An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth: What Going to Space Taught Me About Ingenuity, Determination, and Being Prepared for Anything

Preparation is not only about managing external risks, but about limiting the likelihood that you’ll unwittingly add to them.

If you start thinking that only your biggest and shiniest moments count, you’re setting yourself up to feel like a failure most of the time. Personally, I’d rather feel good most of the time, so to me everything counts: the small moments, the medium ones, the successes that make the papers and also the ones that no one knows about but me. The chall

People around you will let you know in no uncertain terms that your single-minded dedication bears a striking resemblance to pigheaded selfishness.

Over the years I’ve learned that investing in other people’s success doesn’t just make them more likely to enjoy working with me. It also improves my own chances of survival and success. The more each astronaut knows how to do, and the better he or she can do it, the better off I am, too.

Early success is a terrible teacher. You’re essentially being rewarded for a lack of preparation, so when you find yourself in a situation where you must prepare, you can’t do it. You don’t know how.

One of the main purposes of a debrief is to learn every lesson possible, then fold them back into what we call Flight Rules so that everyone in the organization benefits. Flight Rules are the hard-earned body of knowledge recorded in manuals that list, step by step, what to do if X occurs, and why. Essentially, they are extremely detailed, scenario

An astronaut is someone who’s able to make good decisions quickly, with incomplete information, when the consequences really matter.

Throughout all this I never felt that I’d be a failure in life if I didn’t get to space. Since the odds of becoming an astronaut were nonexistent, I knew it would be pretty silly to hang my sense of self-worth on it. My attitude was more, “It’s probably not going to happen, but I should do things that keep me moving in the right direction, just in

asked him for advice on song writing, and he said, “I never write songs, I just write them down,” adding that if the song isn’t flowing through you of its own accord, it might be a good idea to wait until it is. He also said that he is careful not to judge a song until it’s finished, “so that it doesn’t get poisoned or stunted.”