Life Lessons from an Astronaut
“The smartest person in the room, I’ve learned, is usually the person who knows how to tap into the intelligence of every person in the room.”
The prolific podcaster, Tim Ferriss, recently hosted Scott Kelly who is most famously known for being the human test subject in NASA’s experiment “A Year in Space”. The conversation ranged in topics from disputing Flat-Earthers to colonizing Mars and there wasn’t a boring moment.
You can get the whole conversation here on Tim’s blog, but I’ll hit the highlights and lessons from it to spare you an hour and a half of listening. However, if you have the time to listen then you definitely should!
Lessons and Highlights:
- Scott’s mother and father were both police officers in New Jersey. His mom trained hard to become the first female police officer in their hometown and one of the first in the state.
- A chronic underachiever in grade school, Scott did barely enough to make it to college. He knew his lax efforts wouldn’t cut it in higher education so he had to work harder than most to attain high marks. Scott developed an important skill in college: Learning how to learn. He reflected on its importance for challenges he would later face in the military and in space.
- Once in college, Scott invited his twin brother, Mark, to go out of town to party. Mark, who had been the higher achieving student, disparaged the idea because he knew Scott had his first college exam coming up. He told Scott he would have to practice every problem in the pertinent chapters multiple times if he wanted to succeed. This was a tipping point in Scott’s success. Scott knew that if he wanted to be an academic success, he would have to take a more disciplined approach to his studies. Scott heeded Mark’s advise and ended up scoring a 100% on his exam.
- After graduating college, Scott was commissioned into the Navy where he was an F-14 Tomcat pilot and ultimately attained a Captain rank before his retirement from the military.
- Scott says we have the resources and knowledge to colonize Mars. It would introduce plenty of technical challenges such as inventing more robust life support systems for astronauts and protection against radiation- as Mars has a higher level of radiation than Earth because its atmosphere is not as dense.
- He credits his brother for noting the task is not about rocket science, its about political science. It’s about having political support and the right funding. Furthermore, Scott stated that we need science-minded people in office.
- Scott states that we shouldn’t look at Mars as a lifeboat for Earth. This is our home and we should take care of it. It’s important to get a foothold on Mars but it’s not planet B to Earth’s planet A. Going to mars is about inspiring the future generations.
Scott has an audio course on Knowable, a book called Endurance, and a documentary on Netflix titled A Year in Space
