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

by Ozan Varol

realize. In our certainty-obsessed public discourse, we avoid reckoning with nuances. The resulting public discussion operates without a rigorous system for discerning proven facts from best guesses. A lot of what we know simply isn’t accurate, and it’s not always easy to recognize which part lacks real evidence. We’ve mastered the art of pretending to have an opinion—smiling, nodding, and bluffing our way through a makeshift answer. We’ve been told to “fake it until we make it,” and we’ve become experts at the faking part. We value chest beating and delivering clear answers with conviction, even when we have little more than two minutes of Wikipedia knowledge on an issue. We march on, pretending to know what we think we know, oblivious to glaring facts that contradict our ironclad beliefs.