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

by Ozan Varol

INTRODUCTION

This giant leap—taken within a human lifespan—is often hailed as the triumph of technology. But it’s not. Rather, it’s the great triumph of a certain thought process rocket scientists used to turn the impossible into the possible.

To think like a rocket scientist is to look at the world through a different lens. Rocket scientists imagine the unimaginable and solve the unsolvable. They transform failures into triumphs and constraints into advantages. They view mishaps as solvable puzzles rather than insurmountable roadblocks. They’re moved not by blind conviction but by self-doubt; their goal is not short-term results but long-term breakthroughs. They know that the rules aren’t set in stone, the default can be altered, and a new path can be forged.

When something breaks, as it inevitably does, rocket scientists must isolate the signal from the noise and home in on the potential culprits,

we all encounter complex and unfamiliar problems in our daily lives. Those who can tackle these problems—without clear guidelines and with the clock ticking—enjoy an extraordinary advantage.

Lurking behind the elusive subject of rocket science are life-changing insights on creativity and critical thinking that anyone can acquire without a PhD in astrophysics. Science, as Carl Sagan put it, is “a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.”12

Critical thinking and creativity don’t come naturally to us. We’re hesitant to think big, reluctant to dance with uncertainty, and afraid of failure. These were necessary during the Paleolithic Period, keeping us safe from poisonous foods and predators. But here in the information age, they’re bugs.

Companies fail because they stare at the rearview mirror and keep calling the same plays from the same playbook. Instead of risking failure, they stick with the status quo. In our daily lives, we fail to exercise our critical-thinking muscles and instead leave it to others to draw conclusions. As a result, these muscles atrophy over time. Without an informed public willing to question confident claims, democracy decays and misinformation spreads. Once alternative facts are reported and retweeted, they become the truth. Pseudoscience becomes indistinguishable from real science.

relentlessly practical.

ozanvarol.com/rocket

Conformity in the educational system saved us from our worst tendencies, those pesky individualistic ambitions to dream big and devise interesting solutions to complex problems. The students who got ahead weren’t the contrarians, the creatives, the trailblazers. Rather, you got ahead by pleasing the authority figures, fostering the type of subservience that would serve you well in the industrial workforce.

This rule-following, elder-respecting, rote-memorizing culture left little room for imagination and creativity. This I had to cultivate on my own, primarily through books. My books were my refuge.

I’ve always been more interested in pragmatic applications than theoretical constructs. I loved learning about the thought process that went into rocket science, but not the substance of the math and physics classes I had to take. I was like a baker who loved rolling out dough but didn’t like cookies.

As I meandered from rocket science to law and then to writing and speaking to different audiences, my overarching goal has been to develop a set of tools for thinking like a rocket scientist and to share what I’ve learned with others. Translating elusive concepts to plain language often requires someone on the outside looking in—someone who knows how rocket scientists think, who can dissect their process, but who is sufficiently removed from that world.

STAGE ONE LAUNCH In this first stage of the book, you’ll learn how to harness the power of uncertainty, reason from first principles, ignite breakthroughs with thought experiments, and employ moonshot thinking to transform your life and business.

1 FLYING IN THE FACE OF UNCERTAINTY The Superpower of Doubt

Genius hesitates. —CARLO ROVELLI

accurately, we can say that people made a classic mistake: trying to make something appear definite when in fact it isn’t.

This chapter is about how to stop fighting uncertainty and harness its power. You’ll learn how our obsession with certainty leads us astray and why all progress takes place in uncertain conditions.

In the modern world, we look for certainty in uncertain places. We search for order in chaos, the right answer in ambiguity, and conviction in complexity. “We spend far more time and effort on trying to control the world,” Yuval Noah Harari writes, “than on trying to understand it.”11 We look for the step-by-step formula, the shortcut, the hack—the right bag of peanuts. Over time, we lose our ability to interact with the unknown.

Our approach reminds me of the classic story of the drunk man searching for his keys under a street lamp at night. He knows he lost his keys somewhere on the dark side of the street but looks for them underneath the lamp, because that’s where the light is.

But it’s only when we sacrifice the certainty of answers, when we take our training wheels off, and when we dare to wander away from the street lamps that breakthroughs happen. If you stick to the familiar, you won’t find the unexpected. Those who get ahead in this century will dance with the great unknown and find danger, rather than comfort, in the status quo.

Textbooks, explained theoretical physicist David Gross in his Nobel lecture, “often ignore the many alternate paths that people wandered down, the many false clues they followed, the many misconceptions they had.”15

Obviously, answers aren’t irrelevant. You must know some answers before you can begin asking the right questions. But the answers simply serve as a launch pad to discovery. They’re the beginning, not the end.

Our ability to make the most out of uncertainty is what creates the most potential value. We should be fueled not by a desire for a quick catharsis but by intrigue. Where certainty ends, progress begins.

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.

“The great obstacle to discovering,” historian Daniel J. Boorstin writes, “was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.”19

The pretense of knowledge closes our ears and shuts off incoming educational signals from outside sources. Certainty blinds us to our own paralysis. The more we speak our version of the truth, preferably with passion and exaggerated hand gestures, the more our ...

When we prefer the seeming stability of stories to the messy reality of uncertainty, facts become dispensable and misinformation thrives.

The problem with the modern world, as Bertrand Russell put it, is that “the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”

What’s more, most dark rooms come with two-way—not one-way—doors. Many of our excursions into the unknown are reversible. As business magnate Richard Branson writes, “You can walk through, see how it feels, and walk back through to the other side if it isn’t working.”31 You just have to leave the door unlocked. This was Branson’s approach with the launch of his airline, Virgin Atlantic. His deal with Boeing allowed him to return the first plane he bought if the new airline didn’t take off. Branson turned what looked like a one-way door into a two-way door—a move that allowed him to walk out if he didn’t like what he saw.

If we explore only well-trodden paths, if we avoid games we don’t know how to play, we’ll remain stagnant. Only when you’re dancing in the dark, only when you don’t know where the light switch is—or even what a light switch is—can progress begin. First chaos, then breakthrough. When the dance stops, so does progress.

I find it comforting that there isn’t a theory of everything, the definitive answer to every question asked. The theories and the paths are multiple. There’s more than one right way to land on Mars, more than one right way to organize this book (as I keep telling myself), or more than one right strategy for scaling your business.

In looking for certainty, Einstein got in his own way.

It turned out that the number of planets—nine—was as meaningless as the number 42. For astronomers, this was just another day at the office. Science didn’t care about feelings, emotions, or irrational attachments to planets. To be sure, there were dissenters within the astronomical community, but most of them moved on. Logic trumped emotion, a new standard was set, and nine became eight. End of story.

Astronauts maintain their calm not because they have superhuman nerves. It’s because they have mastered the art of using knowledge to reduce uncertainty. As astronaut Chris Hadfield explains, “In order to stay calm in a high-stress, high-stakes situation, all you really need is knowledge.… Being forced to confront the prospect of failure head-on—to study it, dissect it, tease apart all its components and consequences—really works.”67

when uncertainty lacks boundaries, discomfort becomes acute. Letting the amorphous fears of an uncertain future marinate in your head turns up the volume on the drama (all the way to 11).

“Fear comes from not knowing what to expect and not feeling you have any control over what’s about to happen,” writes Hadfield. “When you feel helpless, you’re far more afraid than you would be if you knew the facts. If you’re not sure what to be alarmed about, everything is alarming.”

Determining what to be alarmed about requires following the timeless wisdom of Yoda: “Named must your fear be before banish it you can.”72 The naming, I’ve found, must be done in writing—with paper and pencil (or pen, if you’re into technology). Ask yourself, What’s the ...

Writing down your concerns and uncertainties—what you know and what you don’t know—undresses them. Once you lift up the curtain and turn the unknown unknowns into known unknowns, you defang them. After you see your fears with their masks off, you’ll find that the feeling of uncertainty is often far worse than what you fear. You’ll also realize that in al...

In addition to considering the worst-case scenario, also ask yourself, What’s t...

The brain, to paraphrase psychologist Rick Hanson, is like Velcro for the negative but Teflon for the positive. Unless you consider the best-case scenario along with the worst, your brain will ...

Redundancy, in other words, can’t be a substitute for good design. Think about it: Where are the redundancies in your own life? Where’s the emergency brake or the spare tire in your company? How will you deal with the loss of a valuable team member, a critical distributor, or an important client? What will you do if your household loses a source of income? The system must be designed to continue operating even if a component fails.

If the tools on board the spacecraft are sufficiently versatile, they can perform functions that go far beyond their intended use.

When we face uncertainty, we often manufacture excuses for not getting started. I’m not qualified. I don’t feel ready. I don’t have the right contacts. I don’t have enough time. We don’t start walking until we find an approach that’s guaranteed to work

But absolute certainty is a mirage. In life, we’re required to base our opinions on imperfect information and make a call with sketchy data. “We didn’t know what we were doing when we landed” on Mars, Squyres admits. “How can you know what you’re doing when no one has done it before?” If our group had postponed until the choices presented themselves with perfect clarity—until we had perfect information about our landing sites so we could design the perfect set of tools for them—we never would have gotten to Mars. Someone else willing to tango with uncertainty would have beaten us to the finish line.

The path, as the mystic poet Rumi writes, won’t appear until...

The secret is to start walking before you see a clear path.

Start walking because, as Newton’s first law goes, objects in motion tend to stay in motion—once you get going, you will keep going. Start walking because your small steps will eventually become giant leaps. Start walking, and if it helps, bring a bag of peanuts with you for good luck. Start walking, not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard. Start walking because it’s the only way forward.

2 REASONING FROM FIRST PRINCIPLES The Ingredient Behind Every Revolutionary Innovation