#3amideas

Edit: Chris Hadfield. Chris freaking Hadfield. I was watching a TEDX talk by Chris Hadfield today, and he was talking about his journey as an astronaut. He started as a little 9 year old boy who was inspired by Armstrong and the like. But on the way to becoming an astronaut, he had to overcome hundreds of thousands of obstacles and fears. He called it a "caveman reflex". Basically, if you walk through a spider web, your natural reflex is to flail around and freak out. But if you think about it, there's a tiny amount of venomous spiders in your area, and an ever smaller amount of those spiders are actually harmful for people. So if you realize that, you can begin to temper your fears by walking through spider webs. By the time you reach the 20th or so spider web, you're not even going to worry. You'll have learned to control your fears and you'll have learned something new about your own limits.  But out of the entire talk, something really stuck with me. At one point, Chris said something along the lines of, "I was hanging on to the earth with one hand and gazing at the beauty of it all and I realized that overcoming fears is beautiful." When I heard this, I was completely blown. Out of all the mindsets I'd learned and seen so far, this was the one mindset of grown and learning that was so filled with that childlike and innocent wonder, tempered with an infallible sense of courage. The kind of courage that would make you stare out into the tangible all-consuming blackness of space, and smile because you had overcome so much more in your life. 

I know I tell people quite a bit about having faith in themselves and loving themselves, but this definitely was one of the more eye opening things I'd heard in a while. It covered fear of failure with self confidence and courage, topped off with a childlike curiosity.