Today's post is a brief review of Astronaut Cady Coleman's book, Sharing Space.
One might think referring to someone as an astronaut would be both the ultimate and definitive thing one could say. However, with Astronaut, Air Force Lt. Colonel, MIT graduate, Chemistry Ph.D., Flute accompanist for Jethro Tull, fluent in Norwegian and Russian, parent, and now author, it's hard for me to escape the feeling, "Cady, leave something for the rest of us to do."
First, get the book. It's engaging, informative, motivating, inspiring, at times, dazzling, and most amazingly, modest. Dare I say, down to Earth.
What has caught my attention for today, is when Cady turns the focus from her unconventional achievements, and points us to the unconventional strategies she needed to apply to succeed.
In short, this self described "world class procrastinator (p, 27), through personal ingenuity, and the support of canny teachers and mentors, learned to find her correct practice.
One of her first contributions to correct practice for her team was in developing English-language labels for the Russian-developed modules in the International Space Station. In order to provide safety and efficiency for constantly changing teams representing multiple cultures and languages, all having to share that space, they needed accurate, rapid to understand, readily visible, and apt labels for numerous components.
She described the frustrating work of hashing this out in a conference room.
"After spending days arguing in a conference room, I insisted that we moved to the simulators used to train astronauts and cosmonauts so that we could see concrete examples of the devices we had been discussing."
"Suddenly the world seems simpler." (page 70)
It turns out, a lot of us are tactile learners.
Later, in mission training, she needed again to assert, what for her, would be correct practice.
"I was developing my own style of understanding the electrical engineering I needed to complete this mission. I studied the drawings and wiring diagrams created by the telescope engineers to illustrate what connected to what. It would be my job to know what would happen to the telescope or the rocket every time I flipped a switch on board the shuttle."
"An experienced engineer might have glanced at those drawings and grasp them immediately. but to me, a PhD chemist, it was more like spaghetti. So I came up with a solution that worked for me."
"I highlighted the various connections using colored pencils. Blue for cooling, pink for data, and so on. I was told some of the instructors thought what I was doing was a waste of time. but they were wrong. I was just taking a different route to get to the same destination - a route that made sense for the way my mind worked. (emphasis mine)"
Like Cady, those of us whose correct practice is different from conventional practice, often find it through our own resourcefulness. What Cady emphasizes in addition, is that she also found canny mentors. While her book is full of them, many of them showed up for her in unexpected ways along her journey.
An important one in this example is that her flight commander, Colonel Eileen Collins, supported her against the pushback for applying an approach others called a "waste of time." Collins said, "If you keep your focus on the mission, you can be confident you are doing the right thing."
So necessary to correct practice are those mentors, teachers, and guides; who remind us of the mission, exhort us to do the right thing, and who come to our defense when we do.
"In the end I translated my colored-pencil sketches of the data communication system into a diagram that was so intuitive that it was ultimately adopted by all of the Mission Control teams."