Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

by Ozan Varol

1962 when President Kennedy promised to get a man to the moon, at Rice University

So it only took 7 years to get us to the moon - not even the 10 that Kennedy promised - incredible

The wright brothers’ first powered flight was in 1903 then?

Science, as Carl Sagan put it, is “a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.”

The more skills you have, the more opportunities you’re likely to get

“If you have a successful business,” Kokonas explains, “it’s actually harder to change it.” The inertia required for changing course is too strong, particularly when you’re at the top of your game. “It’s hard to make incremental changes,” he says. “Every now and then you just need to destroy it and rebuild it better.”

So I decided to go rogue. I threw away my lecture notes and instead asked my students to conduct a thought experiment: Play the role of an aspiring dictator and come up with ways to decimate democracy in the United States. They then switched roles and devised measures to guard against the most serious threats.

Achatz explains that when he and Kokonas opened the restaurant, “one of our creative roads was to look at a dish on paper or in front of us and ask, ‘What else? What else can we do? What else can we add? What can we add to make this better?’”52 But over time, they reversed their approach. “Now,” Achatz says, “we find ourselves constantly asking, ‘What can we take away?’” Michelangelo approached sculpting in the same way. As he explained, “The sculptor arrives at his end by taking away what is superfluous.”

As the renowned Hollywood producer Brian Grazer and his coauthor Charles Fishman write, “The child who feels free to ask why the sky is blue grows into the adult who asks more disruptive questions: Why am I the serf and you the king? Does the sun really revolve around Earth? Why are people with dark skin slaves and people with light skin their masters?”

George Bernard Shaw once said, “Few people think more than two or three times a year. I’ve made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.”

As the mind begins to wander and daydream, the default mode network in our brain—which, according to some studies, plays a key role in creativity—lights up.

Isaac Newton was “the least popular professor” on campus because “he’d stop in the middle of a lecture with a creative pause that could extend for minutes,” while his students waited for him to return to earth.

A breakthrough begins with asking a good question, laboring over the answer intensely, and being stuck in idleness for days, weeks, and sometimes years. Research shows that incubation periods—the time you spend feeling stuck—boosts the ability to solve problems.

i like this process: formulate a great question, think on it intensely, and then walk away from it, letting your subconscious mind go to work

To facilitate cross-pollination, renowned scientists often develop diverse interests. Galileo, for example, was able to spot mountains and plains on the Moon—not because he had a superior telescope, but because his training in painting and drawing enabled him to understand what the bright and dark regions on the Moon represented.

Johannes Gutenberg had a printing press problem, so he looked to other industries—like winemakers and olive oil producers—who used a screw press to extract juice and oil. Gutenberg then applied the same concept to kick-start the era of mass communication in Europe.

to create Gutenberg's famed and revolutionary printing press

The company encourages its employees to spend up to four hours a week taking classes at Pixar University, its professional-development program. The classes include painting, sculpting, juggling, improv, and belly dancing.

What gave Newton the multimillion-pound edge was his willingness to get the opinion of his daughter—an outsider to the publishing industry, but a member of the target audience for the book.

The story of how JK Rowling got published

if your goal is a moonshot of eliminating all accidents, you must start with a blank slate and question all assumptions—including the human operator behind the wheel. This first-principles approach paves the way for the possibility of autonomous vehicles.

So don’t seek just to make things better, but as perfect as possible

Most of us go after the mice instead of the antelopes. We think the mouse is a sure thing, but the antelope is a moonshot. Mice are everywhere; antelopes are few and far between. What’s more, everyone around us is busy hunting mice. We assume that if we decide to go for antelopes, we might fail and go hungry.

Moonshots appeal to human nature and attract more investors. Poking fun at the limited ambitions of most Silicon Valley firms, the manifesto for Founders Fund—a prominent venture-capital firm—reads: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”16 The firm became the first outside investor in SpaceX’s moonshots.

I believe this is Peter Thiel’s fund

They are not that smart. They just know what most of us have never learned: There’s far less competition for antelopes. Everyone else is busy chasing mice in the same crowded, rapidly shrinking territory. This means you can’t afford not to take moonshots. If you wait too long—if you keep chasing ever-smaller business margins at ever-greater cost—someone else will take the moonshot that puts you out of a job or makes your business obsolete.

Michelle Obama - upon reflecting on all the powerful people she’s met - ‘they’re not that smart’