Speaker 2
That is awesome. And you said a phrase in there that I love.
Speaker 2
we help you? What do you need to do? What do we need to do to help you? There's a lot of good, a lot of good learning going on around that right now. I definitely agree with you. Not everybody's going to win. Not everybody's going to succeed. And there are limits. And you need to be able to cut people who don't have the character that is required to do some of the things that these small teams are
Speaker 1
doing. Agreed. And going back to something you said just a minute ago about, I've got some friends that have talked to me about the fact that one of the things that almost destroyed their career was this idea of perfection. And so this idea that first 10 minutes, man, I'm going to crush this. And then they make a series of very reasonable errors and not huge errors, just like they drop a pencil or whatever, right? Are they stutter-stepped? And all of a sudden in their head, they're like, oh, I'm just a trainer. I've embarrassed myself. I've let down my team. And it's crushing. And so when you think about that, because let's just talk about ego and emotion for a second, we'll go back to that space station example you gave. Not only is this happening in your head, but you are aware of people who are watching. And so talk a little bit about that
Speaker 2
pressure. The thing that I did in my life with the highest internal pressure was my first spacewalk, where I was out with another, it was my first one. So I was a rookie spacewalker and I was out with a German volcanologist Alex Gerst, and he was a rookie as well. And I put a tremendous amount of stress on myself and on Alex that we had to get this done and we had to do it correctly. But I am far from a perfectionist. So if I mess something up, I have no problem fessing up there. And towards the end of that spacewalk, there was something that I physically did not have the strength to do. And Alex just came over, he had a lot more strength than me. He did the connector and we were able to move on. So I just think that the ability to say, wow, I suck is really important in just about everything we do. And you can have those moments, even in an unbelievably successful spacewalk on a $100 million orbiting laboratory, where you really didn't hurt the equipment at all. But you can still have, you need to have those moments of being humble and asking for help and getting a teammate over that can do something. And I don't know, that kind of misses the mark on the question you asked, but that was the first thing that came to my mind.
Speaker 1
No, I think it's really fair. I just think that as you mature, you know, as you're younger, you're just trying to learn the dance steps, right? You're just, you just want to be better at your job. That's all you're thinking about. And you've got a whole team around you, but as you start to step up into the role that you're talking about, which is no longer trainee or assistant, but now you're the lead. And there's a pivot that has to happen, or you will destroy yourself. You will literally destroy yourself. You have to gain a certain amount of tolerance for the fact that you're going to be 95%. You're just not going to get to 100 because you've never seen it before. And you're going to have to make peace with that 5%.