Why an astronaut was obsessed with failure (and the lesson that leaves us to improve our productivity)

Most of us avoid thinking about failure. And when we do it is usually something inevitable, but ephemeral, because we flee from that thought.

Chris Hadfield, the Canadian astronaut who commanded the International Space Station, did exactly the opposite throughout his career: Metustically visualized each possible failure.

Because? To prevent it.

What seems like a paradox (focusing on failure to achieve success) makes some sense. Precisely in its workplace, space, an error can mean death. There, NASA dedicates Much of the training time to practice the response against emergencies. It is not pessimism, but strategic preparation.

It is a method applicable to everyday life and on the earth’s surface. When We visualize what can go wrong in a project or an important decisionwe are reducing anxiety and uncertainty. And improving our response capacity.

It is like having a mental GPS that has already calculated alternative routes before encountering the first obstacle.

But there is a trap: The key is not to become obsessed with the worst scenarios, but to turn them into contingency plans. Hadfield did not limit himself to imagining disasters, but developed specific responses for each one. He turned fear into something productive.

The method can be reduced to three steps:

1. Identify fissures.
2. Develop a specific response for each one.
3. You practice those answers until they become automatic.

This method makes sense and works because Eliminates the surprise factor of failure. When you have already visualized a problem, and practiced the answer to it, our brain processes it as a similar situation, not as a crisis.

Hadfield came to command the International Space Station preparing obsessively for everything that could go wrong. We, at a more mundane, literal and metaphorical level, we can achieve our goals by systematically proof all possible fissures.

It is not something that guarantees success, but it is a way of thinking that it will make us more competent already proof of failures.

Outstanding image | NASA / Wikipedia Commons

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