No one ever accomplished anything great sitting down.

If you start thinking that only your biggest and shiniest moments count, you're setting yourself up to feel like a failure most of the time.

Fatherhood is the unending imperfect task of turning yourself into your dad while secretly maintaining the unbridled elation of your boyhood

Early success is a terrible teacher. You're essentially being rewarded for a lack of preparation, so when you find yourself in a situation where you must prepare, you can't do it. You don't know how.

Every single day you're the result of what you did on the days prior.

One Chief Astronaut used to make a point of phoning the front desk at the clinic where applicants are sent for medical testing, to find out which ones treated the staff well-and which ones stood out in a bad way. The nurses and clinic staff have seen a whole lot of astronauts over the years, and they know what the wrong stuff looks like. A person with a superiority complex might unwittingly, right there in the waiting room, quash his or her chances of ever going to space.

Competence means keeping your head in a crisis, sticking with a task even when it seems hopeless, and improvising good solutions to tough problems when every second counts. It encompasses ingenuity, determination and being prepared for anything.