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Grace Between Gates – Embracing Calm During Travel Chaos

A personal story of finding grace in the chaos and really feeling lucky when things go upside down.

I’ve been on my fair share of delayed/cancelled flights.
I’ve spent hours at airports all over the world, pacing from one gate to another, watching the departure board turn into a list of disappointments.

But this past week? This was something else.

Toronto Pearson was a mess.
Flights were backed up for hours because of two record-snow storms.
Many more were cancelled.
People were stranded, exhausted, frustrated.
And I was right there in the middle of it (heading from my home, in Montreal, to San Diego for MMT)… And felt a sense of peace compared to what others were going through.

From cancelled flights and delay to then learning that a Delta flight from Minneapolis had crashed upon landing.

The plane flipped upside down on the tarmac.
Fire. Smoke. Emergency crews racing to the scene.
Somehow, everyone (thankfully) survived.
And the impact on the airport was immediate.
Many runways shut down.
All planes returned to the gate and had the passengers deplaned.
All inbound flights were diverted (or cancelled).
Flights delayed even further.
Many more were cancelled.
Even leaving the airport wasn’t easy… all hotels, car rentals, taxi lines and more encountered snaking lines with hundreds of people trying to figure it all out.

You start to realize how fragile air travel is when not dealing with two massive challenges (the crash and the storm)… and then something like this happens.

A single runway closure sends ripple effects across the system.
A delay in one city means a missed connection in another.
And when the industry is already running at full capacity, there’s no room for error.

It was a perfect storm of everything that could go wrong.

But there’s much more to this story… including a 30 hour-plus no sleep personal experience that never ended in San Diego at MMT, but back home… and not everyone was so lucky or feeling so thankful.

This is what Elias Makos and I discussed on CJAD 800 AM. Listen in right here.

Mitch Joel · Grace Between Gates – Embracing Calm During Travel Chaos

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Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.