If I could talk to my younger self, I would just say that the path to great things is filled with a lot of stumbles, suffering, and challenges along the way. But if you have the right attitude and know that hard times will pass - and you get up each time - you will reach your destination.
Jonny Kim
Controlled aggression, to me, is one of the most important traits to have. To have that social intelligence to know when to exert aggression in the military environment, and when to stay calm, cool, and collected.
I didn't like the person I was growing up to become. I needed to find myself and my identity. And for me, getting out of my comfort zone, getting away from the people I grew up with, and finding adventure, that was my odyssey, and it was the best decision I ever made.
All things that are worthwhile are very difficult to obtain.
I was told that with the right attitude, and with enough hard work, if you get up after every time you fail, you can amount to something and you can do positive work. You can leave a positive mark for our world, and that's what I aim to do.
You're going to learn a lot every time you fail. So embrace that.
The SEALs were very good in teaching me hard skills - that means resilience, pushing past your mental and physical boundaries; and having an enormously high threshold for pain.
Ego is probably one of the biggest poisons we can have - it's toxic to any environment.
Success to me means serving a calling higher than yourself that improves the lives of everyone and is done completely in the name of service.
Don't let that hunger for the unknown go away. That curiosity is so important, so you should maintain that passion for what you do.
I fundamentally believed in the NASA mission of advancing our space frontier, all the while developing innovations and new technologies that would benefit all of humankind.
A lot of those soft skills - working with groups of people who I've never met before to accomplish a mission, adapting to personality types - those are skills I've learned outside the SEAL time.
If there was a time machine and I could tell my younger self what I'd be doing in 2020, there's no way I'd believe it.
My father was the classic epitome of a very hard immigrant-worker. He made up for his lack of education by working really hard... He worked six days a week for as long as I can remember.
High school was interesting. For a lot of people, high school was just a big social experiment, and I think the value of high school was not so much learning how to be a great student... but I think it's learning how to interact with people and be social. I would say that in that endeavor, I completely failed.
For me... after having some intense wartime experiences where I lost a lot of good friends that I've loved, I made a promise to those guys who died - that I'd do everything in my power for the rest of my life to make this world a better place. Because those men were great human beings and they left a void.
I applied to zero colleges.
My kids, I love it when they tell me, 'Abba, I want to be an artist.' And I say, that is awesome... I just want you to be happy and to follow your heart.
I was good at school but I thought I sucked at everything else. I was socially scared of making relationships. High school was a big fail as the social experiment that it is.
I was a really low-confident kid. I did have friends from playing sports - I played water polo and I swam. But at the heart of it, I was really scared of talking to people, and making friends, and making relationships.
Never in a million years would I have thought I could have been an astronaut candidate.
I was pretty much nonexistent on the Internet before NASA, and that was really because I've been inspired by amazing sacrifices of people who did amazing things - jumping on grenades or sacrificing their lives or doing the most crazy, brave things without hesitation and never, ever seeking recognition for it. That was always very powerful for me.
I didn't have the confidence from my childhood, but dreams are possible and all good things in life are hard to get, so persevere and don't give up!
Going into the Navy was the best decision I ever made in my life because it completely transformed that scared boy who didn't have any dreams to someone who started to believe in himself.
I think living with humility, and serving with humility, is one of the most important things humans can do.
When I was a young kid, I didn't have a lot of confidence.
My parents were South Korean immigrants who came to America in the early 80s for the hope of a better life for their children.
I live in Boston so I'm used to small spaces.
Once someone is no longer a threat, you look at them like anybody else.
My only expectation, which I tell my kids very, very often, is that they follow their heart.
I never want my children to ever feel like they need to be a SEAL, or that they need to go into medicine, or be an astronaut in order to please me - because I don't think that's very fair. I just want them to live their own lives. I don't hesitate at every opportunity to remind my children of that.
I know certainly that my parents sacrificed a lot to come to America, and to... start a new life for their family and their future families. At least with first-generation Asian-American immigrants, parents put so much risk in work and to provide the best for their children.
