Exceptional people

Others among the now less than 1,000 people left in Mars One's first colonist application procedure have been spending a great deal of time in the public eye. They have been featured in print and online news articles, on television, and giving presentations to schools among other things. I've had a local magazine feature done on me and a couple of online news articles have used me, but that is about it. One of the things that I would really love to do, though, is go to local schools and speak to young people. I'd like to teach about space exploration and Mars in particular, but mostly I'd like to tell the following to every child I could.

note: An odd thing that I do (I think it's odd anyway, maybe everyone does it) is think about things that are unlikely but possible. I spend an inordinate amount of time planning what I might say in this or that circumstance just in case. I thought of the following when planning what I would say to school children if I spoke to them as a Mars One colonist in training seven or eight years from now but I realized that it is just as applicable now.

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These days people seem to think that I am someone exceptional. I am one of a very few who managed - through a combination of coincidence, unmitigated gall, and some quality of psychology of which I remain unaware - to be one of the first of Mars One's colonist candidates. There is no guarantee that any of we, the 1058, will ever get to go to Mars, much less be among the first four, and yet we are deemed exceptional anyway. I don't want to downplay the situation, I know that of some seven billion people in the world I am in a group of a thousand who have been set apart, but I feel less that I am exceptional and more that I have an exceptional burden to live up to. For the millions who did not hear about Mars One in time, for the thousands who didn't have the audacity to apply, and for the hundreds who were not of the right psychological makeup I must be exceptional. I feel a need to be as great as all of those people think I should be. I will never be, but I will never stop trying either.

The question, then, is how do I become exceptional? This question is not for me alone either. I believe that every human being who lives - me, you, the guy down the street, everybody - can be exceptional and should strive to be exceptional. And the first step to becoming exceptional is choosing to do so. Whatever you do in life, choose to do it exceptionally. You only have a short time available to you and so whatever you spend that time on should be worthy of the cost. If you're going to spend your time being a nurse or an engineer or a physicist or a teacher or mechanic or raising children or digging ditches, get up in the morning and look in the mirror and tell yourself that you're going to do it spectacularly. Your time is short, don't waste it being half-assed.

The next (and most important) step to being an exceptional person is the thing that Mars One colonist candidates spend the majority of their time doing. By far we spend more time learning than in any other activity. In fact, even when we're doing other activities we are usually learning even as we do them. Mars One colonists are learning how to use new unfamiliar equipment, and how to repair said equipment, and how to repair each other, and how to grow food, and how to have good relationships with other people, and conflict management, and too many other things to list. We are constantly learning and studying and trying to grow. There was a point in time when a single human brain could hold all of the knowledge in the world. That time is long past, but exceptional people are people who continuously try to do exactly that - learn all that there is to know.

I hadn't mentioned this before, but being an exceptional person is only a three step process. Step One: choose to be exceptional, Step Two: learn everything you can, and Step Three: never think that you've gotten there. There's an old saying "You learn something new every day." It's usually used by someone who has just learned something when they didn't expect to. I prefer to think of it as a challenge to not be complacent. "You! Learn something new! Every day." You may be the best writer or cook or mathematician who ever walked the Earth but you don't know all that you can know and you never will, so keep learning and growing and striving until the day you die.