What We Can Learn From My Newest Hobby

My newest hobby is skydiving. Repeatedly jumping out of a plane is exciting, but is of course also risky.

I’ve jumped at a variety of drop zones now and they are not all the same. In some drop zones, staff are running around, looking… not entirely in control. When you want to rent gear (including your parachute), you have to approach a random instructor who hands you a set and asks you to put it back where you found it at the end of the day.

The gear is clearly older and not in the best shape. The space where people pack their parachutes is messy. The onboarding briefing, which tells you about the safety procedures and about where to land at this particular drop zone, is not particularly thorough. The screen says you’ll be jumping in 18 minutes—“but you shouldn’t take those times on the screen seriously”.

You can jump at a drop zone like that, but it doesn’t leave you with the best feeling.

Other drop zones have meticulous attention to detail and organization. The staff are competent and work efficiently. Each rental “rig”, which compromises your main parachute, your reserve parachute, and some other safety devices, is carefully labeled. The rental rigs are new or very well maintained. If you bring your own rig, you must have it inspected before you are allowed to jump with it.

The drop zone briefing is a YouTube video, which gets updated every season. In the drop zone buildings, there’s a space for everything: here’s where you check in, over there is for lounging, this is where we pack parachutes, that’s where you can leave your packed parachute until you need them, please eat over there, that’s the classroom, here is the video room… it’s all clearly marked. And if you are not in the airplane boarding area 5 minutes before your jump, you’re not jumping.

Which type of drop zone will have the best safety record? Which type of drop zone has the proudest employees? And which type of drop zone will get rave reviews?

As I write this, I am in Dubai, where I’ve been jumping with Skydive Dubai. They have an incredibly professional drop zone—two of them, actually—and their community is fantastic. See? I want to advertise it on my own, without being asked to.

That’s how people will feel about you and your work if you get really organized.