Chris Hadfield

It takes years of serious, sustained effort, because you need to build a new knowledge base, develop your physical capabilities and dramatically expand your technical set. But the most important thing you need to change? Your mind. You need to learn to think like an astronaut. I was just getting started

No matter how competent or how seasoned, every astronaut is essentially a perpetual student, forever cramming for the next test.

As I have discovered again and again, things are never as bad (or as good) as they seem at the time.

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.

An astronaut who doesn’t sweat the small stuff is a dead astronaut.

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

When we got back to Earth, a lot of people asked whether everything had gone the way we’d planned. The truth is that nothing went as we’d planned, but everything was within the scope of what we’d prepared for.

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.