Hidden Figures: 3 Lessons From the Astronaut Who Trusted the “Smart One’s” Numbers
If you think your job is stressful, imagine being handed a mission to fly to orbit — at 77 years old. Now imagine actually doing it, calmly, as if it were any other Tuesday. That’s John Glenn, the astronaut, Marine colonel, and U.S. senator whose story is partially told in Hidden Figures (2016) — and whose real life, once you look past the film, is just as remarkable as what made it to screen.
The Man Who Joked Through the Danger
The film’s version of Glenn leans hard into one trait above all: his sense of humor, deployed even in the tensest moments. Asked how fast he’d be circling the Earth — over 17,000 miles an hour — his first thought is joking about how big the speeding ticket would be. When Mission Control asks for volunteers to go first into orbit, and everyone in the room raises a hand with quiet dignity, Glenn raises both, just to make sure his enthusiasm registers. When his capsule’s heat shield catches fire on reentry and the control room around him panics, Glenn’s actual words back to them, once he’s safely through it, are almost dismissively calm: that sure was a fire, wasn’t it.
Lesson 1: Humor Isn’t a Distraction From Danger — It’s How Some People Metabolize It
None of this reads as someone failing to take the danger seriously. It reads as someone who understood, instinctively, that panic doesn’t make a crisis go better, and that a well-placed joke can lower the temperature in a room enough for people to actually think clearly. It’s a skill, not a personality quirk — and it’s one that shows up again decades later in his real life, when at 77 he petitioned NASA to let him fly again. Rather than let officials quietly turn him down, he reframed the ask: wasn’t anyone curious what space travel does to an aging body? He volunteered to be the test case. He got his seat on the shuttle.
Lesson 2: Real Respect Doesn’t Check Who’s Watching
One of the film’s quieter, more pointed scenes shows Glenn visiting Langley Research Center, where Black and white employees stood in visibly segregated lines. Glenn crosses that line alone, shakes hands with the Black employees, talks with them, even jokes with them — a small gesture, but one that cost him nothing to skip and meant something precisely because he didn’t skip it. Later, preparing to trust his life to a set of orbital calculations, he asks that the numbers be checked by “the smart one” — not by race, not by gender, just by competence. When mathematician Katherine Johnson’s math is confirmed correct, his message back to Mission Control is simple thanks, sent through the phone: her numbers, not the machine’s, were the ones he trusted.
A friend of Glenn’s later summarized his core philosophy as something close to: treat people with respect, and people tend to treat you the same way back. It’s not a complicated idea. It’s just rare to see someone actually live by it consistently, with no one keeping score.
Lesson 3: When You Lose, Get Back to Work
When the Soviet Union beat the U.S. into orbit — Yuri Gagarin’s flight landing before Glenn’s — the film shows him walking out of the debriefing room first, and setting the tone instantly: they won, so now we need to learn how to get to space too. No dwelling, no searching for someone to blame. Just an immediate pivot to the next useful action. It’s the same instinct that mathematician Katherine Johnson is shown embodying throughout the film — solving the next problem instead of staying stuck on the last setback.
The Story the Film Doesn’t Tell
Hidden Figures barely touches Glenn’s personal life, because it isn’t the film’s focus. But it’s worth knowing: John and Annie Glenn met as toddlers, became sweethearts in high school, and married in 1943 — beginning a marriage that lasted 73 years. Annie had struggled with a severe stutter since childhood, unable to reliably order food or talk on the phone. At 53, she enrolled in an intensive three-week speech program, emerging able to speak fluently for the first time in her adult life — and went on to spend years afterward as a public advocate for people with communication disorders, even campaigning on her husband’s behalf during his 1984 presidential run.
John Glenn died in 2016 at 95. Annie followed in 2020, at 100, from complications of COVID-19 — four years and a full life of advocacy after her husband’s passing.
The Real Secret, According to Glenn Himself
Looking at both of their lives — his repeated willingness, well into his seventies, to take on something enormous, and hers, starting her life’s real work at an age when most people are settling into retirement — it’s hard not to notice the same underlying instinct: neither of them ever treated a difficult problem as something to simply live with. Glenn himself put it simply in interviews: engaging with something larger than yourself tends to make life more satisfying, not less. Whatever stress your job carries, having people in your life you can wholeheartedly care about is what keeps everything else in balance.
This is part of an ongoing series analyzing biographical films for the real-life lessons hidden inside them. Watch the full video breakdown (in Persian) on the Filmraah YouTube channel.
