Apollo 13 is one of the greatest pieces of cinema ever created, showing some of the best of humanity through one of the most intense trials we have ever gone through. A flight to the moon became a race to get the crew home after an oxygen tank exploded. There’s a lot we can learn from it.
1. You can be calm under pressure. Learn how. Astronauts spend years learning to deal with stress and making good decisions while under it.
2. Focus on solutions. NASA would not have brought the astronauts home if they had tried to figure out exactly how each problem went wrong. Instead, they focused on what was available, and how to use it to get them home.
3. Imagining things that can go wrong is actually a good thing. NASA scientists spend years coming up with things that might go wrong and ways to overcome them. There were a lot of problems on Apollo 13 that were solved because someone had come up with a solution to a completely unrelated problem. You can do the same. What might go wrong with what you think will happen? How can you solve it?
4. Big problems are a series of small problems. The big problem was getting the crew back safely. After the ship was crippled, many problems cropped up. They faced one problem at a time, never letting themselves get overwhelmed by how huge the problem was. Take it one piece at a time.
While fantasy may inspire with things that can never be, NASA inspires by what is, and what is possible. Learning to think a little like the men behind the successful failure of Apollo 13 can help you out a lot.
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