An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth - Chris Hadfield

"Early Success is a terrible teacher. You are essentially rewarded for a lack of preparation.So when you find yourself in a situation where you must prepare, you don't know how to" 

Sweat over the small stuff - this is the underlying theme of Chris Hadfield's biography (not explicitly mentioned) as he chronicles his major life of NASA days and small portion to his pre-NASA days. There are some gems along the way where the author speaks about "Destructiveness of Competitiveness" ,"Aim to be a Zero" and "Climbing down the ladder". The anecdotes are weaved in seamlessly and the usage of jargon is at a minimal. The passion and the childish enthusiasm bounces off you during the key moments in his life - the first day he reported @ NASA, the lift-off to space, the first few days @ ISS et al or whenever he talks about Human Space mission. 


The portion of the book from the time of lift-off from Baikonur,Russia in Spacecraft Soyuz, his subsequent stay of 5 months in ISS, and the touchdown in Kazakhstan is so vividly written that it is hard to put down the book. During his stay, the social media was coming off age and the author posted some stunning pictures from the space, and "mundane activities" of Astronaut keeping up with earthly behaviours. 

The initial portion of the book is on a lacklustre side, may be because of the absence of "happening" events in Astronaut's life. Part of the reason may be because of long sentences that tends to drift off the readers - otherwise the book by Chris H. rivals in many ways the book by Randy Pausch - The Last Lecture.

It is not about the Trophy, Stupid!

“The applause will die down, the trophy will gather dust, and the experience will fade away. What will remain with you forever is what you learnt out of it.”

It was a day before the Area Level Contest for International Speech 2015. I was in my mentor’s house, horsing around but duly ensured that my mind was under a pretext that I was present in his house to practice my speech.

At one point, I became silent. Sensing something amiss, my mentor asked me what happened. I said : “ I really want to win the Area Level Contest”.  The desire stemmed from the loss at Area Level Humorous Contest 2013.  Not winning the contest is one thing, but not making it to even top 3 was a disaster. Truth be told, I do not like losing.  In my formative years of childhood till adulthood, I was too much into sports – probably I get this attitude from those experiences.  I wanted to make a mark this time.  I now realize how wrong I was in my approach.

I was asked by the editor of this newsletter to write about the experience in participating in the contest. But experience doesn’t amount to much if you do not reflect on the learnings you derived out of the experience.  I thought it was best to share my learnings out of contesting in this year’s contest:

#Learning 1 – Play with your strength.

 This seems a very innocuous message to all of us. DTM Lalitha Giridhar told me this after my disastrous CC6 (and also my first speech in CTM) where I forgot my lines. With respect to all the different technicalities of a speech, there is always a quality (or more) that I believe we are gifted with- either it is body language, confidence, voice modulation, scripts; there is always something that will stand out, that comes natural to you.  How do you discover it ? Simply go through you CC’s and you will find it. I found mine in CC6. Remember to harness that quality to the fullest extent and you will go places.   

#Learning 2 – Learn to unlearn

I am a very wrong person to preach you about this but the inability to unlearn was probably the one of the reasons I did not go further.   I had shared my script with Noorain Nadim for review; and the grammar Nazi that she is, she pointed out a few ( I am being generous to myself)  grammatical errors. The speech was so ingrained in me, that I just couldn’t incorporate those incremental improvements. To go further, we should be at peace in incorporating significant changes in the script as we go along in the contest. I couldn’t get myself to incorporate minor ones.

#Learning 3 – Follow your message

Follow your dreams now because it comes with an expiry date – this was my message in the script. The first time I sat in front of my computer I didn’t intend to revolve my script around this message but this eventually came out. I recollect on how many dreams, wishes and desires I delayed because of some naïve reason. Some have died – for example Aishwarya is now dating someone else; some has still life in it. This is the biggest learning I got – I now embrace my message.