Life lessons from The Edge

I quite enjoy the 1997 film The Edge, starring Anthony Hopkins and Alex Baldwin. Written by the great David Mamet, it contains many excellent lines of dialogue, including these:

“A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.”
I wrote a whole chapter in my next book about this very idea.

“What one man can do another can do.”
This is one of the mantras that I’m constantly reminding myself.

“I’m dying, and I never did a goddamn thing.”
This is my ceaseless, unending, greatest fear in life.

“Never feel sorry for a man who owns a plane.”
Solid.

“Did you know that you can make fire from ice?”
A good reminder that the seemingly impossible is sometimes possible.

In case you don’t know how:

Shape a chunk of ice into a disk, then use the warmth of your hands to melt it into a smooth, round lens. Then, just like you might use a magnifying glass to start a fire (as I did many, many times as a Boy Scout), adjust the angle of the disk until the rays of sunlight shine through it onto some dry tinder.

Behold. Fire from ice.

Or, as was often the case as a Boy Scout, the smoldering pair of jeans of a fellow Scout, followed by a cry of pain and possibly a fist fight.