ICYMI: On The Daily Stoic Podcast, Kelly Talks About Navy and NASA Experiences, Lessons on Leadership

In case you missed it, Arizona Senator Mark Kelly sat down with Ryan Holiday on The Daily Stoic for a wide-ranging conversation of some of the challenges Kelly faced as a Navy combat pilot and the split-second decisions he had to make as a NASA Space Shuttle commander. Kelly also spoke candidly about the importance of ego-free leadership, why he ran for Senate, and why he has no problem fighting back against Trump. Sen. Kelly speaks to Ryan Holiday on The Daily Stoic. Watch the full interview here . Listen to the full interview here . See key excepts below: On the need to remove ego out of leadership… “You don’t want somebody who has such an ego that they think they’re good at something. I think we see this at very high levels in our government right now. Somebody who thinks that they’re they’ve got this. […] I think it’s always good to have people knowing that they’re never going to reach the place that they want to get to. That’s going to mean that they’re going to continuously try to improve. It makes them better, but if they ever think they actually got there, if they have that kind of ego and they think, ‘Man, I got this,’ then they’re going to get worse.” On what he learned at NASA about decision making… “ On my third flight where I was a commander, this is something we never trained for, it was one of the solid rocket boosters. […] The Space Shuttle started rolling and yawing and I was about to hit the button to take over manually to then try to correct this and then I gave it another second and, to me it seemed like we were about to kind of go out of control, and then it corrected itself and we were fine. Never practiced that in the simulator in those thousands of hours. “Chris Craft was the first flight director and was the head of flight crew operations. [..] He had this saying, ‘When you don’t know what to do, don’t do anything.’ And I’ve used that through my career. Even sometimes my political career. Take a beat. Let’s think about this. […] Just don’t jump to some conclusion. Try to figure it out.” On the perspective seeing the world from space gives him… “Imagine if Marcus Cerulius knew that we were one galaxy in a universe of two trillion galaxies […] He certainly realized that to some extent were kind of insignificant. “In my four trips to space, I really get a kind of a deep-seated view that we have to do a better job taking care of this place. There’s no there’s no other option.” On why he ran for Senate… “I never wanted this job anyway. I had a great job and then my wife gets shot in the head and then she resigns and I find myself in a position where, before the election in 2018, a woman comes up to me. It was at a ‘Get Out the Vote’ rally and she says, ‘Hey, my son has Down syndrome, and I’m terrified he’s going to lose his health insurance. Would you please consider running for the U.S. Senate?’ Without that conversation, I would not be in the Senate right now.”