Captain Scott Kelly's speech soars above the rest

It is easy to forget the failures that lie behind every accomplishment. It is easy to assume that the people we admire found their success without trial, that they sprang into existence fully formed and free from the need to stumble before they could run. Listening to Captain Scott Kelly speak makes it clear that this is not the case.

Before he spoke of himself, Kelly spoke of his mother. She was a secretary and a waitress, but wanted to be a police officer like Kelly’s father. He built her an obstacle course in the backyard reminiscent of the one she would have to qualify on at the police academy, and she trained on it every day. “The first time she tried to get over that wall,” Kelly said, “she fell in the dirt.” Despite her initial failure, Kelly’s mother persevered. She set goals for herself of first touching the top of the wall, then grabbing it and eventually pulling herself up and over. She dragged a young Kelly around in an approximation of the 140-pound sack officers were required to carry in their exam. In the end, she outperformed most of the men and became the first female police officer in Orange, New Jersey.

It was this ethos of indomitable spirit that Kelly touched on again and again throughout the course of his speech. While he could simply have filled the hour and a half with anecdotes about his time in space (and there were plenty of those) Kelly chose instead to use his own story as a message of inspiration.

For a kid who wanted to be an astronaut, Kelly was not the best student. In his own words, Kelly may be “the only student to ever go to the wrong school.” Throughout the application process and up until his first day of class, Kelly was under the impression he was applying to an entirely different university. If not for that mistake, Kelly would never have stumbled across a copy of “The Right Stuff” at the university bookstore. It was only after reading the book that he became serious about pursuing a career among the stars.

Here, Kelly returned to the lesson he learned from watching his mother. When presented with an impossible goal, the best approach is to break it down into many more manageable steps that all build upon each other. For Kelly’s mother, that was training on her obstacle course. For Kelly, it was pursuing a degree in engineering, then applying to be a US Navy pilot. Success did not come immediately. On his first attempt to qualify in the F-14 Tomcat, Kelly missed the landing and was disqualified from the pilot program. When given the option to re-qualify, knowing that if he failed he wouldn’t be allowed to fly again, Kelly didn’t hesitate. “I’d rather fail at something I couldn’t possibly achieve than fail at something easier,” he said.

Obviously, he didn’t fail. Kelly went on to be selected as a NASA astronaut, flew to space on four different missions and was a three-time commander of the International Space Station. He has spent a total of 550 days in space, 340 of which were spent on a year-long mission — the longest consecutive amount of time ever spent in space by an astronaut. The purpose of the mission was to study the long-term effects of microgravity on human physiology, in preparation for eventual missions to Mars and beyond.