An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth

by Chris Hadfield

I wasn’t destined to be an astronaut. I had to turn myself into one.

I wasn’t destined to be an astronaut. I had to turn myself into one.

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 case—and I should be sure those things interest me, so that whatever happens, I’m happy.”

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 case—and I should be sure those things interest me, so that whatever happens, I’m happy.”

However, success, to me, never was and still isn’t about lifting off in a rocket (though that sure felt like a great achievement). 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.

However, success, to me, never was and still isn’t about lifting off in a rocket (though that sure felt like a great achievement). 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.

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.

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.

Feeling ready to do something doesn’t mean feeling certain you’ll succeed, though of course that’s what you’re hoping to do. Truly being ready means understanding what could go wrong—and having a plan to deal with it.

It’s almost comical that astronauts are stereotyped as dare-devils and cowboys. As a rule, we’re highly methodical and detail-oriented. Our passion isn’t for thrills but for the grindstone, and pressing our noses to it. We have to: we’re responsible for equipment that has cost taxpayers many millions of dollars, and the best insurance policy we have on our lives is our own dedication to training. Studying, simulating, practicing until responses become automatic—astronauts don’t do all this only to fulfill NASA’s requirements. Training is something we do to reduce the odds that we’ll die.

When we’re simulating deorbit to landing, for instance, dozens of people observe, hoping that something new—a flaw in a standard procedure, say, or a better way of doing something—will be revealed. They actually want us to stumble into a gray zone no one had recognized could be problematic in order to see whether we can figure out what to do. If not, well, it’s much better to discover that gray zone while we’re still on Earth, where we have the luxury of being able to simulate a bunch more times until we do figure it out.

So instead of trying to persuade everyone else to try our route, Scott and I volunteered to scout it out. We proved to ourselves that it was doable, then climbed back up to show the others how to descend safely. 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.

He was highly skilled, technically, but also arrogant and confrontational, the kind of person who regularly swore at me, berated me and told me in no uncertain terms that I was a bumbling fool. I started to dread interacting with him, and when he dressed me down in front of Mission Control, I wanted to lash back, make my case in a legal manner, enlist supporters and try to convince them I’d done nothing wrong—everything about him just rubbed me the wrong way, professionally and personally. 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. Figuring that out helped me stop reacting emotionally to his abuse and start trying to figure out how to make the best of the situation. I quickly realized that I shouldn’t take the guy’s behavior personally. I was just one of hundreds of support people he thought were plotting his downfall; he reduced the secretary to tears on an almost daily basis. But even though I didn’t have a lot of respect for him as a person, I was his junior and had to respect his role, whether he respected mine or not.

If you’re focused on the wrong things, like the bee in your helmet or whose fault it is that the g-suit came unplugged, you are likely to miss the very narrow window of opportunity to correct a bad situation.

In a way, it feels wrong even mentioning it—I didn’t, at the time—because I know everyone else on board did similarly unheralded, unobtrusively helpful things. We’ve all fixed the toilet in space (it breaks down regularly). We’ve all wiped jam off the walls (it has a way of floating off your toast and splattering everywhere). On the ISS you have to be ready, willing and eager to do every job, from the highest-visibility stuff right down to rewiring an antenna, because there’s nobody else to do it. But if you are confident in your abilities and sense of self, it’s not nearly as important to you whether you’re steering the ship or pulling on an oar. Your ego isn’t threatened because you’ve been asked to clean out a closet or unpack someone else’s socks. In fact, you might actually enjoy doing it if you believe that everything you’re doing contributes to the mission in some way.

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. It was time for me to do that. It was time to be a commander.

On my first day at JSC, I hadn’t been an obvious candidate. I was a pilot. I didn’t have much leadership experience to speak of at all. Worse: I was a Canadian pilot without much leadership experience. Square astronaut, round hole. But somehow, I’d managed to push myself through it, and here was the truly amazing part: along the way, I’d become a good fit. It had only taken 21 years.

More than 500 people have had the opportunity to see our planet from afar, and for most of them, the experience seems to have either reinforced or induced humility. The shimmering, dancing show of the northern and southern lights; the gorgeous blues of the shallow reefs fanning out around the Bahamas; the huge, angry froth stirred up around the focused eye of a hurricane—seeing the whole world shifts your perspective radically. It’s not only awe-inspiring but profoundly humbling. Certainly it drove home to me how nearsighted it would be to place too much importance on my own 53-odd years on the planet.

Understanding my place in the grand scheme of the universe has helped me keep my own successes in perspective, but it hasn’t made me so modest that I can no longer bear applause. I bear it just fine, and actually get a kick out of the hoopla around launch and landing. Still, I also know that most people, including me, tend to applaud the wrong things: the showy, dramatic record-setting sprint rather than the years of dogged preparation or the unwavering grace displayed during a string of losses. Applause, then, never bore much relation to the reality of my life as an astronaut, which was not all about, or even mostly about, flying around in space. It was really about making the most of my time here on Earth.