Chris Hadfield’s advice

In a recent interview with CBC Radio, Commander Chris Hadfield gave his three secrets for becoming an astronaut:

1. Keep your body in shape and eat well
2. Challenge yourself with education, and push yourself to learn things you barely expect to learn
3. Practice making decisions and sticking with them

Pretty simple. Refreshingly simple, in fact. And broadly useful, I’ve no doubt. I speculate that this advice is actually applicable to any reasonably intellectual endeavour.

Each has its own challenges: in a busy life it can be hard to eat right and make time to exercise; education requires an investment of money and time (but increasingly there are free online courses from leading institutions) and it can really be exhausting to learn something challenging; and decision-making is fraught with risks and prone to second-guesses.

But the pay-off is grand.

As a multi-point of trivia, Commander Hadfield and I have a few things in common:

• We both have ties to the University of Waterloo: me as a student and donor, and he as a professor
• We both worked at the Canadian Space Agency
• We both were interviewed by CBC Radio
• We both starred in a YouTube video, but I’ll grant that his got a few million more hits

…and while he has been to space, I’m tremendously interested in space, and that should count for something.