How to pass exams – Part 10 – It’s like landing on the moon! 

“Obstacles don’t have to stop you. If you run into a wall, don’t turn around and give up. Figure out how to climb it, go through it, or work around it.”
Michael Jordan (probably the greatest basketball player of all time)

In July 1969 Apollo 11 landed two men on the surface of the moon, the edited version on YouTube looks very calm, in reality there were alarms going off all over the place (see 3 mins onwards)

They’d travelled 240,000 miles in three days, but missed their landing site by about a mile. I don’t think that’s too bad, if you’ve gone almost a quarter of a million miles and you miss it by a mile!

But it meant they were starting to run out of fuel, so as they were landing alarms were screaming at them, “Don’t land! Don’t land!” The two astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, chosen because they were the best pilots in the world, were in the lander and must have said ‘do you know what, we’re going to push thru and land this thing, we’ve come this far we’re not going to go back now!’ And that’s exactly what they did – they pushed thru and landed on the moon, did the original moon walk, and then flew back home again.

Amazing stuff.

[ Based on years of research you can read more about Lee’s work at http://leejackson.org/education/howtoenjoyandsucceedatschoolandcollege – How to pass exams ]  

In 1962 President John F Kennedy, made this famous speech… “But if I were to say, my fellow citizens, that we shall send to the moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control,  communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the sun and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out.”

But in 1962 they didn’t even know whether the space craft would land safely on the surface of the moon or whether it would fall through it! The surface dust was a big problem, an unknown and maybe unsolvable problem.

Nobody had landed anything that heavy before on the moon, so they didn’t know whether the surface of the moon would hold the weight of the space craft or whether it would just sink and disappear! They had massive obstacles they had to push thru to make that happen.

Every single one of us, whatever our background is, have obstacles to push thru.

To be successful at school, in life, we’ve all got obstacles to push thru. My obstacles are different to your obstacles, but there are still things that we all have to push thru.

More to come…

This an excerpt from Top UK School Speaker Lee Jackson’s book “How To Enjoy And Succeed At School And College” Available in paperback and on Kindle (for only £1.99 during pre-exam time) here now.