***** SPDF: I am adult-long devoted to human-crucial success, and to obstruct attempts likely to end in disaster.

I can think of little, if anything, that more centrally defines who and what I am then my devotion to finding and dedicating myself to actions, strategies, tactics, campaigns...  That have the potential to win, to succeed, if pressed hard enough, committedly enough, forcefully enough, hard enough, by enough people....  And I am unwilling to either participate in, or in any way enable, actions that are unlikely to succeed regardless of how much resources and effort are invested.

This characteristic of mine has been true of me throughout my adulthood.  It was central to who and what I was in my college and advanced degree educational life.  It was centrally true of me during all of my business career.  And it has been true of me ever since., I suspect, I am quite sure, it will be true of me until I take my last breath or degenerate into a different being psychologically.

My constitution is such that I am only interested in, I am only able, to participate in things that I think are monumentally important to humanity and to creation, and I am then unable to not devote myself to seeing what would constitute success, what would constitute failure, and to devote myself to the former and to stand in the way of the latter.

I've often thought, over many years now, I've often shared over many years now, of the example of the Space Shuttle Challenger.  The space shuttle challenger blew up.  It has been quite well documented that the failure was due to a part, an o ring, and my understanding is that quite clearly an engineer, or several engineers, knew of the potential risk before the launch, before the explosion.  I don't know the details of that event beyond what I just said, but my life has been centered around somewhat life and death ventures so I know the territory quite well. 

I know how desperately a team like that Challenger launch team wanted to meet deadlines, meet goals, have a success.  I know the pressures on that engineer, or engineers, that had negative news, had bad news.  I don't know of any life and death heroics that that engineer, or those engineers, waged to attempt to stop that tragic flight.  They may have done so, but I'll guess they did not.

Either way, I'm not suggesting the problem was primarily theirs.  Near certainly the problem was systemic, enterprisewide, the wrong value on success, lack of value on avoiding disaster.

Throughout my adulthood my devotion has been to achieve both mission critical success and to avoid mission disaster, to avoid enabling the masses of people involved that were not devoted to both.

On enterprises I've had some substantial successful impact, and much failure.

But I have never failed to make the attempt regardless of personal cost to me.  And I suspect this will always be true of me.