I Jump Anyway

I've jumped out of a plane.

Not metaphorically. Not as a team-building exercise at some corporate retreat. I mean I stood at the open door of a Cessna at eighteen thousand feet, looked down at the green patchwork of earth below, felt the wind trying to pull the breath out of my chest — and I jumped anyway. Out of the airplane of a company that would soon claim 11 lives in a horrifying aviation accident.

People ask me what that feels like. The honest answer is that the scariest part isn't the jump. It's the moment before. It's standing at the threshold with every rational instinct screaming at you to step back, sit down, go home. The jump itself is almost a relief. Once you commit, the decision is made. All that's left is to fall well.

I think about that a lot these days.

What Risk Actually Looks Like

Real risk tolerance isn't about being reckless. It's about making a clear-eyed calculation that the cost of standing still is higher than the cost of moving forward — and then moving forward anyway, even when you can't see the landing. It requires you to look directly at the thing that could hurt you, understand it fully, and choose forward anyway. That's not bravado. That's a discipline.

When the Supply Chain Burned

Last year, a supplier we trusted betrayed that trust in the most consequential way possible — selling us products that weren't what they claimed to be, with forged documentation to cover their tracks. A customer was harmed. We ended up in federal court.

Every voice around me had the same advice: go quiet, pull back, wait for the smoke to clear. And I understood that instinct. But I kept asking the same question I always ask at the threshold — what does standing still actually cost? Folding inward wasn't protection. It was abandonment dressed up as caution.

So instead of going quiet, we sued. We fought back publicly, on the record, in federal court. We rebuilt our verification protocols from scratch and kept our doors open. The crisis didn't break us. It sharpened us.

The Threshold

We are, at our core, creatures of forward motion. Stillness is not our natural state — action is, even when action is frightening, even when the available actions are all bad ones. I don't think it's an accident that the image most seared into the collective memory of September 11th isn't the impact or the collapse — it's the jumpers. Because those people, in the most impossible moment imaginable, were still choosing. Still asserting that they would not simply be acted upon by the world. That instinct — raw, ancient, almost involuntary — is the deepest thing in us. It is what we are made of. And when everything else is stripped away, it is what remains.

The threshold is the hardest part. Not the fall. Not the landing. The moment of decision — when you can still turn back, when turning back would be completely understandable — that's where character is actually formed. Every time you turn back, the hesitation becomes a habit. The habit becomes an identity.

I decided a long time ago — standing at a literal open door at eighteen thousand feet — that wasn't going to be my identity.

That same decision is why we now have an active federal lawsuit against the State of Hawaii. The state has moved to regulate our business out of existence — not because we have harmed anyone, but because we have succeeded where their system has failed. We could have accepted that quietly. We could have thrown in the towel like so many others, decided to take the safe route and forget our our kiosks, and otherwise roll over and let the machinery of government trample over us unopposed. That was the cautious choice. That was the reasonable choice. But it was never going to be our choice.

The question is never whether the risk is real. It always is. The question is whether the cost of not jumping is higher than the cost of jumping. In my experience — from that Cessna door to a federal courtroom — the answer has almost always been yes.

So I jump.

Lance Alyas,

Oahu Dispensary and Provisions