In My Experience, Fear Comes From Not

Ultimately, Leadership Is Not About Glorious Crowning Acts. It's About Keeping Your Team Focused On A Goal And Motivated To Do Their Best To Achieve It, Especially When The Stakes Are High And The Consequences Really Matter. It Is About Laying The Groundwork For Others' Success, And Then Standing Back And Letting Them Shine.

When You Have Some Skills But Don't Fully Understand Your Environment, There Is No Way You Can Be A Plus One. At Best, You Can Be A Zero. But A Zero Isn't A Bad Thing To Be. You're Competent Enough Not To Create Problems Or Make More Work For Everyone Else. And You Have To Be Competent, And Prove To Others That You Are, Before You Can Be Extraordinary. There Are No Short-cuts, Unfortunately.

Our Training Pushes Us To Develop A New Set Of Instincts: Instead Of Reacting To Danger With A Fight-or-flight Adrenaline Rush, We're Trained To Respond Unemotionally By Immediately Prioritizing Threats And Methodically Seeking To Defuse Them. We Go From Wanting To Bolt For The Exit To Wanting To Engage And Understand What's Going Wrong, Then Fix It.

Other Anatomical Changes Associated With Long-duration Space Flight Are Definitely Negative: The Immune System Weakens, The Heart Shrinks Because It Doesn't Have To Strain Against Gravity, Eyesight Tends To Degrade, Sometimes Markedly (no One's Exactly Sure Why Yet). The Spine Lengthens As The Little Sacs Of Fluid Between The Vertebrae Expand, And Bone Mass Decreases As The Body Sheds Calcium. Without Gravity, We Don't Need Muscle And Bone Mass To Support Our Own Weight, Which Is What Makes Life In Space So Much Fun But Also So Inherently Bad For The Human Body, Long-term.

Our Role Is To Develop Techniques That Allow Us To Provide Emergency Life-saving Procedures To Injured Patients In An Extreme, Remote Environment Without The Presence Of A Physician.