Bruce Dickinson would want to know what you did this morning. Not what you planned. What you did. He’s specific about these things. He flew Iron Maiden’s tour plane — a Boeing 757, registration TF-AAK, which the fans named “Ed Force One” — across six continents while serving as the band’s vocalist. He holds a commercial airline transport license. He captained flights for Astraeus Airlines during the gaps between tours. When the airline went bankrupt, he co-founded his own aviation maintenance company. This is one of his side projects.
His other side projects include: international fencing (competed for Great Britain in the epee), beer brewing (Trooper, a golden ale, sells over 25 million pints), novel writing (two published), screenwriting, motivational speaking, BBC radio presenting, and beating stage-three tongue cancer diagnosed in 2014. He was given a 66% chance of recovery. He recovered. Then he went back on tour.
“I don’t understand boredom,” he’s said. “There’s too much to do.” He says it without false modesty and without bravado — the flat, practical delivery of a man from Worksop, Nottinghamshire, who genuinely cannot comprehend how anyone runs out of things to try.
The Dare
Talk to Dickinson and the challenge would arrive within minutes. Not an explicit dare — he’s too English for that. More like an implicit pressure created by the sheer volume of his own activity, which makes anyone else’s daily schedule look like a nap.
He’d ask what you were building. The word matters. Not “doing” — “building.” Dickinson thinks in terms of projects, skills, outputs. He learned to fly because the band needed a pilot and he thought it would be interesting. He learned to fence because he’d read about it in a novel and wanted to know how it felt. He brewed beer because he drank beer and figured the distance between “drinking” and “making” shouldn’t be that far. Each skill was acquired with the same systematic intensity he brings to learning new Iron Maiden material — which he does by studying the lyrics as literature, marking emotional beats, choreographing his movements to match the narrative arc of each song.
“Iron Maiden isn’t a band,” he’d tell you. “It’s a theatrical production. The music is the script. My job is the performance.” He performs the way a stage actor performs — full physical commitment, running five miles across the stage per show, sword-fighting during “The Trooper,” climbing set pieces, changing costumes mid-concert. He’s 67. He’s still doing it.
His Credentials
Three decades as the voice of one of the biggest heavy metal bands in history. Over 100 million albums sold. The vocal range — a multi-octave operatic instrument that sounds like a fighter jet achieving consciousness — is self-taught. No formal vocal training. He developed the technique by screaming along to Deep Purple records in his bedroom in Sheffield, then refined it by performing 200+ shows a year for decades. The stamina is the real achievement. Individual notes can be taught. Two hours of sustained vocal performance at that intensity, night after night, at altitude (he performs at elevation on some tours), cannot.
He was expelled from school for urinating in the headmaster’s dinner. This is not a metaphor. He was sixteen. The headmaster’s name was not recorded, which is probably for the best. Dickinson considers the incident formative. “It taught me that there are consequences,” he said, “and that some consequences are worth accepting.”
What He’d Think of Your Excuses
Dickinson has heard every excuse for not doing something. He’s heard them from bandmates, from employees at his aviation company, from cancer patients in recovery, and from audiences of corporate executives who’ve paid him to deliver motivational speeches. His response is consistent: he doesn’t argue with the excuse. He asks a question.
“What would happen if you started?”
Not “what would happen if you succeeded” — that’s too distant, too hypothetical. What would happen if you just started. Today. The first lesson. The first flight hour. The first chapter. The first attempt. He believes the gap between inaction and action is smaller than people think, and that most people are stopped not by the difficulty of the thing but by the imagined difficulty of the thing, which is always worse.
He’d tell you about the morning after his cancer diagnosis, when he woke up and went to the gym. Not because exercise cures cancer. Because doing nothing would have given the fear more space than it deserved.
He flies planes, fences, brews beer, writes novels, and fronts Iron Maiden. He’d like to know what’s stopping you. Talk to Bruce Dickinson and find out what else is on the table.