My First Month with the Mini 5 Pro: Life Lessons from a 252-Gram Teacher

My life has changed a lot in the last 30 days, my dear pilots! I hope that by now you already have your hands on a cute DJI Mini 5 Pro and are starting to enjoy the pleasure of flying for 52 minutes (unless you live in Quito like me, where it’s more like 43 minutes – thanks, altitude!).

My first 30 days with this micro tank / Swiss army knife have just passed. As you may have noticed from my recent articles, this might not be my most expensive, biggest, smallest, loudest, or fastest drone. It might not even be the most fun to fly. But it absolutely, without a doubt, has been the best bang for my buck I’ve ever gotten.

Why This Little Giant, Right Now?

Maybe this was just the perfect time for this drone to come to me. Maybe my life, my evolution, my current “leave everything behind, you are not defined by what you fly, you are defined by who you are” kind of mentality brought me here. It brought me to the point where I was doing professional drone work for one of the biggest car makers in the world… with a DJI Neo. Because again, it is not the drone, but the hands that guide it.

Leaving all that philosophy behind for a moment, right now I am here, with a drone that needs to fall into hands that will use it and abuse it. It demands an open and curious mind that wants to push it to its limits and boundaries. How far can it go? How fast? What’s its maximum usable ISO for video? How much wind can it REALLY resist? And especially, the most important question for me: Is it the best available drone out there on the market?

Depends.

Okay, Let’s Get Real for a Second

Are you high on life right now? Or are you passing through a hard moment? What is your daily struggle? Are you fighting with inner or outer demons? Is there a very loved person who doesn’t want to talk to you? Maybe you are the one who doesn’t want to hear from a person you used to love way too much?

I can almost hear some of you thinking: Hey Rafa. This is a drone website. We talk about drones here. We’re not at the shrink’s office. We’re not supposed to be talking about our feelings and pains.

Well, that is partly true. Yes, indeed DroneXL is not just a drone news website (it’s the best drone news website!). But why aren’t we supposed to talk about what we feel? About our daily struggles? About what keeps us going, or what makes us do whatever it is we do through life? Or maybe about that thing that doesn’t let us smile for real, that weighs like a stone on our chests?

Call it what you want: loneliness, mortgage stress, being jobless, not being able to afford housing or food for the ones who depend on us, friends or family drifting away. Maybe an ex-partner. Maybe a child, a daughter, that you can’t connect with. This list could be gigantic and maybe won’t address your exact problem. But the real important thing here is that every one of us is having a fight. And maybe, just maybe, this little giant from DJI has a lot to teach us about how to survive.

Life Lessons from a 252-Gram Teacher

We have to learn from this drone that we don’t need to look expensive to be great. The part that dominates our life is our brain, and nobody can see it at plain sight.

We have to learn from it that we don’t need to be big to do great things. You think you need physical size? Let your inner strength be big. Let that fire fuel you toward any goal you have, independently of your physical size.

We have to learn from it that the last thing we should do is compare ourselves to others. Every one of us comes from different circumstances, and those circumstances made us who we are. And we should be proud of ourselves, even if there’s only a small chance of getting where we want to be.

Maybe these 30 days with such a great piece of hardware just made me philosophic.

DroneXL’s Take

I just know this: if you are ready to pay the price of using it on manual, of throwing away the dumb automatic modes, this is going to be the best drone of your life. If you want to do the most delicate, precise movements, it will do them. If you want to be fast as hell, it will do that too.

You want to be creative? Then be really creative before you even turn the drone on. Make a plan. Watch some videos for inspiration, take notes, and then go out and make something uniquely yours. If you want different results, you have to start doing different actions, not just copying what someone else just did on YouTube.

If you have critical thinking, a little common sense, and a small bit of imagination, this drone will be the best pen ever created to draw any crazy idea you have in your mind. Just remember that it will respond to your inputs. But you have to have the guts to listen to your heart and tell it what to do.

Go. Get the drone. Be free. Thirty days down, and each one has been better than the last.

Photo credit: Rafael Suarez