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

The upshot of all this is that we become competent, which is the most important quality to have if you’re an astronaut—or, frankly, anyone, anywhere, who is striving to succeed at anything at all. Competence means keeping your head in a crisis, sticking with a task even when it seems hopeless, and improvising good solutions to tough problems when e

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

Astronauts are taught that the best way to reduce stress is to sweat the small stuff. We’re trained to look on the dark side and to imagine the worst things that could possibly happen. In fact, in simulators, one of the most common questions we learn to ask ourselves is, “Okay, what’s the next thing that will kill me?”

The problem was simple: I’d decided I was already a pretty good pilot, good enough that I didn’t need to fret over every last detail. And it’s true, you don’t need to obsess over details if you’re willing to roll the dice and accept whatever happens. But if you’re striving for excellence—whether it’s in playing the guitar or flying a jet—there’s no

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

From all our sims, it felt very familiar: same sort of seats, same sort of tasks, same sort of checklists. Even the same voice was coming through our headphones: that of Yuri Vasilyevich Cherkashin, our instructor. Everything looked and felt just about as it always had, all the times we’d practiced—right

At night, instead of studying in my room, I studied in the airplane I’d be flying the next day. I got out all the checklists and navigation procedures, and acted out the whole flight, pretending to use the instrument controls. Once I was done and had “landed” safely, I started all over again. No one told me to go sit in a cold hangar for a couple o

Advanced Resistive Exercise Device (ARED), an ingenious machine that uses vacuum cylinders to apply a load of up to 600 pounds to a bar or cable,

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.”