Mark Kelly escaped death as a U.S. Navy Captain flying combat missions during the Persian Gulf War and as a NASA astronaut. 

But it was his wife, former U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords of Arizona, who came the closest to losing her life when Jared Loughner went on a shooting rampage at a 2011 "Congress on Your Corner" event near Tucson, seriously injuring Giffords, and killing six others, including a nine-year-old girl. Although her recovery has been remarkable, Giffords still has difficulty speaking and walking. Her right arm is paralyzed.

In his keynote address Thursday at Synnex's North American conference in Greenville, South Carolina, Kelly talked about cooperation, communication and vision being key to his family's perseverance. Here is some of the wisdom he shared with 1,800 vendors and solution providers.

"I saw the power of having a goal, having a plan and working really, really hard."

For much of Kelly's childhood, his mom put in long hours as a school secretary and waitress. But eventually she decided she wanted to do more with her life, and set her sights on becoming one of New Jersey's first female police officers.  

Just over 5 feet tall, she would be required to scale a 7 foot, 2 inch wall as part of the physical fitness examination for aspiring police officers.

Kelly's father - a retired New Jersey detective himself - put up a practice wall in the family's backyard, and his mother practiced on it every day for months. She went from not being able to clear it at all to scaling it at lightning speed.

When test day came, she climbed the wall in just 4.5 seconds, easily besting both the maximum time allowed of 9 seconds and most of her male competitors.  

"How good you are at the beginning is not an indicator of how good you'll become."

It wasn't until high school, after years of underachievement, that Kelly decided he wanted to be the first person to walk on the planet Mars. He sketched out a plan to become a naval aviator, a naval test pilot and finally, an astronaut.

At the end of the first year of aviation training, Kelly and all his classmates were tasked with doing a touch-and-go landing all by themselves on a naval aircraft carrier.

Kelly did a terrible job of landing on the ship, and was asked by a supervisor during an early test flight, "Are you sure this is the career for you?"   

Yet with a healthy dose of practice and persistence, he survived the rest of training and would eventually make it into space with NASA on four occasions.

"There's never an excuse for not communicating with the people you work with."

Kelly was an aircraft pilot with the Navy when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990.

One night, as Kelly and a partner were heading into Basra in southern Iraq to drop off materials, he heard that another American plane was shot down with anti-aircraft missile acquired from the Soviet Union.

After dropping off the materials, Kelly defied the wishes of his co-pilot and diverted the plane off its flight route into Iranian airspace to avoid the missiles.

But since Kelly failed to follow the proscribed egress route, American forces on the ground mistook them for Iraqi fighters and ordered that a plane at their exact coordinates be shot down.

Fortunately, Kelly recognized the coordinates and radioed back "Do not shoot the moron in Iranian airspace."

His co-pilot wouldn't acknowledge him for the remainder of the flight, Kelly said, and never spoke to him again. Kelly vowed to never again go rogue.   

NEXT: How To Avoid Groupthink and Bounce Back From Adversity