Controlled aggression, to me, is one of the most important traits to have. To have that social intelligence to know when to exert aggression in the military environment, and when to stay calm, cool, and collected.
I was told that with the right attitude, and with enough hard work, if you get up after every time you fail, you can amount to something and you can do positive work. You can leave a positive mark for our world, and that's what I aim to do.
I didn't like the person I was growing up to become. I needed to find myself and my identity. And for me, getting out of my comfort zone, getting away from the people I grew up with, and finding adventure, that was my odyssey, and it was the best decision I ever made.
If I could talk to my younger self, I would just say that the path to great things is filled with a lot of stumbles, suffering, and challenges along the way. But if you have the right attitude and know that hard times will pass - and you get up each time - you will reach your destination.
All things that are worthwhile are very difficult to obtain.
Don't let that hunger for the unknown go away. That curiosity is so important, so you should maintain that passion for what you do.
For me... after having some intense wartime experiences where I lost a lot of good friends that I've loved, I made a promise to those guys who died - that I'd do everything in my power for the rest of my life to make this world a better place. Because those men were great human beings and they left a void.
Never in a million years would I have thought I could have been an astronaut candidate.
The SEALs were very good in teaching me hard skills - that means resilience, pushing past your mental and physical boundaries; and having an enormously high threshold for pain.
High school was interesting. For a lot of people, high school was just a big social experiment, and I think the value of high school was not so much learning how to be a great student... but I think it's learning how to interact with people and be social. I would say that in that endeavor, I completely failed.
If there was a time machine and I could tell my younger self what I'd be doing in 2020, there's no way I'd believe it.
Going into the Navy was the best decision I ever made in my life because it completely transformed that scared boy who didn't have any dreams to someone who started to believe in himself.
I was pretty much nonexistent on the Internet before NASA, and that was really because I've been inspired by amazing sacrifices of people who did amazing things - jumping on grenades or sacrificing their lives or doing the most crazy, brave things without hesitation and never, ever seeking recognition for it. That was always very powerful for me.
Ego is probably one of the biggest poisons we can have - it's toxic to any environment.
I fundamentally believed in the NASA mission of advancing our space frontier, all the while developing innovations and new technologies that would benefit all of humankind.
Success to me means serving a calling higher than yourself that improves the lives of everyone and is done completely in the name of service.
You're going to learn a lot every time you fail. So embrace that.
My father was the classic epitome of a very hard immigrant-worker. He made up for his lack of education by working really hard... He worked six days a week for as long as I can remember.
I was a really low-confident kid. I did have friends from playing sports - I played water polo and I swam. But at the heart of it, I was really scared of talking to people, and making friends, and making relationships.
I didn't have the confidence from my childhood, but dreams are possible and all good things in life are hard to get, so persevere and don't give up!
