August 17th is Elinor Smith Day!

by Rick Joi
Rick Joi is the founder of The Workiversary Group and author of the award‑winning book, Inspiring Work Anniversaries.

Tuesday’s blog post featured a quote from Elinor Smith, and today is Elinor Smith’s birthday! 🎂 🥳

In case you missed the post, the quote was:

It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.
— Elinor Smith

The quote is from Smith’s book Aviatrix, and it is broadly misattributed to Leonardo DaVinci across the internet, which tragically misappropriates attention from a truly inspirational pioneer. (You can help right this wrong by leaving a comment on this page asking that the Foundation for a Better Life — a.k.a. the #PassItOn people — correct their attribution of the quote.)

Who was Elinor Smith?

In 1927, as a sixteen-year-old, Elinor Smith became the youngest licensed pilot in the world.

While Amelia Earhart is now better known, pilots of their day considered Smith a better flier, voting Smith female pilot of the year in 1930.

Smith set many solo endurance, speed, and altitude records and was the first woman featured on a Wheaties cereal box.

While technology has moved on and most of her records have since been broken, Smith is still the only person to ever have flown a landplane under (?!) all four of New York City’s East River bridges.

The quote featured in Tuesday’s blog post is in reference to her thinking ahead of that flight.

Full of chutzpah to the end, in the year 2000 at age eighty-eight, Smith was invited to NASA’s Ames Research Center and became the oldest pilot to complete a simulated space shuttle landing.