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

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

I recognized that the only fair way to deal with the imbalances my job created was to anticipate crunch times at work and try to make it up to my family well in advance. Every year, when the kids were young, for instance, I took them on vacation by myself for 10 days—to Europe, the Grand Canyon, scuba diving in the Florida Keys—so that we could bon

You can’t view training solely as a stepping stone to something loftier. It’s got to be an end in itself.

“Boldface” is a pilot term, a magic word to describe the procedures that could, in a crisis, save your life.

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

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.

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.”

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

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