Learn to Trust Your Instincts

It's easy to look at someone who is successful and chalk it up to their good instincts. By definition, instinct is an innate ability you are born with. It is easy to envy someone else’s natural talent and wish you could trust your own instincts like they can. The truth is your instincts are a skill which you must practice and hone if you want to improve. You must test your instincts in order to learn what works and what falls short. Like any good product development process, you need to make testable predictions and learn from the outcomes.

Recently I found myself complaining that something at work wasn't being done. Instinctually I thought I knew what should be done, but I felt it wasn't my job and I wasn't completely confident that I had the right solution to the problem. I worried I was being shortsighted or trying to follow process too rigidly, but I knew what my instincts were telling me. Could I trust my instincts?

Eventually someone else saw the same gap and took action. I observed the result that followed and realized my instincts had been correct. I had made a prediction, but I hadn’t taken action to test it. Without the outcome, the initial prediction held no value.

A few weeks later I found myself in a nearly identical situation on a different issue, again seeing an instinctual solution. After some doubt, I took action to test my instincts. There was a risk of being wrong, but I took little steps and asked for feedback along the way. This approach allowed me to change course or back out altogether if I was wrong and keep going if it seemed I was right.

The work I did has proved useful to the team, which makes me proud. More than that, I can celebrate taking a risk and learning from the outcome. One victory doesn't make me an expert, but I have learned to extend myself in order to evaluate my instincts. By learning from my successes and my failures, I can improve my instincts over time and feel more confident when quick decisions are appropriate. There will also be times when it makes more sense to observe the actions of others, but that doesn’t mean I can’t make predictions of my own ahead of time.

It's okay to take a risk and be wrong, so long as you can admit your mistakes and commit to a plan to change. In the long run, making predictions and carefully observing the result will help you be right more often and improve your instincts.

Free WiFi at 32,000 Feet

Steps to reproduce circa 2015-2017:

1. Connect to Gogo Inflight WiFi

2. Open a web browser and open the default Gogo Inflight page

3. Select a movie to watch (any movie, free or paid)

4. Say "No" you don't have the Gogo app (even if you do have the app, it won't check)

5. Enter a simple Captcha (but why?)

6. You'll be redirected to the App Store to download the Gogo app, but ignore this

7. Enjoy free WiFi for 10-15 minutes; rinse and repeat when your connection stops working

Inflight WiFi is notorious for being extremely slow and expensive. While satellite based internet will always have higher latency than ground based internet, the latency and bandwidth of satellite connections continue to get better and better. Even though prices seem to be coming down slowly over time, the main customer is likely to be business travelers who can be squeezed into paying a premium for the service and who flight often enough to make the monthly subscription a viable option. By keeping prices high and limiting the demand, the limited bandwidth supply is better for those who pay. From talking to other tech savvy fliers, this seems to be a known trick, however I haven’t seen many articles describing it in detail and I stumbled upon it myself while in flight and poking around on my phone.

To take advance of this hack, your flight must use Gogo WiFi which is currently offered on select American, Alaska, Delta, and Virgin flights. All of my experience is with the service offered on American Airlines, but the flaw seems to exist on all Gogo-enabled flights. American Airlines only offers Gogo WiFi on their domestic US routes; a different service entirely is used on their international flights, much to my disappointment. You have to repeat the above steps every 10-15 minutes, and while the timeout might sound obnoxious, you only have to go through those steps a few times on a short hop flight, and it’s exactly the sort of connection you need to check email, send some iMessages, or play a mobile game or two. I’ve only tested this on my iPhone, but I suspect you’d see similar results on Android. I wouldn't expect this to work on a laptop, but let me know if you try! Even without this trick, there are seemingly a few white-listed services that aren’t blocked when connected to WiFi even before you’ve paid. On an American flight, the AA app works so you can check flight times or the status of a checked bag. In one test, the Yahoo! Stocks app seemed to provide real time ticker quotes, though news articles were blocked and curiously the default iPhone Stocks app did not work. When I’m bored on a flight with nothing else to do, I tend to try everything.

From a product development perspective, I can understand why this defect would remain in the backlog. You could go as far as to call this a feature, a sort of “free trial” for potential customers to give them a taste of what Gogo has to offer, tempting you to pay for the full experience. Who knows, maybe Gogo even throttles your connection when giving you access to download the app. I did try to reach out to Gogo and help correct the issue. Recruitment and PR employees at Chicago Tech Week put me in touch with an engineer, but after a few emails their interest fizzled out and obviously nothing has been fixed.

As a disclaimer, it deserves clarifying that in no way was I attempting to hack inflight WiFi while on a plane. I was not subverting or modifying the hardware or software onboard an aircraft in anyway nor do I advocate doing so. I do think airplanes need third party security testing, but this isn't something to be done while in the air with unsuspecting crew and other passengers. I simply stumbled across the fact that you get free internet access when you say you need to download the app, and I wanted to share my experience. Happy flying!