Instant Genius - The mindset behind the Moon landing – Richard Wiseman

Episode Date: January 30, 2019

The men and women of the Apollo program needed a particular mindset to land astronauts on the Moon – Richard Wiseman explains how you can harness this mentality to achieve your own Moon shots. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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but you can learn lessons from that. You know, you can think big. That's what Kennedy did. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Focus magazine team. With the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at ScienceFocus.com or look out for us in your app store. Hello and welcome to the Science Focus podcast. I'm Helen Glennie, editorial assistant at BBC Focus magazine.

Human civilization has done some incredible things. Some achievements, like building the Pyramids of Giza, are awe-inspiring. Others, such as the eradication of smallpox, have changed the lives of millions. But nothing can quite match the effect Neil Armstrong's first footsteps on the surface of the moon had. It brought the planet together in a moment of shared ore, even if it was the competition of the space race that drove it forward. There is no denying the technical achievement of launching a rocket nearly 400,000 kilometres towards the moon, landing on the surface and returning the crew safely back to Earth,

especially when you consider the computers used famously had processing power less than a modern smartphone. But the moon landing wasn't just a great achievement for technology. It also pushed the boundaries of the human mind to its limits. In his new book, Shoot for the Moon, psychologist Richard Wiseman interviews the people who were there at mission control, planning the Apollo missions, communicating with the astronauts in space, and making split-second decisions that would mean the difference between missions, success or failure, between life and death. In this podcast, he speaks to online editor Alexander McNamom,

about the effect the Apollo program had on the national psyche, the great mental strains that both the crew at mission control and the astronauts in space needed to go through to assure success, and how you can harness the lessons they learned to change your mindset and achieve your own moonshots. But first, just a quick reminder that we really want to see your reviews of the show so that we can get an idea of how we're doing. And please share your suggestions of who you think we should speak to

on Twitter at Science Focus. The book is about the really the psychology of the Apollo landings. I mean, there's been a huge amount of literature, as you might imagine, about the technology. And then a few years ago, I was talking to a friend of mine who's massively into the Apollo landings. And I said, has anyone ever written anything about the mindset that got us to the moon? Because it was a phenomenal achievement. And it turned out they hadn't. And so I said, well, how would I go about doing that? And they said, we should really interview the mission controllers, these folks that are very sort of heart of the, the mission. It turns out because they were young folks at the time, they're still around, or many of them are still around. And so I went around. I interviewed them. And the book is about their mindset that allowed them to do pretty much the impossible. And then how you can use that in your own life to achieve, you know, perhaps not put yourself on the moon, but hopefully in impressive things in your own life. So the book is sort of a cross between a science history book and a sort of personal psychology? So it's a really odd crossover. And I've written many books about popular psychology

and they're all sort of self-development books where you say here's the theory, here's the research, here's the evidence, and here's some things you can do. This book is very different because the first part of every chapter is a little bit of the narrative of how we got from Earth to the moon. The second part then brings out the principle involved in that particular stage and gives you some exercises and techniques for incorporating that into your own life and thinking. So it's a very unusual self-development, quote, crossover science book. I don't think anyone's quite done that before, where you have this sort of overarching narrative, and you're dropping out these techniques as you go along. We all know that we've landed on the moon. But I was just wondering if you'd be able to

give us a little explain as to sort of what the Apollo program was and how it happened. Well, the context is vital. So you have early 60s, America sort of feeling they're lagging behind the Soviets and the space race. And then Kennedy does this remarkable thing, which he said, okay, we're going to put a person on the moon by the end of the decade. And now, I think as we look back, we don't perhaps realize what a phenomenal idea that was. He said that in 61. And at the time, America had just sent somebody around about 100 miles on a brief sort of space hop, 100 miles up and then straight back again. And there he was standing there and saying, as a nation, we're going to come together and we're going to go a quarter of a million miles to the moon, land and come back again by the end of the decade. It's a ridiculous idea, quite frankly. But the nation embraced that for the most part. and they manage to do it. They manage to draw together the psychology

and perhaps more importantly in some sense is the technology that means by 69 Neil Armstrong steps onto the moon. And so, you know, along the way, you have many smaller steps, but fundamentally, that's the overarching story. That must have been quite a huge risk for Kennedy at the time. There must have been quite a lot of psychology and the idea of saying,

you know what, at the moment, we can just about get people 100 miles up within the next 10 years, we're going to land someone on a body in outer space? Yeah, and I think that's where a lot of the psychology is, because when you look at his meetings with scientists and with advisors, they're coming up with plans which are a lot more doable and actually, quite frankly, not as exciting. And he realizes that he needs a plan that's going to energize the whole nation,

make people passionate about this. And it's such a kind of moonshot, we'd call it now, it's where the name comes from. You know, it's such a crazy idea. My goodness, how exciting if we could do that. And then people start to hear about this amazing idea and the fact that they could be part of it. And not only in terms of paying taxes to make it happen, but also working at NASA. So people start to make their way to NASA to work there. But I think Kennedy's sense of passion, the fact that it is such a big goal.

such an exciting goal is psychologically absolutely vital. Without that, he would not have galvanized the nation. That's huge grand scale thinking. So how was that applied within the mission? I think that people just really got excited. I mean, when you speak to the mission controllers, they're now in their 70s and 80s, and you take them back to that time, early 60s, mid-60s, you can hear the sense of excitement and their voices. Every single one, One of them says, you know, if I could go back and do it again, I'd be there in a shot. It was the most exciting thing I did. I gave my life to this.

Many of them will say, for them, the 60s doesn't exist because they just never moved outside of that building. They don't know any 60s music. They know nothing about 60s fashion. They don't know very much about the news because they were absolutely dedicated to this. And one said, you know, it never felt like we worked today in our lives. We were so passionate about what we were doing and we were so convinced that we could do it and that the nation would love us for it, that this just became not our vocation,

but our calling. So is that something that we can take that, that sort of dedication, that mindset that they had, there's a way that we can use that in our own lives? I think that there's a couple of ways. I talk about this in the book. One of them is what's meaningful for you. What would really matter? You can do sort of famous psychology exercises where you look about, you think about your legacy.

you know, what is it you're going to leave that matters. Another way of injecting meaning into pretty much anything you're doing is to ask the question, well, how is this helping others? So people are not just passionate about putting, you know, a person on the moon. They're doing it because that's meaningful. It means that, you know, America's going to pull ahead in the space race. It means that America will own space and that's going to help in terms of, in their mind, in terms of democracy and peace and so on. It's a meaningful thing to do. And so, whatever jobs people have, there's quite a lot of research that when you say to them, but how does that help other people, they become far more committed to that job. So there's some lovely work where

people who are working on supermarket checkouts, for example, not the most traditionally meaningful job in the world. But when you point out that often the contact they're having with some customers will be the only contact that those customers have with anyone all day. And for those people, it's incredibly important. And there's lots of research to support that for the people working on the checkouts, now it becomes a meaningful activity and something that some of them become quite passionate about. So it's either a question of discovering your passions and following them, or it's a question of sort of saying what's meaningful here. And that's how you apply really the kind of moon kind of approach to your everyday life. It's quite incredible how the work,

the fact that something so significant and huge as the Apollo landing can actually have an effect on our lives in a very, very sort of grand way in ourselves, our own moonshots. Absolutely. I think that's really, I mean, no one has done this book before as far as I know. And so I think that's why it's that really rather strange pairing of saying that some people think getting to the moon was the most important thing humanity has ever done. And then there are lessons there that obviously you're not going to get to the moon probably, but you can learn lessons from that.

You know, you can think big. That's what Kennedy did. And how do you do that in your own life? How do you think big? And then by setting those kind of stretch goals, as they're known in psychology, that helps you to achieve them. And so I do think there are very strong parallels here. I think there are things we can take away from the moon landings that are over and above the advances in technology. So in the book, there's eight sort of ways how attached around particular stories of events that happened in the moon landing and the

Apollo program that sort of we can take from that to our own lives. Are there any in particular that particularly resonated for you that really said, wow, that's a great story and really works well in real life as well? I think probably the very first interview I did, which was the Jerry Bostic, one of the most famous mission controllers. And I couldn't get my head around what was really happening in terms of recruitment and mission control. Because nowadays, if you think about it, if you imagine the country is going to do the most important thing, it's going to spend. and vast amounts of its national budget on that particular enterprise, who are you going to put into that room? Well, you'd probably go to the best universities. You'd go to your senior engineers

and so on. So you go to your senior engineers and so on. NASA didn't do that. There was so much skepticism, a cynicism about the idea of being able to reach the moon by the end of the decade, that they simply went out and found a group of people who were extraordinarily passionate and extraordinarily young. And I spoke to Jerry and I said, why did they go for such young people? And he said, because we were so young, we didn't know we couldn't do it. We just went in in a kind of gung-ho way thinking, well, if, you know, the president wants to get us to the moon, we'll get to the moon.

We didn't know how hard it was. he said what a lot of people do is they give up before they start they kind of go we're not going to be able to achieve this as a group or as an individual there's no point in trying that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and kennedy has this lovely line where he says you know if we try we may not succeed but if we don't try we're going to fail and i think that is the the big story here it's it's a bunch of very young people when when armstrong walked on the moon the average age in mission control is 26. They are phenomenally young. But because of that, they believe in themselves and they believe this thing is possible. And I think that is at the root of it. And I think

that's a key message, I think, from the moon landings. So essentially, it's, you know, having that personal belief in both yourself and the whole mission or whatever you're doing, that's a key takeaway from the Apollo missions. That's right. I mean, they were passion. obviously most of them had a background in engineering, but not always. I mean, you know, marketing people in there and so on, but they were passionate about it. They were team players. They didn't have people there that wanted to be individual stars. They wanted a group of people that wanted to do something significant and all prepared to work

one another to make that happen. But they didn't give up before they started. And it's very easy, I think, when you have these stretch goals, when you have these ideas, you think, well, it'll always be somebody else that will do that. It will never be me. And of course, in doing so, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So I think that thought, big time, lays at the heart of the moon landings. And of course, what's great about this is that they managed to do it against all of the odds. They managed to do it. A team of 20-something sat in a room and with a huge amount of support, obviously,

but still managed to actually do this essentially impossible goal. That is incredible. I mean, you could just think that it must have been quite a difficult sell essentially for Kennedy and NASA and the team to convince the country that when he said we are going to go to the moon that this was the group of people that he trusted to take them. Yeah, I mean, I think the initial set, which was we're going to go to the moon, was a fairly easy one, because everyone went, wow, okay, fine, let's all get behind and do it. And of course, that's another key point here is that they were doing it, not for themselves. These are, I mean, I've interviewed many, many people in terms of the science of success over the last sort of 20 years. This is the most humble group of people I've ever interviewed, and yet the group that have achieved the most. So when you look back on the transcripts, those interviews, it's really hard to find the word I. They are trained and their experiences, they say we for everything. We did this. We did that. They're always talking about each other's achievements. They're rarely talking about their own. And so their mindset was, you know, we're doing this for the good of the nation, for the future generations and so on, and we're doing it as a team. It is not about any one of us being famous. These are not famous people. It's about

doing something that's going to change world history in a very positive way. A very very very, very particular mindset. It's interesting because that we and mentality and mindset that you have all produced a very positive result which was landing on the moon, but also in the book you talk about, there's a chapter about the Apollo 1 disaster and how they took collective responsibility, each individual took their own responsibility for that,

both as individuals and the team essentially. Yeah, so for your listeners that don't know, the Apollo 1 disaster was a terrible fire on Earth. They thought where they would lose people in space. And in fact, actually, they didn't think their initial, what turned out to be Apollo 11, that first mission to the moon, as it were, for moon landing. They didn't think it would be successful.

They were pretty much certain that it was 50-50 at best. But where they actually lost people was on the ground, a terrible fire for Apollo 1, the command module core fire. And again, I spoke to the mission control. that were on shift, as it were, for that. And it was a terrible, terrible experience. And part of the underpinning for that was actually overconfidence. They were rushing ahead. They'd got this idea that nothing bad could happen. And to be honest, a lot of them, or some of the people within NASA, were not perhaps taking full responsibility. You know, there was a little bit of group think going on.

Everybody was giving responsibility to other people. And so I think, that was a key turning point where they realized how serious this endeavor was and that the important thing was they needed to learn from mistakes, something that now psychologists refer to as a growth mindset. This idea that when terrible things happen, not only do you have to be resilient and bounce back, but you have to go, all right, I need to make this a learning experience. I need to take responsibility for my actions and I need to make certain it doesn't happen again in the future. So I think the Apollo won fire, terrible and tragic as it was, was absolutely crucial to getting to the moon. I think without it, we probably wouldn't have got there because of that shift in attitude that happened when the fire took place.

Is that something that we can take from that story, as it were, to apply practically in our own lives? I think the message there is, of course, terrible things happen, unfortunately, to most of us as we, not terrible things, but negative things happen to most of us as we go through life. The question is, how do you respond to that? Because if you think, well, I'm the sort of person or the sort of organization that doesn't change, then that negative thing becomes catastrophic because there's nothing you can do about it. If you're the sort of person that says, okay, this is a learning opportunity, it's an opportunity

to do things better in the future, then you grow. And I think that growth mindset, and there's a vast amount of research into it now, is absolutely crucial. And it's reflected, I think, in our language, you know, I talk in the book about the magic word yet, that if you, with kids saying, I'm not very good at mathematics, if you just had the word yet to the end of that sentence, I'm not very good at mathematics yet, it gives hope. It shows you a flexible person, a person that's going to learn, and change and grow. And so I think that growth mindset is vital to the journey. It's coming back to just the fact that they didn't really anticipate that the mission was going to be a success. They said it was 50-50. What is the mindset that both the people on the ground and the

astronauts themselves would have had to have had to be able to go on a mission that they knew that there was a one in two chance that they would be lost in space? Well, I think those mindsets are slightly different. I mean, there's been quite a lot of written about astronauts' mindsets, and that, in a sense, is slightly different. I think from a mission control perspective, when I spoke to some of them, they felt that by the time Apollo rolled around in some of the later stages of the project, there was this sense in which that they knew what they were doing was extremely dangerous, particularly after the fire. And there was a sense of, you know, are we really going to do this? Are we really going to send three people up into space, possibly to their deaths? And there's a very famous moment in a meeting where Glenn Lennon, Glennie talks about this, who's one of the mission controllers.

He said, you know, I said, if we're going to go to the moon, at some point we have to go to the moon. We have to stop talking and start doing. And he thought for him, that was a real pivotal moment. You suddenly realized we're going to do this thing. It is dangerous. There are risks associated with it. But if we're going to reach that goal, if that's a goal worth reaching, we are going to have to take those risks.

And I think the attitude, which is about bravery, it's about moving outside your comfort zone, it's about dropping away the excuses while you're not changing and getting on with it are absolutely vital. And again, one of the mission controller said, you know, we took risks. we were never reckless. We always knew they were calculated risks. But I think that that key attitude is at some point, if you're going to go to the moon, you've got to go to the moon. If you're going to do this thing, you have to get on and do it. At some point, the talking has to stop. And then once it started, were there ever points where they, you know, they'd have to,

they were prepared for this, but they'd have to say this risk is too much. Oh, certainly on the planning. I mean, they're incredible in terms of their preparations. And And certainly in certain moments, they would go, my goodness, this is ridiculous. This is reckless. But they had safety systems and safety systems behind those. So for any one part of that mission, there were several safety systems and then a final system that hopefully would bring you home rather than push you forward into an even more dangerous situation.

So certainly very, very risky. And astronauts incredibly brave for sitting on, you know, if one of the Saturn Fives would have exploded, you've had the largest non-nuclear explosion in the history of mankind. Those things are just essentially bombs they're sitting on top of. So incredibly brave. But again, as a team, they went, we will take these risks. We know what they are. We would never want to be in the position of putting somebody in a dangerous position because we didn't take responsibility or we're reckless, but we are prepared to take risks. And that responsibility is with every person in the team knowing their path.

Absolutely. And one of the astronauts Kermatically says at some point he's looking at this Saturn 5 rocket containing millions of parts and there's an engineer working on just one tiny switch or whatever it is. And he says, you know, how confident

I mean that this thing is going to work. And the engineer famously says, well, I don't know about the rest of it, but what I do know is in terms of this switch, this mission won't fail because of me. And if everyone has that attitude, if everyone involved in every part of this rocket has the attitude of it won't fail because of me, we'll all be fine. And I think that was the attitude. And nowadays it has to be said, we're quite good at passing responsibility off to other people, and particularly in some organizations. It's all about not taking responsibility or covering your back. They never did that. It was them. And that's it. You never really passed stuff on to your seniors. You took responsibility. and it was given to you. You're expected to do your job and do it in a very, very responsible way. That must have been a loss of trust that was given to these. As you say, this mission control was

average age 26. There's a lot of trust that's being given to them both by their seniors, the people in government and the astronauts as well. Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And so Jerry Griffin talks about with Apollo 12 that when it's struck by lightning, he has to make the call. You know, it's not his in charge of mission control at that point. He could easily have passed it up the line to the people above him and so on and goes all the way up. But it doesn't work like that. You're standing there.

You've got the facts and figures. You make the call. And exactly the same happens when Neil Armstrong, of course, is famously going down to the surface of the moon. And there's a problem. And it falls to Steve Bales. in emission control to make that call. And then he's only got a few moments to do it.

He can't pass it up to his seniors. Everyone took responsibility, even though they're incredibly young. And that's definitely something that we can take that learning from the upon a mission and use it in our own lives. Oh, I think so. Just that notion of taking responsibility for successes and failures, I think is absolutely key. and also in terms of Steve Bells, for example, being prepared. I mean, that's part of being responsible.

So I talk in the book about this type of pessimism called defensive pessimism. Now, normally pessimism is bad for you because you sort of think, I'm going to fail at this, I won't try and so on. There is a type of it called defensive pessimism where you think through the terrible things that might happen and you prepare for them. And that's what the Apollo missions did big time, entire Sims teams, as they're known that would simulate every single aspect of the mission. So actually when it comes to the real thing, they're not particularly nervous as a group because they've gone through that mission

as assimilated many, many times before and rehearsed for every outcome, which gives them a certain confidence. So again, I think that's a key skill in life, that the ability, not to be pessimistic, but the ability to think what might go wrong if it does what's plan B, what's plan C? So very much preparation is a key mindset to have. Absolutely. And they had that big time and it really mattered because there wasn't a single mission where things went according to plan. And the famous moment with Steve Bales is a computer overload essentially, Neil Armstrong going towards the surface of the moon. He has got moments, you know, age 26 with 500 million people watching live to make a judgment call.

And it just so happened, exactly that problem had come up in the very last simulation they had done. And so he could confidently make that call. Without that simulation, he'd have bought that particular landing probably or killed the two astronauts. So, yeah, preparation absolutely key. And I guess the same would be the same for the actual astronauts who were there, you know, potentially cut off from the rest of civilization that they would have to be prepared for events as well. Absolutely. Absolutely. Because sometimes, because the timing obviously takes a while to get a signal to Earth and back again, you can't always wait for backup or for somebody else's opinion from mission control. So to some extent, they've got to be autonomous. But they've also got to be flexible because for all of that preparation, things still happened. There's a story I'd write about in the book with Buzz Aldrin, where they're sitting in the lunar lander, they're going to blast off, and then they notice they've knocked the sort of end of a switch off. And that means they're can't engage the rockets. And in all these preparations, they've never knocked the end of that switch

off before and broken it in the way they did on the actual landing. And so potentially they're stranded on the moon. And it's Aldrin that realizes that if he takes essentially a felt tip pen and pushes it into the switch, he can re-engage the rockets and get off the moon. So yes, there's still got to be that flexibility because the unexpected is always going to happen. But it's always built on a sort of bedrock of preparation. I mean, I guess that's, he's the sort of person that could think in that way, which is why he's the sort of person that was one of the first alams on the moon. Yes, I think, I don't know about you, but certainly for me, I wouldn't be thinking about

me felt tip pen at that point. I would be panicking in tears and regretting the entire thing. So you're not the sort of person who would sign up for, I'd like to go to the moon, please? No, no. I think if I was given one of that experience at Christmas, you know, you can sort of go and to meet a donkey or you can go on the moon. I think I'd go with visiting local donkey sanctuary. I'm not a natural for space travel, I don't think. I mean, it's all horrendous conditions, particularly those early flights. You've got three people in a very small capsule, quite a lot of

wind and all sorts of other problems, vomiting, and so on, on Apollo 8 in particular. So I think it's pretty unpleasant. And also, I mean, actually, I mean, I'm not, I'm not. not an expert on this by a long way, but actually a pretty basic technology. Often they're just looking out the window and navigating by the stars. And obviously, the computing power at that time quite famously is less than, certainly you're getting a smartphone. So it was unbelievably brave thing to do. But they pulled it off and we're still talking about it 50 years later.

It's phenomenal. So the mission has obviously had quite a big impact. As you say, we're still talking about it. had a big impact on life on Earth, really. Do you think you could pick out one thing that you would say of the whole Apollo mission that had the biggest impact to humanity as it were? I think most people talk about the Earthrise photograph, the notion that they were the first people to, if you like, see Earth from space and take a

picture. And we realize how fragile the planet is and it has a big movement. That's a big impact on the green movement and so on. I would say psychologically, though, just that notion that when we pull together as a community, as a country, to some extent, as a world, we can do phenomenal things. We can do phenomenal things. And if we can put a person on the moon, then surely, you know, we could cure poverty or alleviate poverty or feed. Those haven't got enough food and so on.

So I think it, for a while, created an enormous sense of optimal. optimism. I think we've lost that over time, but I still think the promise is there. It shows you what you can do when a group of people are passionate and are given the resources to do something which is truly amazing. Do you think that something like landing on Mars would have a similar effect on us? I don't know. I don't know. I think there's something very psychological about the moon. And it's what I talk about in the book again, I say to people, you know, go out and look up and you can see the moon. And it is obviously a very, very, very long way away.

And at the time, the chances of putting a person on that moon vanishingly small, but we did it. And if we can do it once, we can do it again. And you've still got the same brain, more or less, as the people that did it. so you can use that brain to do amazing things. I mean, the mission controllers are from surprisingly modest backgrounds. They're not from Yale, Stanford, MIT. They went to fairly small colleges.

But what they'd got was optimism and passion. And is that really that got them through? And is that something that you would take away? That optimism, passion, would be, would that be one of the things that you've taken away from doing the book yourself? I think the notion that you put together a group of people, as I say, from fairly modest backgrounds, yes, they had resources, but not a great deal of technology, that that became their lives. That's how it essentially defined them for about 10 years.

And that they believed they could do it and they were prepared to work together to make it happen. I think all those things just illustrate our potential. That's why I'm interested in a psychologist, you know, is our potential and how you make that potential real. And I should say that, you know, from day one, there's so much drama in the story, the most obvious way to get to the moon at the time, really, was just to send a rocket straight to the moon. And there was an enormous amount of debate around that kind of plan. And in the end, they end up doing almost exactly the opposite. They sent a rocket that orbited the moon, only a small part of it went down, a smaller part came up, and an even smaller part returned to the, to the moon. the earth.

So, you know, it again shows the power of innovation, of doing things differently, of doing things that no one's done before, of being flexible, being optimistic. It's all kind of encapsulated in this incredible journey. I mean, it is an incredible story. Just what I, what you tend to see now, certainly 50 years later, is that it's, we landed on the moon and that's it. But the book makes it quite clear that there is a huge, great big leaps of. of both technology and, you know, creative mindset to get there?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it was mad. When Kennedy said that in 61, you know, as I say, America had just gone 100 miles up and 100 miles back down. And then he says, you know what? We're going to get to the moon, land and come back again. So he could have said, we're just going to send a rocket. It's going to go onto the moon.

Relatively sort of doable, kinder. As soon as you've got people involved and they're going to have to land and step out. onto the lunar surface, you know, into this hostile environment that no one's ever stepped out to it before. And they're going to get back in. And then they're going to take off and come back in. It's crazy, utterly crazy. But we should remember, we did it. We absolutely did it. I say we. I didn't have much to do with it at the time. But looking back, I like to consider myself a key part of the team. We did it. And we can do it again. And we can incorporate that same thinking into our lives. was just wondering if you'd be able to, if you had like maybe five ways how we could use, I say five,

it can be as many or as few as you want, but just ways we could use that Apollo mindset in our day-to-day lives as a word to sort of give us that Apollo prod in the right direction. Sure. I would say, first of all, be passionate. I mean, as a group, there's enormous passion, an entire country, passionate about this huge goal. So harness that passion or develop it would be absolutely key. Second, I would say often when you have a goal like that, you think, like, it's unachievable. And what you've got to remember is that longest of journey's series of small steps. That's exactly what the Apollo folks did. They did, you know, the Mercury Project, setting one person up, Gemini, sending two, eventually Polyphrey.

It's a series of small steps. So break that big goal down into lots of smaller steps. Third, believe, you know, that lovely phrase, we're so young that we didn't know it couldn't be done. It's so easy to say to yourself, oh, my goodness, you know, this is this is so difficult. I'm going to give up before we start. Actually believe in yourself. That's absolutely vital. Also, take responsibility, you know, if it's not going to fail because of you.

Don't expect everyone else to be doing things for you. Take that sense of responsibility and hold on to it and be brave. You know, take risks. Don't be reckless. If you find yourself kind of giving excuses, oh, I'm going to. to wait until next week before I start that new job or whatever it is, think am I actually being sensible or am I just being too scared to make that change? Change can be quite scary, but you know what? You've got to walk towards the cannon sometimes. You've got to be brave. If you're going to

go to the moon at some point, you've got to go to the moon. That was Professor Richard Wiseman, whose book Shoot for the Moon is available now. In the latest issue of BBC Focus magazine, we look deeper into the depths of space and uncover some of the bizarre and unusual objects that are currently mystifying astronomers. We also try to make sense of quantum weirdness, understand the link between brain injury and criminal behaviour, and investigate the medical breakthroughs

that could mark and end to heart attacks. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Focus magazine team. We're the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal.

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