September 29, 2011
Bassham, Lanny. FREEDOM FLIGHT. 1. 1. Flower Mound, TX: Mental Management Systems, 2008. 1-96. Print. ISBN 978-1-934324-18-9
Auto-Biography:
This is a story of how a fourteen hour plane ride from New York to Cairo changed Lanny Bassham's life. This is a story about freedom. It is inspired by true events and actual people, once you have read this story it will change the way you look at life, as it did for me.
Jack's voice in the story is authentic and powerful. At the beginning of the story you will find that the two characters, Jack and Lanny, are complete strangers, but by the end of the book these two become life long friends. In the first chapter you see that Lanny is a member of the United States Olympic Shooting Team (International Rifle Shooting) and he is frustrated because his team has just been assigned a new captain.
The Olympic Team's new captain was John Sands (Jack). This didn't set to well with Lanny because in his mind set, he thought that their new captain was just some guy that had high up connections and wanted a free trip to the pyramids. Once the two characters took there seats next to each other, Lanny, after a long silence, asked Jack how he got the assignment to be the captain. Jack would respond by simply saying that he asked the President of the United States.
In disbelief, Lanny asked Jack to explain, and Jack did just that. As it turns out Jack spent six years and seven months in a North Vietnamese prison, he was a POW (Prisoner of War). Jack said that the President told him that if there was ever anything he wanted, anything at all, just ask for it, and this was his request. After apologizing, Lanny asked "Is prison something you can talk about?"
So for the remainder of the book Jack tells his life story of those six years and seven months he spent in prison. He talks about everything from his daily thoughts to his life changing mentality. During his imprisonment one of the most important lessons he learns, is the lesson of understanding oneself. The countless hours he spent alone thinking to himself helped him achieve numerous goals he once found unattainable.
I was fortunate enough to meet Lanny Bassham a few weeks ago, and to hear him tell this story in person. This was a story that changed Lanny's life, and after hearing the story and reading the book it has changed my outlook on my life. You will find that many people can relate to this book because it is an emotional story, but also has in it how you can change your life just with a certain mentality.
When CPT Jack Fellowes USN POW returned from Vietnam he had 15 philosophies:
- Never prejudge a person.
- With attainment comes responsibility.
- Are you in prison or free?
- One must continually separate the important from the unimportant, thinking about and acting on the important while letting the unimportant go.
- It is unimportant what happens to you in life. What is important is what you do about what happens to you.
- The conscious mind can only think of one thing at a time.
- Everything we experience in life acts as preparation for the future.
- Your environment is not reality. Your perception of your environment is reality.
- Focus only on the solution to the problem and not on the problem itself.
- Every time you vividly picture doing something you create a preset in your self-image that improves the chances that you will act that way in the future.
- No matter how bad our environment seems, others have endured more and complained less.
- We will not continue to think about a goal if there are not open doors waiting for us to go through that make the goal attainable.
- My job is not to try to direct life's events as much as it is to manage the quality of my own participation in the events.
- Attainment is the best way to measure success not just accomplishment alone.
- God endows us with weapons to fight through adversity.
