30, the cartilage in my knees was gone. I could barely walk and was in too much pain to hold a job. My physical sense of self slowly atrophied.

During the late-1990s, knee replacements and a breakthrough biotechnology drug gave me a second chance at having an active life. Because I'm not sure I'll get a third chance, I now find myself living with positive intention, creativity, and optimism.

I work hard to have a positive influence on the world. For instance, my work with the XPRIZE Foundation showed me that the impossible dream is indeed possible. We changed the way the world thinks about spaceflight, and we unleashed the potential for incentive prizes to be applied to the great technical, social and environmental problems of our time.

And my solo flight across the Atlantic in a small, single engine plane gave me a platform to talk about the future of flight, the future of medicine, and to give hope to people facing adversity in their own lives.

My life experiences - excellent physical health shattered by debilitating illness, then miraculously restored - have made me aware of just how precious an limited my time really is. I believe that I am here to be of service, to be creative and to love life.

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" What motivates man to great adventures? I wonder how accurately these motives can be analyzed, even by the participants themselves.  When I think of my own flights in the early years of aviation, I realize that my motives were as obvious, as subtle and as intermixed as the waves on oceans I flew over. But I can say quite definitely that they sprang more from intuition than from rationality and that the love of flying outweighed practical purposes – important as the latter often were. "

— Charles A. Lindbergh