I have some big news! I'm a pilot! A paramotor pilot, to be specific. I'll get more into the details below, but for those who want a taste of what and why, check out :this clip to get a sense of what it's like. Before I talk about my experiences, however, I need to discuss how I got there.

I originally wanted to write this post entirely about my experience learning to paramotor. It's still largely about that, but along the way I realized there might be something here that's even more interesting than just the fact I picked up this new skill. It's all the surrounding stuff; the planning, logistics, and agency that made it possible in the first place.

It's interesting to look at the world around me and notice problems that I feel like I could solve. Of course since I'm in my 20s, the world around me mostly consists of other 20 year olds facing similar challenges to me. This part of life is fascinating because a lot of my peers have figured out how to solve some really hard problems, while continuing to struggle with really easy ones.

Right now, for some reason it feels like one of the biggest problems people face is a lack of direction. Of too much indecisiveness and not enough agency. I don't know if it's just because I'm in my 20s right now, and the classic trope is that your 20s are for finding yourself; for discovering who you are. Maybe in 5 or 10 years this will be a solved problem for me and my friends - I won't be noticing how indecisive and unfocused the people around me sometimes seem.

Until then, though, this feels like a topic worthy of discussion.

Video Games and Agency

Here are two things that I believe to be true. The hardest things in life require the most agency. The best things in life require the most agency.

Consider video games. They are full of incredibly hard things. Doing the things I do is not harder than beating a game like Elden Ring! It is a very tough video game but, despite that, beating it is a feat that countless people have accomplished. Many of the people I know who are incredibly good at hard video games, due to the many hours they've invested into that skill, themselves struggle with indecision and agency.

The reason behind this is that most hard stuff isn't actually difficult. Sure it can be challenging and takes a lot of skill, but the part where you actually get to work on the problem tends to be the fun part. Spending two hours on an impossible video game boss is tricky and takes a lot of practice, but it's also fun and rewarding after the challenge has been conquered. The really tricky part is getting to that spot in the first place.

Video games do that for you. They take all the agency out of the picture and handle it for you: quests, maps, skill progression, objective tracking. If you're ever unsure of what to do in a video game, you're often one button away from a clean and organized list of objectives, more perfect and clear than anyone could ever have for any real life problem. When you encounter failure in a game, you're almost instantly back into a situation where you can try the hard part again without having to deal with any messy consequences.

Of course these things are not true for every video game, and there are very much genres of game that don't quite hold your hand this way. However, the success of gameification as a way to increase agency should be taken very seriously, and is academically studied. By using video games as a template, or perhaps just as an example of what we can accomplish with some structure, there's a lot of inspiration to be drawn for your own plans and goals.

If real like was more like a video games in terms of structure then it would be easier to accomplish big, difficult goals. This, however, is within your power! You can take a goal and break it down into a video game-like quest list and series of objectives. This is not necessarily the best way to make a plan, but video games show that with the right structure almost anyone is capable of anything! We just have to find a structure that works for you.

My Planning Process

I sometimes get the feeling a lot of people are impressed by the amount of things I'm able to accomplish in the course of living my life. Or if not impressed, at least taken a little bit aback. I've had people say that about me before, that unlike most people, when I express interest in an idea of activity I almost always deliver. I'm not trying to be egotistical here; really, I don't think that being able to do things should be that impressive. In an ideal world it wouldn't be!

I think that many people attribute this impressiveness to lot of focus or determination, but really to me it just feels like competent planning. This is something that can be learned by anyone, and if everybody was better at it then people would be more empowered to achieve their goals.

There are a lot of steps between wanting to do something, and actually having that thing done. Considering that most of the intermediate steps tend to work out for me, I suppose I can speculate on where exactly things break down for most people. Identifying the exact source of the problem might be the first step to finding a general solution.

Broadly speaking, I think there are a few steps between the conception of an idea and the execution in reality

1. Generally wanting to do something.
2. Actually seriously wanting to do something
3. Breaking it down into steps.
4. Doing each step
5. Repeat steps 3 to 5, breaking things down into easier and easier steps, until problem is solved

Let's go back to my paramotoring, and work our way through this list. Step 1 is to generally want to fly. I'm not sure if this is how it works for other people, but I have a whole list of things I'd love to do; way more than I can practically achieve in one lifetime. So it was natural for me to have this idea that some day I might want to paramotor. Honestly, there are so many things I watched as a child that depicted the joy and wonder of flight that I always kind of knew I'd want to try it someday. You can thank Avatar the Last Airbender and How to Train your Dragon for a big part of this journey.

I know that it's easy to get on a tandem flight with an instructor, but to me learning a skill is almost as fun as the skill myself. Plus, it would really compromise the whole freedom of flight aspect if I didn't actually have the freedom to fly wherever I wanted. So, becoming a trained paramotor pilot seemed like the path for me.

Knowing that I want to do something means keeping an eye out for opportunities so that I'll be able to sieze them as they come. For a long time, I had no chances to do anything close to flight. Not only was it very expensive, but I also lived in the middle of a big city. I kept thinking about it though; every few months I couldn't help watching a couple of videos and doing a quick google to see if anything had changed.

Of course, eventually something did change. I moved to Chicago and had more money, which opens up a lot of doors. Here, I had a decision to make. Did I actually, seriously, want to invest time and money into this whole paramotor thing?

Everybody knows that fantasizing about having done something is way more enjoyable than actually doing the thing. However, you can't fantasize forever, lest you end up being someone who only dreams of doing while all opportunities slowly slip away. No matter what the dream, you'll eventually be forced to make a decision, and I was at this precipice with paramotor; is it something that I wanted badly enough to actually do it? This (surprisingly deep) question encompasses step 2.

Personally, I feel that it's important to be committed to the endeavours you choose. If you make a habit of not finishing what you start, each successive dream becomes a little more out of reach. If I pursued this I would treat it like a commitment; I was making the decision to sign away multiple hours and days over the next few months. To dedicate a ton of time, money, and effort which my future self could maybe use for better things. It was daunting, but we all know how it ended.

So that brought me to step 3: the research and planning phase. Time to break this project down into steps. Paramotor in particular was quite logistically challenging because getting from downtown Chicago to anywhere remotely suitable to fly is quite a trek. Since I don't own my own car, this would require renting cars weeks in advance if I wanted to fly, and don't forget that this all depended on the weather. Some weekends I would have to make the one hour drive there only to discover that there'd be no flying due to unruly winds and then meekly drive another hour home.

There was also the smaller yet still annoying stuff to deal with. Having to wake up earlier than I usually prefer to get as much flight time as possible. Eating breakfast in the car on the drive there. Paying for gas. Getting home late without much time for dinner.

Again, I knew all of this when signing up. It was all part of the deal. It's a reminder that it's possible to do big things and plan for them if you're honest with yourself about the effort that it will take. This would have been way harder if I had signed up before thinking through all of the obstacles I'd have to deal with. However, preparing myself mentally means that I could focus entirely on the joy of learning without getting bogged down in the logistics.

I could go on about how I broke the problem down into smaller and smaller pieces, repeatedly applying step 5 until the path ahead of me became simple. Problems transformed from "how do I spend enough hours getting training?" to "for which weekends do I need to rent a car?" to "I should start getting ready so I can get downstairs in time for my carpool". It's like in a video game; once the problems are broken down enough the analysis paralysis disappears and you can focus only on doing.

Plus as I did it more all of the steps got easier. I combined paramotor training with other outdoor activities like camping, to fully utilize the weekends when I had a car. I carpooled some days to save money, and discovered I could make time after work so that my weekends wouldn't always be busy. I made a habit of checking the weather forecast in advance so that I could plan out my week and know when and when not to go.

I want to reiterate that the value of all the plans I made wasn't only in ensuring they went flawlessly. The value of making all these plans is that it gave me context and ideas for how to face my problems. Each plan made all future plans easier and faster. I wouldn't have been able to improvise as well had I not dedicated time to research and preparation, and many of the moment to moment decisions I made were improvised ones. Planning also broke down the mental barriers that exist when contemplating a looming, difficult activity. When you convert one big hard problems into dozens of easy problems, the scariness kind of fades away.

The Art of Paramotor

I made you wait long enough, it's time to talk about the fun part! The part where I got to hang out in a big green field on a beautiful summer's day, and run so fast that I could fly. To get to see big blue skies above and countryside down below, and to watch sunsets from one kilometer up.

I guess I should start by explaining a little bit about what exactly paramotoring is. In my opinion, it's all about answering the question of how we humans can fly like a bird. If you've ever seen a bird soaring serenely overhead and wondering how you could do that someday then you're like me, and I might just have the answer you've been looking for.

To fly you need wings to generate lift. For us heavy heavy humans, you need a really really big and lightweight wing. The genius of paraglider design is to use a huge inflatable piece of nylon. When not inflated, it's just a light pile of plastic you can carry around. When it becomes inflated, it rises up above your head and generates lift. It's kind of like flying a huge kite, except the kite is attached to your hips.

Now we have a big wing, but we can't fly just yet. Lift is proportional to windspeed, and even if you could run that fast you won't be running once your feet are off the ground. One option is to gently glide from a high place, like a big hill, to a low place. This works really well, and if you're an expert at reading the weather you can even catch a few thermals, a hot column of rising air, to carry you up and fly indefinitely. That would make even the eagles jealous!

Add in a harness to sit in while you're flying, and some control with some pullable toggles attached to each side of the wing, and you're paragliding! In my opinion, this is the purest form of human flight available. It's truely quiet and peaceful, with nothing but your nylon wing overhead and your feet dangling below. You can soar like a bird or pull your wing in to dive like a hawk. There are some complications about ensuring your wing stays inflated and avoiding bad weather, but overall it's an amazing experience.

Unfortunately, unless you live somewhere like the Swiss Alps or Salt Lake City, you won't have the ideal conditions for paragliding like big hills and thermals. Even then, it's very weather dependant. Instead, what many people do is strap on a big motor with a propellor to their backs so they can generate their own speed and lift. It's kind of like wearing a huge fan. Even though it's loud and less serene then true free flight, it's cool to have the option of not having to land if you don't want to. This is called powered paragliding, or paramotor.

Chicago is a very flat city in a very flat state, so the only option we have here is paramotor. Still, after years of waiting, it would be good enough for me. At least for now. The rest of the planning process discussed above then occured, and throughout the entire process I was more excited than anything.

The group of students I was doing it with was really fascinating. A lot of older guys with backgrounds in motorcycling and skydiving. It was a truly diverse group of people in the way only the USA is, and it was wonderful seeing those friendships being formed. It was a great group, and everybody was helping each other and sharing advice because everybody knew we were all in it due to passion.

Most of the actual training consisted of running up and down a big grassy field with either just the wing, or the wing plus the motor on your back. It was actually really fun - nothing makes you feel more alive than touching grass on a beautiful summer day. The rainstorms and sunsets were spectacular too. Not only was it a great workout, it was just a great way to spend your mornings even without the whole flying aspect.

That's enough about the training though; let me describe the actual paramotoring. You begin by running really hard to inflate the wing and bring it up off the ground. You can't slow down at this stage otherwise the wing won't come all the way up. Then, you have to run directly upwind while using the controls and your feet to stay under the wing and make sure you're perfectly in line.

The whole time, you have a running motor, almost like a lawnmower, on your back. If things go wrong, you need to kill the motor immediately so that it doesn't tear up the cords. Otherwise, you keep two fingers on the throttle and prepare to throttle up the moment the wing is stable and you're lined up. This is probably the hardest part of the entire process, and we spent most of our time practicing controlling the wing on the ground. It's also kind of the most exhilarating.

When first learning, I was really really nervous about the day of my first flight. Taking off took me a while to master, and I remember on the drive there on the day of my first flight I had to hype myself up by remembering all of my favorite flight scenes from fiction. Luckily my instructors knew that I was capable, but my first take off and the moments leading up to it are to this day some of the most scary, anxious ones I can remember.

Ones you're running and the wing is stable, it becomes a lot more fun. You slowly increase power to the motor which not only makes you run faster, it takes more and more of the weight off your back. Just before takeoff, when you're at maximum running speed, it feel like how I imagine a speedster would feel: zooming at maximum speed effortlessly across the ground, almost gliding millimeters above the grass.

Then, once you're ready, you yank down on your controls to increase the angle of attack, squeeze down the throttle, and shoot off into the sky! It's an amazing feeling, to be propelled from behind and lifted from above as your feet sway over the tops of trees. You then wiggle into your seat and enjoy.

Once you're up there, the experience of flight is very serene and far less intense than you'd expect. It's possible to do stunts, what is called acro, but nobody at my school learns that; the instructors prioritize safety. For us, it's kind of just sitting in a chair in the sky! I didn't train enough to get into any particularly fancy maneuvers, but gliding alone above the trees was enough for me.

Eventually, you have to land. For some people, usually heavier ones, landing can be the most difficult part. For me it really wasn't. Since I'm so light and used to landing on my feet, it kind of felt like drifting down slowly from the sky, kind of like a dandelion puff. At the end I just stand up and let the wing drift down behind me, ready for the next flight.

It's an amazing experience that there's sadly no full way to describe without doing it yourself. On a hot summer day, when you're up in the sky and the wind is keeping you cool and the green landscape stretches out below you like a carpet, it's unbeatable. It's as close as you can get to being a bird that we'll probably ever have. I've flown in a small plane before and this is far superior. I know paramotor is not for everyone - flight is not for everyone - but if it is for you then I hope you get a chance someday.

:Click here to read some more scattered thoughts about paramotor.

Instilling Agency

So given all of that, what exactly is agency? I'd generally describe it as being able to achieve the things you want to achieve. It's some combination of introspection to know what you want, and good planning and motivation to achieve it.

I understand that different people struggle with motivation and procrastination, and that's a hard battle to win. However, using what I described above, I really do believe that an organized plan lowers the bar for motivation. Breaking things down into small pieces reduces the motivation you need for any given piece, and I think helping people be better at planning is far easier than defeating their procrastination.

Plus, one of the few reliable ways to increase agency in my experience is to actually get started on a plan. All the difficult parts of paramotor kind of melted away after I'd gone a few times and the excitement was burning within me. With a good plan you can kickstart your motivation, and that cycle can grow agency exponentially. After successfully doing anything a few times, you will have the confidence you need to make your next project a success.

I wish having as much agency as I do wasn't so impressive, but it's also a sign. By being a high agency person you can set yourself apart from others, and the benefits of doing so compound. You can meet so much more people, accomplish so many more things, and be a much more motivated person by cultivating this a little bit.

I think parents have a big role to play here too. It's far too common and far too easy to inadvertently squash a child's agency by being too restrictive. I think one of the primary goals for any parent should be to show your child that they are capable of achieving their goals, no matter how large and scary they are. Most of what I try to do when I spend time with children revolves around pushing their boundries and hopefully instilling this sense of agency.

Sometimes I wonder if I could do more for the agency of the people around me, since I seem to have a surplus of it. I often try to invite others on my adventures since if the plan is already made it can really lower the barrier to entry to involve someone else.

Ultimately, I hope to encourage people and push them to go slightly further than before. Perhaps this account of learning to paramotor might inspire someone to go and finish a dream that they've been putting off. I'd ask you directly, reader, do you know of any wishy-washy "someday" "maybe" goals that you could potentially accomplish now? Is the barrier to doing so just motivation? Could you lessen that motivational bar by putting together a few plans until the problem seems smaller and easier?

I know that the path to accomplishing some of these goals can seem long and harrowing, but maybe that's just your anxiety talking. Maybe that path is shorter than it seems.

:x more-paramotor

It's funny that one of the main attractions to paramotor over any other kind of flight is how affordable and compact it is. You can essentially have a full flying machine that fits in your trunk for under $10k brand new including training. For comparison, the absolute cheapest new planes will run you at least a few hundred thousand. Unfortunately, I didn't get my own equipment because I don't have any space in my apartment to store it, much less a vehicle to carry it around in. Still, it might be a fun investment someday if I get a lot of land.

Another interesting thing is how unregulated it is. In the US, paramotors and paragliders are classified as ultralight aircraft. That essentially means that you can fly on your own with very few restrictions as long as you're not putting anybody else as risk. Sadly, this prohibits flying above a densely populated area (with a very vague definition of dense) or flying with passengers, which means you can really practically only do it over farmland and countryside.

However, even just running with the wing attached on the ground is so much fun that I could see myself just doing that. On a windy day that alone might get you enough lift, and people can catch thermals and fly indefinitely at beaches and mountains. I definitely would like to experience true paragliding someday, so I might be planning a trip to Utah sometime soon.

Wearing the motor is really really heavy, at least for a weak person like me. Luckily you usually don't wear it much - when you put it on and take off you only feel the weight for a couple minutes, and you take it off right after landing. However, when training you run up and down with the motor on your back to show you can still control the wing, and that was by far the hardest and sweatiest part.

Paramotor is dangerous, but I think it's about comparable to riding a motorcycle. Not something you'd make a habit of, but safe enough to do occasionally as a treat, and one where the amount of risk is entirely in your own hands. My instructors say that there are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old bold pilots. They themselves were pretty old (and still flying in airshows too) so I guess that's a pretty good sign.

If you own your own gear, you'll probably spend a lot of time on motor maintenance. My instructors joked that they were not paragliders, they were paramechanics. As annoying as this can be, I think it's kind of cool to intimately understand where your power is coming from and how fuel gets turned into thrust. There's a lot too it, and it gives you a closer connection with the machine.

During training they had to move a lot of motors and wings around the field. To do this, the instructors had an incredibly old 1970s Ford pickup truck. It was also a stick shift. They let me drive it because I was always happy to help, and it was really cool getting to drink an old manual pickup truck around the field. I only stalled it a few times!

It was interesting how this hobby demonstrates different people's relationship to risk. I tried to be as safe as possible, but some of the students would push the instructors for one more go even later in the day when the thermals started up and we all had to stop. The instructors tell stories of training these adrenaline junkie hotshot guys who almost certainly were going to hurt themselves eventually but there was nothing they could do to stop them. They even know some people who died.

It just so happens that the optimal times for paramotor are when there's a minimum of thermic activity, to keep the air still and predictable, which is the opposite of what paragliders want. This make paramotor safer, but also kind of annoying since these times are early in the morning or right before sunset. Still, it was always a nice energetic way to start the day or fun way to end it.