I couldn’t find a transcript of this video, so I typed one myself.

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

So if you turn that around, you can start turning yourself into who you want to be, based on what you decide to do today. What food do you put in your mouth? What book do you read? What movie do you watch? What do you do with your spare time? Do you study, do you learn something?

But if you just, sort of, make deliberate choices with your life, it’s amazing after a week, or a month, or a year, the changes that you can effect. And you, literally, turn yourself into the person that you want to become.

Life very seldom goes as planned. Mine sure didn’t! I couldn’t count the number of dead ends I ran into, setbacks, serious problems, minor problems, opportunities that looked like a sure thing that didn’t pan out… The key is to accept them.

I decided a long time ago that I wanted to be an astronaut - but I realised the odds were terrible! So I thought, well, let’s head in the direction that I like. Let’s do things on the way, that if I don’t make it all the way to the very impossible end of the ultimate job that I might love to do someday - that each of the things that I’m doing on the way, are things that I like doing, and that I would be happy to stay at.

So I did that. I went to university and studied engineering. I loved engineering, it was interesting and challenging. I became a military pilot. Flying a CF-18 was a tremendous privilege and responsibility. I went to test pilot school. And at each one of those stages of life, that kind of built on each other, I would have been happy to stop and say - this is my profession, this is who Chris Hadfield is.

Don’t measure the success of your life by one thing at the end. Measure your success by each of the small victories along the way.