An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth

by Chris Hadfield

Success is feeling good about the work you do throughout the long, unheralded journey that may or may not wind up at the launch pad. You can’t view training solely as a stepping stone to something loftier. It’s got to be an end in itself.

In space flight, “attitude” refers to orientation: which direction your vehicle is pointing relative to the Sun, Earth and other spacecraft. If you lose control of your attitude, two things happen: the vehicle starts to tumble and spin, disorienting everyone on board, and it also strays from its course, which, if you’re short on time or fuel, could mean the difference between life and death. In the Soyuz, for example, we use every cue from every available source—periscope, multiple sensors, the horizon—to monitor our attitude constantly and adjust if necessary. We never want to lose attitude, since maintaining attitude is fundamental to success. In my experience, something similar is true on Earth. Ultimately, I don’t determine whether I arrive at the desired professional destination. Too many variables are out of my control. There’s really just one thing I can control: my attitude during the journey, which is what keeps me feeling steady and stable, and what keeps me headed in the right direction. So I consciously monitor and correct, if necessary, because losing attitude would be far worse than not achieving my goal.

To me, it’s simple: if you’ve got the time, use it to get ready. What else could you possibly have to do that’s more important? Yes, maybe you’ll learn how to do a few things you’ll never wind up actually needing to do, but that’s a much better problem to have than needing to do something and having no clue where to start.

That’s how I approach just about everything. I spend my life getting ready to play “Rocket Man.” I picture the most demanding challenge; I visualize what I would need to know how to do to meet it; then I practice until I reach a level of competence where I’m comfortable that I’ll be able to perform. It’s what I’ve always done, ever since I decided I wanted to be an astronaut in 1969, and that conscious, methodical approach to preparation is the main reason I got to Houston. I never stopped getting ready. Just in case.

In my experience, fear comes from not knowing what to expect and not feeling you have any control over what’s about to happen. When you feel helpless, you’re far more afraid than you would be if you knew the facts. If you’re not sure what to be alarmed about, everything is alarming.

But in order to stay calm in a high-stress, high-stakes situation, all you really need is knowledge. Sure, you might still feel a little nervous or stressed or hyper-alert. But what you won’t feel is terrified.

In a real crisis like that, a group hug isn’t going to save you. Your only hope is knowing exactly what to do and being able to do it calmly and quickly.

A lot of people talk about expecting the best but preparing for the worst, but I think that’s a seductively misleading concept. There’s never just one “worst.” Almost always there’s a whole spectrum of bad possibilities. The only thing that would really qualify as the worst would be not having a plan for how to cope.

But I’m not a nervous or pessimistic person. Really. If anything, I’m annoyingly upbeat, at least according to the experts (my family, of course). I tend to expect things will turn out well and they usually do. My optimism and confidence come not from feeling I’m luckier than other mortals, and they sure don’t come from visualizing victory. They’re the result of a lifetime spent visualizing defeat and figuring out how to prevent it.

No. 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 such thing as over-preparation. It’s your best chance of improving your odds. In my next line of work, it wasn’t even optional. An astronaut who doesn’t sweat the small stuff is a dead astronaut.

One reason we’re able to keep pushing the boundaries of human capability yet keep people safe is that Flight Rules protect against the temptation to take risks, which is strongest when momentum has been building to meet a launch date.

That’s one good thing about habitually sweating the small stuff: you learn to be very, very patient.

THERE’S NO SUCH THING as an accidental astronaut.

We were the crème de la crème. Then we got off the elevator. Just like that, we were nobodies. We weren’t even called astronauts but ASCANs (pronounced exactly as you might imagine), meaning “astronaut candidates.” Plebes. No hazing was required to knock us down a peg. Just looking around the office and seeing people we’d idolized for years did the trick. When I was assigned to a desk beside John Young—one of the original Gemini astronauts, one of only a dozen men to walk on the Moon and the commander of the very first Space Shuttle flight—I didn’t feel like I’d finally arrived. I felt like a gnat.

If you’ve always felt like you’ve been successful, though, it’s hard not to fret when you’re being surpassed.

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.

But at some point, you just have to accept the people in your crew, stop wishing you were flying with Neil Armstrong, and start figuring out how your crewmates’ strengths and weaknesses mesh with your own. You can’t change the bricks, and together, you still have to build a wall.

To my chagrin, I was the kind of father who rarely let my kids win—they had to earn victory, fair and square. I don’t have a lot of regrets in life, but one of my biggest is that when my son Kyle was about 10 and was proudly demonstrating how many laps he could swim underwater without taking a breath, I jumped in the pool and swam one more length than he did. It was an unthinking moment, and a great demonstration of the destructive power of competitiveness. I didn’t just show up my child; I risked damaging his self-confidence and our bond.

The lesson: good leadership means leading the way, not hectoring other people to do things your way. Bullying, bickering and competing for dominance are, even in a low-risk situation, excellent ways to destroy morale and diminish productivity.

Then I realized: Wow, he’s really effective. This is his way of competing—trying to terrify and belittle others. His objective is to have a negative impact, and it’s working. He’s actually making me doubt my own competence.

Helping someone else look good doesn’t make me look worse. In fact, it often improves my own performance, particularly in stressful situations.

It’s counterintuitive, but I think it’s true: promoting your colleagues’ interests helps you stay competitive, even in a field where everyone is top-notch.

In a crisis, the “why” is irrelevant. I needed to accept where I found myself and prioritize what mattered right that minute, which was getting back on the ground ASAP.

focus on the journey, not on arriving at a certain destination. Keep looking to the future, not mourning the past.

By the time we head to the launch pad, serenely focused on our mission, our spouses tend to be feeling pretty stressed. As my colleague Mike Fossum says, “Let’s face it—our dreams become their nightmare.”

Sweat the small stuff. Without letting anyone see you sweat.

Maybe it’s not unlike childbirth in that the end result has been in your head all along; you’ve read the books and seen the pictures, you’ve prepared the baby’s room and taken the Lamaze classes, you’ve got a plan and think you know what you’re doing—and then, suddenly, you’re confronted with a squalling infant, and it’s wildly different.

A FRIEND OF MINE was once in a crowded elevator in Building Four South at JSC in Houston when a senior astronaut got on and just stood there, visibly impatient, waiting for someone to divine that he needed to go to the sixth floor, and push the button. “I didn’t spend all those years in university to wind up pushing buttons in an elevator,” he snapped. Incredibly enough, someone did it for him. This incident made such a big impression on my friend that I heard about it, and probably a lot of other people did, too. For me, it was a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of ever thinking of yourself as An Astronaut (or A Doctor, or A Whatever). To everyone else, you’re just that arrogant guy on the elevator, craving significance.

The ideal entry is not to sail in and make your presence known immediately. It’s to ingress without causing a ripple. The best way to contribute to a brand-new environment is not by trying to prove what a wonderful addition you are. It’s by trying to have a neutral impact, to observe and learn from those who are already there, and to pitch in with the grunt work wherever possible.

Ultimately, leadership is not about glorious crowning acts. It’s about keeping your team focused on a goal and motivated to do their best to achieve it, especially when the stakes are high and the consequences really matter. It is about laying the groundwork for others’ success, and then standing back and letting them shine.

But my arms feel so heavy I can barely lift them, and I stay motionless, to reduce exertion. Every part of my body feels sore or shocked, or both. It’s like being a newborn, this sudden sensory overload of noise, color, smells and gravity after months of quietly floating, encased in relative calm and isolation. No wonder babies cry in protest when they’re born.

I’d finally achieved a goal I’d devoted most of my life to achieving. I didn’t feel sad about that. I felt elated: I’d done it! And I knew there was more to do, even if, at that moment, I wasn’t quite sure what, exactly. But if seeing 16 sunrises a day and all of Earth’s variety steadily on display for five months had taught me anything, it was that there are always more challenges and opportunities out there than time to experience 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.

The whole process of becoming an astronaut helped me understand that what really matters is not the value someone else assigns to a task but how I personally feel while performing it. That’s why, during the 11 years I was grounded, I loved my life. Of course I wanted to go back to space—who wouldn’t?—but I got real fulfillment and pleasure from small victories, like doing something well in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab or figuring out how to fix a problem with my car. If I’d defined success very narrowly, limiting it to peak, high-visibility experiences, I would have felt very unsuccessful and unhappy during those years. Life is just a lot better if you feel you’re having 10 wins a day rather than a win every 10 years or so.

The truth is that I find every day fulfilling, whether I’m on the planet or off it. I work hard at whatever I’m doing, whether it’s fixing a bilge pump in my boat or learning to play a new song on the guitar. And I find satisfaction in small things, like playing Scrabble online with my daughter, Kristin—we always have a game going—or reading a letter from a first grader who wants to be an astronaut, or picking gum wrappers up off the street.

The answers lie in making purposeful change. And the simplest thing to change, the one that I will always have the most power over, is myself.