Heat shield
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After a much longer than originally planned break, CreativeBoost is back. So, hello again.
This newsletter will resume its regular biweekly schedule until the annual break for the holidays in December.
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Today, I’m going to talk about planning and an astronaut.
When I was not even halfway into my career as a writer and business owner, I would likely have related to you a story about how my curiosity, ambition and skills all came together to help start my business back in 2001. I’d have said to you that it felt like it was an inevitable event—as though by design—that launched the next stage of my life.
It’s a story I told many times. But as I get older, I’m less convinced by it.
Early in our careers, most of us spend a lot of time convincing others that we know things. We have a plan. And events unfold in such a way that we think we are meant to stick to that plan. Confidence and swagger hides what tends to be a fixed set of possible outcomes: we either succeed at our plan or we fail.
As we get older, however, we are only being truly honest with ourselves if we challenge what we think we know. This isn’t just a matter of gained wisdom. It’s because planning—if left unchecked—can be a paralyzing mental framework.
Circumstances change in life and so must our thinking. Otherwise, we are doomed to black and white outcomes: we either succeed or we fail. Or worse, we condemn ourselves to a rigid mental model: an assumption that our only choices in front of us either get us closer to our original goal, or they do not.
Astronaut Jim Lovell had a plan.
He’d had an impressive career both as test pilot and as a member of NASA’s Gemini program. Everything Lovell achieved by 1970 had seemingly prepared him to carry out his next mission, which was to command a mission to the Moon.
He and the rest of the crew of the ill-fated Apollo 13 were only about three-quarters the way to their destination when a nearly fatal catastrophe on-board turned the mission into one of survival.
Everything Jim Lovell had prepared for had been to execute a plan—until that plan didn’t matter anymore. Next, all that preparation became important in ways that likely hadn’t been anticipated.
Flying the lunar module now as a lifeboat—a craft that was never designed for anything but for shuttling astronauts to and from the lunar surface—Lovell had a matter of hours to figure out how to pilot the craft to manually navigate a two-degree pie-shaped entry point for a safe return to Earth.
Even as Lovell, his crew and the staff at Mission Control back on Earth solved problem after problem, there was still the matter of what would happen in that last stage of their life-saving mission when their damaged capsule attempted re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere. As Lovell recounts the story:
“…we wondered about that heat shield which was right behind us, if the explosion had cracked it. But there was nothing we could do at that point. There was no solution. You just crossed your fingers. Once we entered the atmosphere we just had to hope the heat shield was intact. And it was.”
You can plan. You can prepare. Do everything you possibly can to ready yourself before you take what seems like a massive risk in your life. But know that at some point, there’s an element of chance that you have to just surrender to. Will your heat shield hold? Or will you burn up on re-entry, streaking across the sky like a falling star?
Like Lovell says: There’s no solution to that. There’s just preparation, execution and hope.
There will be times in your career when you will find yourself lost in space: your carefully tended plans rendered pointless and your new mission will be daunting, filled with more questions than answers.
What will get you through it will be the skill you’ve been honing the whole time without even realizing it: resilience.
Very best, Patrick
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