She Trained to Go to Space. I’m Just Trying to Build a Blog.
I was driving – because that is when I listen to podcasts, always – and somewhere on the road to school what Kellie Gerardi had just said landed with me.
She was talking about how she went from working coat check at a prestigious club in New York to becoming a bioastronautics researcher and astronaut. No traditional path. No military background. No guarantee it would work. And she said something I have been turning over ever since: “The trick is not necessarily figuring it out as fast as possible. It’s keeping yourself motivated for as long as possible.”
I still replay this in my head.
- Who Is Kellie Gerardi?
- The Coat Check to Space Story
- The “Why Not Me?” Question
- Designing Your Reputation
- The Glass and Plastic Balls
- What This Has to Do With Building a Blog
- Practical Takeaways
- Why This Belongs in Soul
Who Is Kellie Gerardi?
Kellie Gerardi is a bioastronautics researcher and astronaut – Director of Human Spaceflight Operations at the International Institute for Astronautical Sciences. She grew up in Jupiter, Florida watching rockets launch from Cape Canaveral. She has completed over 150 microgravity research flights and eventually flew to space herself.
She is not a NASA astronaut. She did not come through the traditional military pipeline. She is someone who decided she wanted to be part of the new era of commercial space exploration and spent over a decade making herself capable of exactly that – one unglamorous step at a time.
She is also a mother, a writer, and someone who has shared her secondary infertility journey – including five pregnancies and ongoing IVF treatment – publicly and without flinching. In this conversation with Mel Robbins, she is warm, precise, funny, and completely devoid of the “I always believed in myself” performance that makes some of these conversations hard to trust.
The Coat Check to Space Story
Here is where it starts, and it is worth telling properly.
While at college, Kellie Gerardi worked coat check at the Explorers Club in New York – a legendary institution for adventurers and scientists. She was not an explorer yet. She was the person taking people’s coats.
What she did with that job is what matters. She wrote down the adjectives she wanted to describe her – attentive, reliable, professional, trustworthy – and she lived those attributes every single day in a job that most people would consider beneath their ambitions. She treated every interaction as if it mattered. Because, she argues, it does.
“How you do anything is how you do everything.” Mel Robbins says this during the conversation and Kellie affirms it completely. The people at that club noticed her. Doors opened. Not because of luck. Because she had already decided who she was before anyone else could see it.
The “Why Not Me?” Question
This is the part that got my attention in the car.
Kellie Gerardi talks about looking at people who had achieved extraordinary things and – rather than assuming they were fundamentally different from her – asking a different question. Not “how did they do that?” but “why not me?”
She is careful to clarify: this is not arrogance. It is not ego. It is what she calls quiet confidence combined with humility. It is the question that asks: what, genuinely, is the difference between that person and me? Is it capability? Or is it effort, time, and the willingness to keep going?
“Ordinary people can make themselves capable of extraordinary things, and it is never too late for you to do that.”
She said this and I had to sit with it. Because the fixed mindset voice (Carol Dweck’s words for it, and she is right) will tell you the difference is innate. That some people are just that kind of person and you are not. But Kellie Gerardi is a walking, spaceflight-certified counter-argument to that story.
Designing Your Reputation
This is a practical framework from the episode that I have already started using.
Write down the adjectives you want to define you. Not who you are today – who you intend to be. Reliable. Creative. Curious. Generous. Someone who follows through. Whatever yours are. Then identify the behaviours that make those adjectives true. And do those behaviours, consistently, in every context – including the unglamorous ones.
“You can design your own reputation if you put in the work to make it true.”
The point is not to perform these qualities. It is to live them until they become the truth. The coat check story is not about networking. It is about integrity in private – about being the same person whether or not anyone important is watching.
I have been thinking about my own list. What adjectives do I want Notes from Soph to stand for? Honest. Warm. Rigorous. Not preachy. A fellow learner, not an expert with all the answers. I want to live those qualities in every post, whether it gets three readers or three thousand.
The Glass and Plastic Balls
This framework comes from Nora Ephron (via Kellie Gerardi) and I thought about my three children immediately.
Some things in life are glass balls – if you drop them, they shatter. Irreplaceable moments. A child’s bedtime ritual. Being present at something that will not come around again. These you do not drop.
Some things are plastic – they bounce. A deadline can move. An email can wait. A missed meeting can be rescheduled. These you can drop without lasting damage.
Kellie Gerardi says, honestly, that she frequently misjudges which is which. That is the real work – not having a tidy system, but developing the discernment to tell the difference in real time. I find this framework more useful than any time management matrix I have encountered, precisely because it does not pretend the answer is always obvious.
What This Has to Do With Building a Blog
I know – comparing Notes from Soph to astronaut training is a massive stretch. I am under no illusions.
But Kellie Gerardi’s point is that the mechanism is the same regardless of scale. The question “why not me?” applies whether you are applying to a spaceflight programme or quietly, nervously publishing your thoughts on the internet at 46 from a village in the south of France.
The thing that keeps most of us from starting – or from continuing when it gets hard – is not a lack of ability. It is a lack of psychological permission. We wait until we feel ready, until we feel qualified, until someone official has confirmed we are allowed.
Gerardi did not wait for that confirmation. She showed up at the Explorers Club with her adjectives written down and she started becoming the person she wanted to be. Years before anyone called her an astronaut.
I think about this when the fixed mindset voice gets loud. When it says: who are you to write about personal development? What makes your notes worth anyone’s time? The answer, borrowed from Kellie Gerardi, is: why not me?
Practical Takeaways
- Write your adjectives. Who do you intend to be? Name it specifically – not vaguely (“a good person”) but precisely (“reliable, curious, warm, someone who follows through”). Then identify the behaviours that make each one true.
- Ask “why not me?” next time you see someone doing something you want to do. Strip away the mythology. What is genuinely different about them? Is it capability, or is it that they kept going longer?
- Try the energy audit. What drains you? What energises you? What keeps you awake – with excitement rather than dread? The answers point somewhere.
- Sort your balls. Identify one glass ball and one plastic ball in your current week. Protect the glass. Let the plastic drop if it needs to.
- Keep yourself motivated for as long as possible. Not: figure it out as fast as possible. The goal is longevity of effort – which means pacing, not sprinting.
Why This Belongs in Soul
Soul, on this blog, is the section for inner life – questions of meaning, becoming, and what it actually takes to build something you chose.
This episode belongs here because it is not really about astronauts. It is about the question underneath every unconventional life: am I allowed to want this? And the answer Kellie Gerardi gives – quiet, consistent, lived-out in every coat-check shift and microgravity flight and IVF cycle documented publicly – is yes. You are.
That is Soul work. That is the work underneath all the other work.
The “why not me?” question has a habit of making itself inconvenient. It shows up when I am avoiding something I know I should start. When I am waiting to feel ready. When I am letting the voice convince me that other people do this sort of thing and I do not.
Kellie Gerardi went to space. I am building a blog. The scales are entirely different. The question is exactly the same.
Et toi? Is there something you have been waiting to start – waiting for permission, waiting to feel qualified, waiting for the path to be clear? I would love to hear about it in the comments or come and find me in the Notes from Soph community on Skool. That question is worth asking out loud.
Notes from Soph | Learning, not perfection.
If this one resonated, you might also enjoy my posts on GRIT (Angela Duckworth on why effort counts twice) and Mindset (Carol Dweck on the belief that makes everything else possible). Kellie Gerardi’s story is both of those things, lived out loud.
Source Details:
The Mel Robbins Podcast – Episode 328: How to Build the Life You Want (Even When You Feel Overloaded, Exhausted, & Uncertain)
Mel Robbins with Kellie Gerardi | 2024
🎙 Listen on melrobbins.com or search “The Mel Robbins Podcast” on Apple Podcasts / Spotify
📚 Amazon (book — Not Necessarily Rocket Science by Kellie Gerardi) https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1642508039/?tag=websitenote0f-21
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