Ours is a culture that mistakes recklessness for courage. We glorify the rule-breaker, the daredevil, the maverick who leaps first and thinks later. It is thrilling in a movie, but in the world of steel, voltage, and wind at 300 feet, that same spirit turns fatal. Precision, not passion, is what keeps the signal, and more importantly the people, alive. So let’s talk about The Princess Diaries 2.

Yes. I’m going there. Buckle up, buttercup.

Read past the tiaras, bad CGI, and that absolutely disaster mattress-sled scene. Beneath the glitter and cringe of this Disney sequel lies some surprisingly durable lessons about process and maturity.

“How’s Michael?” you might ask. “Well, we are just friends now,” … “as he went off to tour the country with his band.” – Princess Mia

WELL ALRIGHTY THEN. I guess we’re going to try to forget everything that happened in the first film so we can play “find my boyfriend” again. SPOILERS AHEAD!

The sequel’s setup is simple enough: Princess Mia cannot ascend the Genovian throne unless she marries, a dusty clause that turns monarchy into a bureaucratic speed-dating exercise. Her grandmother, the ever-regal Julie Andrews, finds a candidate: Andrew Jacoby, Duke of Kenilworth. He is every parent’s dream and every rom-com’s nightmare, steady, respectful, and detail oriented. He represents stability and order. In other words, the grown-up option.

But Disney cannot let stability win for two full hours, so in rolls Nicholas Devereaux, played by a young, aggressively charming Chris Pine. He is the nephew of a scheming parliament member who wants to block Mia’s coronation, and if she fails to marry, Nicholas becomes next in line for the throne. He is charisma with no plan, chaos wrapped in cheekbones. He flirts, schemes, and nearly topples the crown. The plot’s tension is simple: will Mia choose the man of structure or the man of spontaneity?

Eventually the script forces Nicholas to grow up. He confesses the deception, abandons the plot, and begins to act with integrity. But the real transformation belongs to Princess Mia. In the final account, she works inside the system she doesn’t agree with and changes it. The climactic scene takes place at her own wedding, arranged to satisfy Genovia’s outdated law that an unmarried woman cannot ascend the throne. Surrounded by pageantry, pressure, and a full assembly, she halts the ceremony and addresses the nation. She asks why a woman’s right to lead should depend on her marital status and why duty must always demand sacrifice. She speaks publicly in front of the court and Parliament, and by the end the law is abolished after a vote.

It is sentimental, clumsy, and exactly what you expect from a Disney sequel. But underneath the fluff is a real idea: change does not come from burning the house down, rebelling, or tumbles in the hay with a hot sidepiece. It comes from walking into the great hall, standing at the microphone, and presenting change and alternative ideas. Princess Mia does not ultimately rebel; she reforms. She uses process and legitimacy to rewrite the law itself. The movie seems to be about choosing a man, but it is really about choosing a method.

The audience loves him because we all secretly wish we could be that untethered. But the Rebellion does not win because of luck. It wins because of plans, procedures, and people who know to follow them. The trench run succeeds because of formation flying, target calculations, and a commander who can trust his team. Han’s greatest moment is not when he shoots first, it is when he shows up on time, in the right place, aligned to a plan larger than himself. The swagger makes him memorable, but the discipline makes him useful.

And in real life, when things go wrong, it is never the rogue who saves the day. It is the professional. On January 15, 2009, Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger took off from LaGuardia with 155 people on board. A flock of geese crippled both engines less than three minutes into flight. There was no time for flair or instinct. There was only training. Sully did not improvise a miracle; he executed a checklist. He calculated altitude, airspeed, glide angle, and distance, and made the impossible landing on the Hudson River because he had spent decades rehearsing what to do when everything fell apart. His co-pilot, his crew, and every passenger survived. It was not luck. It was muscle memory built by process.

That is the difference between a cowboy and a professional. One hopes for the best; the other prepares for it.

And that brings us back to our own world, the WISP world. For years we have been the scrappy builders, the tinkerers with ladders and ambition. We earned our place through sheer willpower, long nights, and the spirit of making something out of nothing. But if broadband offices and regulators treat us like amateurs, maybe it is because we sometimes act like them. When we fudge EIRP numbers, skip proper NID bonding, free-climb towers, or light up frequencies we do not have a license for, we prove their point. It is teenager thinking, thrilling until someone falls off a tower, a house burns down, or a critical 911 call is dropped from public safety infrastructure failure.

If we want to fix what we do not like about our industry or its regulations, we do it the way Princess Mia did, not by storming out or ignoring the rules, but by standing inside the system and changing it through the right channels. We do it through WISPA, through standards committees, through training programs and best practices. We do it by modeling competence so strong that no regulator or agency can dismiss it. Like Captain Sully, we follow the checklist, trust the process, and save lives because we practiced what to do before the emergency came. Like Han Solo at the end of Star Wars, we show up when it matters, align with the plan, and help everyone else make it home.

It is time to put the mattress-sled antics away. Professionalism is not bureaucracy. It is the process that gets us off the tower alive, every single time, and the discipline that keeps this industry worthy of the trust the public places in us. The Apostle Paul said there comes a time to put away childish things. For us, that time is now.