Watching the President of SpaceX Gwynne Shotwell at TED talk about how she became an engineer after her mom took her to a Society of Women Engineers event and she fell in love with the mechanical engineer that spoke, I couldn’t stop thinking about Laura Tenenbaum from NASA and her talk at SXSW 2017.

Such an inspirational woman and a kickass leader! I love how she shared her role in relation to Elon Musk, embracing being uncomfortable which is such a drive for innovation and how it led to more satisfaction rather than frustration in her job:

I always felt like my job was to take these ideas and kind of turn them into company goals, make them achievable, and kind of roll the company over from this steep slope, get it comfortable. And I noticed every time I felt like we were there, we were rolling over, people were getting comfortable, Elon would throw something out there, and all of a sudden, we’re not comfortable and we’re climbing that steep slope again. But then once I realized that that’s his job, and my job is to get the company close to comfortable so he can push again and put us back on that slope, then I started liking my job a lot more, instead of always being frustrated.

Also loved that she’s a great sleeper as I, too,

actually sleep really well. I’m a good sleeper, that’s my best thing.

 

To close the loop on space and how it inspires the best in us (and of us), a rare and must-watch Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, Explained in a Pioneering 1923 Silent Film (before we’d seen earth from space!). Thanks to the amazing Mario Popova’s Brain Pickings https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/06/11/the-einstein-theory-of-relativity-fleischer-1923/