Will and Orv left Dayton shortly before 9 a.m. on their fourth and most important trip to Kill Devil Hills.
The brothers had already shipped food and construction materials down to their North Carolina camp, but on this trip they carried with them a new sense of excitement.
Will first made the trip to Kitty Hawk just four years earlier. But as their train rolled out of Dayton, intellectually the Wrights were lifetimes beyond all other flying machine experimenters.
They knew they were on the threshold of accomplishing what most of the world considered impossible. The years of planning and experimenting were producing serious results. How did they arrive at this point in such a relatively short time?
"Wilbur was a man who established a goal with care, then never lost sight of it," said Historian Tom Crouch, in his award-winning biography, The Bishop’s Boys: A Life of Wilbur and Orville Wright. "He was the perfect engineer - isolating a basic problem, defining it in the most precise terms, and identifying the missing bits of information that would enable him to solve it. . . . He had the capacity to recognize and the dogged determination required to cut straight to the heart of any matter."
Knowing what you want to do is only part of the journey. Understanding how you'll get there, recognizing each of the steps necessary to reach your goal, is equally important.
Of course, the most important step is the first one. Is your train leaving the station?
Go get started. Achieving your goal may be closer than you imagine.