An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth: What Going to Space Taught Me about Ingenuity, Determination, and Being Prepared for Anything

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The first man to walk on the moon claimed it was a step forward for mankind. However, it has made little difference in most people’s lives.

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. Patience is the key, as he explains how most of the astronauts spend many years together just training for million possibilities that can lead to disaster in space. There could be minor issues that we would not even blink once here on earth but in space it can kill you. That too in less than 10 seconds! From thousands of applications, few handful are selected to become astronauts and most of them don't even go to space for many years together, sometimes even a decade!You might never be able to build a robot, pilot a spacecraft, make a music video or perform basic surgery in zero gravity like Col. Hadfield. But his vivid and refreshing insights will teach you how to think like an astronaut, and will change, completely, the way you view life on Earth—especially your own. It sounds strange, probably, but having a pessimistic view of my own prospects helped me love my job”. There’s no such thing as no-rinse laundry soap, so cleaning of clothes is impossible. Instead, the crew just wears them over and over, until they wear out. And as my vestibular system adapted during our day of downtime, I started to be able to look out the window for longer and longer periods of time. The world was rolling by underneath, every place I’d read about or dreamed of visiting streaming past. There was the Sahara, there was Lake Victoria and the Nile, snaking all the way up to the Mediterranean. Explorers gave their lives trying to find the source of the Nile, but I could detect it with a casual glance, no effort at all.”

Chris plays excellent guitar and has now become a big celebrity singer. He recorded the first music video in space, inside the ISS - Space Oddity and it has already been viewed almost 20 million times! [the views are rising rapidly every minute]. Colonel Chris Hadfield has spent decades training as an astronaut and has logged nearly 4000 hours in space. During this time he has broken into a Space Station with a Swiss army knife, disposed of a live snake while piloting a plane, and been temporarily blinded while clinging to the exterior of an orbiting spacecraft. The secret to Col. Hadfield's success—and survival—is an unconventional philosophy he learned at NASA: prepare for the worst—and enjoy every moment of it. Life off Earth is in two important respects not at all unworldly: you can choose to focus on the surprises and pleasures, or the frustrations. And you can choose to appreciate the smallest scraps of experience, the everyday moments, or to value only the grandest, most stirring ones.Groupthink is a good thing when it comes to risks. If you’re only thinking about yourself, you can’t see the whole picture. It’s puzzling to me that so many self-help gurus urge people to visualize victory, and stop there. Some even insist that if you wish for good things long enough and hard enough, you’ll get them – and, conversely, that if you focus on the negative, you actually invite bad things to happen. Why make yourself miserable worrying? Why waste time getting ready for disasters that may never happen? In his book, An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth, Chris Hadfield takes readers deep into his years of training and space exploration to show how to make the impossible possible. Through eye-opening, entertaining stories filled with the adrenaline of launch, the mesmerizing wonder of spacewalks and the measured, calm responses mandated by crises, he explains how conventional wisdom can get in the way of achievement – and happiness. His own extraordinary education in space has taught him some counter-intuitive lessons: don't visualize success, do care what others think, and always sweat the small stuff.