Astronauts Mark And Scott Kelly Tell BOMA 2017 Attendees To Set Goals Sky High
Identical twin brothers Mark and Scott Kelly’s careers as astronauts may have literally taken them out of this world, but they still managed to inspire and dole out industry advice Sunday afternoon to those working with buildings very much on Earth.
“If I’m going to fail at something, it better be at something I can’t even achieve,” Scott said to the BOMA 2017 International general session.
The brothers wound up shooting for the stars, but it was not always the case. Scott said he graduated at the bottom half of his high school class and said he never really took school seriously until stumbling upon Tom Wolfe’s "The Right Stuff," a book about the NASA space program’s first pilots.
Mark became a Naval Aviator in 1986, the same year as the release of Top Gun. He quickly learned he was not Maverick, he said. After a few missed attempts at landing on an aircraft carrier, Mark said his instructor asked him if being a fighter pilot was the right career choice.
“You know what? I didn’t give up. The guys who did really well that day didn’t go on to be test pilots or astronauts," he said before joking, "I often see them at the front row on Southwest Airlines.”
Their mother overcame the odds to become one of the first female law enforcement officers in New Jersey, and the two cite her seeing a goal, making a plan and working very hard to achieve it as instrumental in their own careers and one that can be used by anyone at BOMA 2017.
Scott spent a year in space, beginning in 2015, as research for the impact it could have on the human body on longer space missions. He believes attaining goals and career milestones stems from the positive impact of incremental adjustments.
“Small, constant corrections are always required. Never being comfortable with the way things are is pivotal to success,” he said. “If we’re not always going to try and make things better, they’re only going to get worse.”
Mark added how important it was to drown out extraneous noise in life. There is quite a bit of noise to silence these days, he said, as people are increasingly focused on things outside of their control, like the turbulent political climate in Washington. The best thing to do is compartmentalize and focus on what is in one’s control, he said.
Mark has been tested to the extreme on drowning out noise. His wife, former Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, was shot in the head at point-blank range at a community event. While he and their family were flying from Houston to Arizona to be with her, he left the seat-back television on a news station, which announced Giffords had died.
The family had begun to grieve on the plane when the cable networks rescinded their announcement and revised their reports to say Giffords was actually in surgery and not, in fact, deceased.
“My wife Gabby was not going to get taken out by cable news,” Mark said.
