neuron.sexy

Two months ago, I was given Chris Hadfield’s “An Astronaut’s Guide To Life On Earth” as a gift.
(I was in Oxford for a day to meet up with a friend who is doing a postdoc in biophysics in Toronto/Hamburg and who, in a fashion not untypical for academics, was dragging half of what she owned en route from Canada to Germany via the UK.) I started (and finished!) the book over my vacation. This is fairly rare: Ever since I started studying a subject I am highly interested in, most of my hunger for knowledge is satisfied by academic literature more or less relevant to the subject. At the end of the day, I am left with an appetite for experiences, and usually opt for reading novels rather than nonfiction literature.

I first heard of Chris when he did an AMA on Reddit from the International Space Station, and I heard Chris perform “Space Oddity”. Aboard the ISS. In space. Space space spaaaaaace.

The book was, as expected, entertaining and refreshingly precisely written. But where I had merely hoped for a fun, light, sciencey read, it turned out to be a fun, sciencey, and surprisingly deep and insightful piece of work. Chris wrote about his struggles and lessons he himself had to learn in a way that is unusual when you speak out publicly.

I recommend the book highly. Still, I am writing this article to share two of its main points that particularly struck home – the book has so many more stories and points that might resonate with you more than these. The book is worth reading even if you’re familiar with these two.

1. What’s the next thing that will kill me? 

   Life is dangerous, and occasionally uncomfortable. But you don’t prevent bad things from happening simply by avoiding thinking about them.

   “A lot of people live their lives hoping certain things won’t happen, because they don’t want to have to face them,” Hadfield says. His advice? Keep a cool head, face up to the problem, and ask yourself, “What’s the next thing that will kill me, and how can I get ready for this?”

   Chris thinks that it is better to be too prepared than not prepared enough. In space flight, a lack of preparation can have immediate, deadly consequences.

   Similarly, when I learned how to dive in Thailand two weeks ago, we practiced several air tank emergency scenarios over and over again. While I still hate taking my mask off underwater – I keep getting water into my nose when I do that, making that exercise fairly uncomfortable – I have practiced it so many times that I am confident what to do if I get water into my mask accidentally. Similarly, I know what it’s like to run out of air underwater, and I know what I do if it happens. Of course, I will still plan all dives so I have more than enough air to get to the surface. But if things go wrong, I am confident I won’t panic, ascend too quickly, get decompression sickness, and die, because I know what to do. I know the next thing that can kill me, and I understand it. This makes diving way less scary.

   

   (Pictured left: My favourite diving photograph of us. Taken from inside an underwater cave cathedral at Koh Haa.)

   I learned rock climbing despite being moderately afraid of heights, and got less and less scared the more I learned. These days, I feel much safer when climbing top rope than bouldering. Sure, it is higher up. But I have more control, I have practiced falling, and I know what to do.

2. Attitude matters, and it’s a bad idea to let outcomes you can’t control determine your sense of self-worth. 

   In life, you can steer in a particular direction but you can’t control actual outcomes. They might be other people’s decisions, or you may only be able to influence probabilities to a limited extent.

   “In space flight, ‘attitude’ refers to orientation: which direction your vehicle is pointing relative to the Sun, Earth and other spacecraft. If you lose control of your attitude, two things happen: the vehicle starts to tumble and spin, disorienting everyone on board, and it also strays from its course, which, if you’re short on time or fuel, could mean the difference between life and death. In the Soyuz, for example, we use every cue from every available source—periscope, multiple sensors, the horizon—to monitor our attitude constantly and adjust if necessary. We never want to lose attitude, since maintaining attitude is fundamental to success.

   In my experience, something similar is true on Earth. Ultimately, I don’t determine whether I arrive at the desired professional destination. Too many variables are out of my control. There’s really just one thing I can control: my attitude during the journey, which is what keeps me feeling steady and stable, and what keeps me headed in the right direction. So I consciously monitor and correct, if necessary, because losing attitude would be far worse than not achieving my goal.”

   This is a very scary failure mode – dangerous because it’s not obvious at all. Chris is talking multiple times about how you’re going to have a bad time if you’re comparing everything to going to space, or make it your life’s aim to go to space and assign a “failure” result to every other outcome.

   I realised that I tend to draw too much of my sense of self-worth from my externally impressive achievements. During my studies, I received a scholarship awarded to the top 1% of German students. I did an exciting master’s degree in a new subject, with the ~€10K tuition fees paid for by the German government, graduating with a distinction. I decided to do a PhD. I wrote an email to Josh Greene, the well-known professor whose PhD thesis – “The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Truth about Morality and What to Do About It”, which laid the groundwork to the Moral Tribes book – got me interested psychology years ago, asking if he was looking for PhD students. I practiced to become quicker at calculating things (I’m a mathematician, but I’m not fast at computing) because I had only one attempt at the GRE if I wanted to finish my PhD application in time. And I managed to get a full score on the quantitative part of the GRE. And I got shortlisted for a PhD position at Harvard, the top university for psychology research worldwide, in a subject I hadn’t even studied until a year before.
   And then the professor I had applied to work with told me he was no longer as interested in moral psychology, and my application was rejected because I wanted to get into a field he wanted to stop focusing that much on, and he didn’t know if we’d even find something to work on that we were both interested in.

   I was devastated.
   Not because I didn’t get into Harvard – getting accepted into their highly competitive PhD program would have been very surprising. It had been an extreme surprise that I had made it onto the shortlist. It was that this particular outcome was very unexpected.
   I had considered my numerical analysis grade might not be good enough, and that I was too nervous during the interview (I was in a video conference with one of my science heroes, and I felt not very prepared – although I’m not sure any amount of preparation would have changed that). I had definitely not considered that my moral psychology idol might cease being interested in the field, and that I maybe should have been less focused on working in the particular area. I sincerely hoped that almost getting into Harvard wouldn’t be my life story.

   (Pictured left: Me at my MSc graduation.)

   After reading Chris Hadfield’s book, I think I am finally finding closure. My current PhD position is very nice, I don’t have exams or any compulsory teaching to do and I can focus on research, and my main supervisor is likely a way better fit. (When I want a prediction of my supervisor’s actions, I ask myself what a rational, smart, nice person with a sense of humour would do, and that usually coincides with reality.) But it’s very likely not strictly better than a PhD position at Harvard – sure, being a PhD student at Harvard would have been nice. And there is no doubt I had the right attitude. The very reason I wrote that email was that I wanted to start working in the field. There was no way I could have known how that particular Harvard professor’s interests would develop.

   But brooding over professional failures is not the only possible way to make this type of mistake. It also seems like a bad idea to base your identity on the absolute highlights of your life. Someone I know got incredibly lucky by getting into Bitcoin early, and accidentally became a millionaire while he was still at university. But now he finds it incredibly hard to gather motivation or enthusiasm. He is inadvertently comparing every possible course of action at this point to the single highlight of his life. And of course, the initial stages of almost every conceivable project at all won’t be as glamorous, or impressive, or downright cool. So by making the ‘Bitcoin millionaire’ history a part of his identity, he is making it really hard for himself to invest energy into anything at all – because this became his ‘is it worthwhile?’ threshold.

   So, if you shouldn’t base your sense of self-worth on the externally impressive core moments, what should you then base it on instead? Well, even an astronaut’s life doesn’t just consist of space travel. There’s years of training on earth. Long, exhausting periods of practice and preparation and sweating the small stuff. Would you rather be happy once every ten years, or have highlights you’re enthusiastic about every week? No one’s life is constantly incredibly amazing. Embrace the small things. This is your life. Take it in. Every minute of it.