Training for the Unknown

O’Farrill’s path runs through elite sport — two ice hockey and rugby World Cups before he was twenty — and corporate talent development at Coca-Cola and Korn Ferry, running in parallel with a second education that started at eighteen: the sweat lodge and mushroom ceremonies of Native American and Mesoamerican traditions. He describes his first ceremony, at nineteen, in the same breath as a psychotic break, a man throwing himself into the fire three times, and a healing that outpaced two years of talk therapy. He’s since sat in ceremony with more than three thousand people, and holds a master’s in cognitive neuroscience and a forensic psychology license alongside it — the credentialed and the ancestral, deliberately, side by side.

Five years ago, an invitation to Frank White’s Overview Round Table connected that ceremonial work to something else entirely: what happens to human decision-making under the extreme conditions of spaceflight. O’Farrill now argues that practices like the vision quest — four days and nights alone in silence, without food, water, or movement — are functionally astronaut training, forcing the same adaptation to isolation and scarcity that a lunar or Mars mission will demand, minus the hardware. His Astronaut Operational Readiness degree program is his attempt to build the physical and spiritual curriculum that the mostly-engineering astronaut programs he’s studied are missing.

In this conversation

• What his first ceremony — a psychotic break, a fire, and a tackle mid-mushroom-trip — taught a working psychologist about crisis management no textbook covers
• The four pillars he asks every high performer to have in place before anything else: practice, rest, nutrition, and leisure
• Why “get out of your comfort zone” is the wrong advice, and what training yourself to expand it actually looks like
• How a three-hundred-millisecond decision margin separates the best athletes from the rest — and what that has to do with astronauts and microgravity