Lessons In Perseverance And Resilience

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Three of the crew members of Apollo 13 (left to right), Jack Swigert, Jim Lovell, and Fred Haise.

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James Lovell, the commander of Apollo 13, which suffered an oxygen tank leak 200 miles from Earth, almost never had the opportunity to fly that mission.

As reporter Russell Lewis of National Public Radio noted in his remembrance of Lovell’s passing, perseverance was his special strength. Lovell did not get into the Naval Academy on his first try. He was later accepted and became a combat fighter pilot and qualified for the test pilot program at Edwards AFB. He did not qualify for the Mercury astronaut program, but was later accepted into the Gemini program. Again, a second try was successful.

Handling adversity

These setbacks steeled James Lovell to be an astronaut who could handle the pressures in times of adversity. Fear was not an option in times of crisis. As Lovell told the New York Times years later, “We were all test pilots, and the only thing we could do was try to get home,” he said to The New York Times in 1995. “The idea of despair never occurred to us, because we were always optimistic we would get home.”

It was this kind of bravery that transfixed the nation and, decades later, after Lovell published his story of the mission, led to a landmark motion picture directed by Ron Howard and starring Tom Hanks as Lovell.

Crisis leadership and teamwork

One thing Lovell noted about the Apollo 13 mission was NASA’s leadership. It scrambled together ad hoc solutions to engineer fixes that could make the command module safe enough to return to Earth.

As Lovell told NPR in 2014, Apollo 13 “showed was what you could do with good leadership in an organization, how good leadership fosters teamwork, and how teamwork and initiative, when you faced a problem – to use the initiative or imagination to try to solve the problem because everything doesn’t flow freely in life, and things change.”

Perseverance + Resilience

Perseverance is something that strengthens as we use it—learning from Lovell’s example, when we face obstacles, we do not give up immediately. Learn from what you did and improve when necessary. Perseverance is an attribute of resilience, a must-have for anyone in leadership.

Resilience emerges, as it did for Lovell, from setbacks. Do not become discouraged. Reflect on your past successes. Self-confidence is honed by achievement. Sometimes achievements come easily, but the ones that require extra effort are those that prepare us to face emerging challenges.

Although Lovell captained Apollo 8, the first mission to leave Earth’s orbit and circle the Moon, he never achieved his dream of landing on the Moon. Life does not always work out as planned but Lovell made his mark in history by turning disaster into a life-saving mission.

Godspeed, Jim Lovell.