Jonny Kim

“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.”

“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.”

“You're going to learn a lot every time you fail. So embrace that.”

“Never in a million years would I have thought I could have been an astronaut candidate.”

“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.”

“I applied to zero colleges.”

“My parents were South Korean immigrants who came to America in the early 80s for the hope of a better life for their children.”

“My only expectation, which I tell my kids very, very often, is that they follow their heart.”

“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!”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“When I was a young kid, I didn't have a lot of confidence.”

“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.”

“I live in Boston so I'm used to small spaces.”

“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.”

“I think living with humility, and serving with humility, is one of the most important things humans can do.”