Why you might want to do more dishes after listening to Scott Kelly, America's longest-orbiting astronaut

In his 520 days in space — including a nearly year-long stretch — Scott Kelly developed a set of skills that have turned out to be incredibly salient today: How to thrive in close quarters with others; how to balance work and home when the two are the same; and how to do everything you’d normally outsource, from fixing a toilet to performing basic medical care. 

For this week’s This is Working, I talked to Scott, now retired from NASA, about lessons from his time in orbit. He had some very practical advice on setting schedules for yourself and managing teams in distant locations. He also echoed what author Jim Collins dubbed the “Stockdale Paradox” — the need to balance being optimistic with being realistic. For Admiral James Stockdale, a 7-year POW in Vietnam's notorious Hanoi Hilton, that meant never counting the days until his supposed release but always knowing it would come. Kelly’s situation was different. He loved his job and chose to embark on the journey, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t arduous. “I never tried to think, ‘How many more days am I going to be doing this?’ ‘When’s the end of this?,’ ‘How many days do I have left?’ because it wasn’t helpful,” Kelly said. “I only really looked forward to the weekend.” 

Where Kelly helped me personally was with how to stay sane and on the good side of people you are interacting with 24 hours a day. (Perhaps relevant: As I’m writing this, my youngest son is ignoring — for the millionth time — my request to turn down his iPad.) Astronauts are pre-screened to make sure they aren’t easily annoyed and NASA trains them to tackle small problems quickly to stop them from growing large. But Kelly’s own ah-ha moment on how to co-exist in a tin can came from embracing a “tiny bit more” mindset: 

“Living in space in a shared environment, what I always try to do is try to seem like you’re contributing just a little bit more to the common work. On the Space Station, there’s six crew members. You do science, you do other things, but then there are activities like cleaning and cooking and taking care of the place you’re living in. And the crews I’ve seen work the best are when everyone is doing just a tiny, tiny bit more than their share. 

“You don’t want to do too much because then a lot of times that leads to issues down the road. So everyone just doing a little more of the shared responsibilities helps to get some of that potential for conflict to go away.”

There’s a lot more from the interview — including great thoughts on responding to crises — which you can watch in the video, read in the edited excerpts below or enjoy as a podcast (we’re everywhere: Apple, Spotify, etc.). You can also find all previous editions of This is Working at lnkd.in/tiw.

Lastly, I have a request of readers. Kelly left us with a linguistic mystery: He mentioned that the Russians have a word for the kind of burnout you get during the last 30% of space travel, but he couldn’t recall the term. Any Russian speakers or cosmonaut fans know? Please share in the comments.

Now I’m off to do a little more laundry than anyone expects…

On the new applicability of his year in the space station: 

“Part of my mission was just to be there for a long time, which actually somewhat has parallels in what we're doing today. We're all sharing this collective mission of combating this pandemic with our actions and with how we're living our lives. So I think the first part about doing anything like this is just recognizing how critically important it is and how our actions not only affect their own personal health or the health of our family, but the health of society in general.”

On dealing with crises when you aren’t able to help

“My sister in law, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, was shot in Tucson, Arizona, on January 8, 2011, and I was about halfway through my 6-month mission. That was the worst, the most challenging experience I’ve had in space, dealing with that tragedy. Six other people were killed, I mean, it was a horrific thing. 

"But my job was to be the commander of the space station at the time. Sometimes being scared can kind of focus your attention, but I think you need to quickly get past that, and the way I’ve always done that is by focusing on the things I have control over, and ignoring the stuff that I have no control over. In the case of Gabby, it was basically doing my job on the space station. I wasn’t going to be able to come home to support my family. Other times, as an example, you’re getting ready to launch into space for the first time on the space shuttle, the most complicated aerospace vehicle ever built, 7 million pounds of thrust, and when those solid rocket motors light, it’s kind of scary. And you think about that, you think ‘this is the last thing I might ever do.’

"Pretty soon, you realize that thinking about that really does not help you, and focusing on the stuff you have control over is absolutely essential. Putting the anxiety and fear behind us, think that’s analogous in this situation. There are things we can control, which is doing our job, our environment, following the guidance, taking care of our family. One thing NASA always does is always thinking about the next worst failure that you can have. I think that’s something that we need to do in this situation: focusing on what we have control over and ignoring the fact that we have no idea when this is going to be over, that we have no idea what the effect long term on the economy is going to be. So you know, trying to ignore that as best as we possibly can is the best advice I can give.”

On the responsibility of leaders

“I find myself in this situation just reaching out to my friends and staying in contact with them even though I don’t have any real requirement or responsibility to do this, but I just recognize the challenge in this situation. And when you have employees that are probably experiencing one of the most challenging and significant things that they’re doing in their lives with regard to how their actions affect their own health and their jobs and their families and the general public, yeah, managers should be reaching out and checking on their people all the time. Getting through this is a team effort, and letting people know that they’re important and that people care about them… you know it’s so important to me that I find myself doing that even though these are not my employees, they’re just my friends and I’m just making sure that they’re ok.

"One of the things that I did on the space station that I think helped was to try to make the ground team feel like they’re part of the crew, and they’re just as important, because they are. In some cases they’re more important. So that kind of idea that we’re all in this together, to bring people together, good leadership, you know, I encourage any managers or leaders out there that are on this call to consider that.

"Just checking in with people is so, so critically important.”

On how being in space changes you

“Seeing the earth from space is a privilege. It’s incredibly beautiful. When you look at our planet from that vantage point, you don’t see political borders like you do on a map. The Earth seems smaller than we generally think. We seem more connected with one another from space. 

"After this pandemic, however, I realize just how connected we are. When someone gets sick in China and a couple of months later you have a worldwide pandemic like this, it just shows how — for better or worse — we are all very much connected. And that’s one of the things you learn in space. People have referred to it as the orbital perspective or the overview effect. Your perception changes about humanity, but also about the planet and the environment when you see how fragile our earth really looks when you’re looking at it from space.”