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

by Ozan Varol

Originality consists of returning to the origin. —ANTONI GAUDÍ

But the same qualities that make knowledge a virtue can also turn it into a vice. Knowledge shapes. Knowledge informs. It creates frameworks, labels, categories, and lenses through which we view the world. It acts as a haze, an Instagram filter, and a poetic structure under which we live our lives. These structures are notoriously hard to beat back, and for good reason: They’re useful. They provide us with cognitive shortcuts for making sense of the world. They make us more efficient and productive.

“We’ve always done it this way.” Decades ago, someone decided to structure the curriculum this way, and that was a good enough reason to stick to it. Since then, no one had raised a hand and asked why or why not.

The status quo is a super magnet. People are biased against the way things could be and find comfort in the way things are. If you had any doubts about our obsession with the status quo, take a look at all these idioms we’ve dedicated to avoiding change: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” “Don’t rock the boat.” “Don’t change horses in the middle of the stream.” “Go with the devil you know.”

Vested interests also reinforce the status quo. High-level executives at Fortune 500 companies shun innovation because their compensation is tied to short-term quarterly outcomes that may be temporarily disrupted by forging a new path. “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something,” Upton Sinclair said, “when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Research shows that we become increasingly rule bound as we grow older.4 Events begin to rhyme. Days begin to repeat. We regurgitate the same overworn sound bites, stick to the same job, talk to the same people, watch the same shows, and maintain the same product lines. It’s a choose-your-own-adventure book that always has the same ending.

The deeper the snow tracks, the harder it is to escape them. An established method of doing things can conceal the exit gate.

Here’s the problem. Process, by definition, is backward looking. It was developed in response to yesterday’s troubles. If we treat it like a sacred pact—if we don’t question it—process can impede forward movement. Over time, our organizational arteries get clogged with outdated procedures.

Complying with these procedures then becomes the benchmark for success. “It’s not that rare,” Jeff Bezos says, “to hear a junior leader defend a bad outcome with something like, ‘Well, we followed the process.’” “If you’re not watchful,” Bezos warns, “the process can become the thing.” But you don’t need to throw your standard operating procedures into the shredder and create a corporate free-for-all. Rather, you need to make a habit of asking, as Bezos does, “Do we own the process or does the process own us?”7

When necessary, we must unlearn what we know ...

Knowledge is good. But knowledge should inform, not constrain. Knowledge should enlighten, not obscure. Only through the evolution of our existing knowledge will the future come into focus. The tyranny of our knowledge is only part of the problem. We’re constrained not only by what we’ve done in the past, but also by what others have done as well.

Resisting this hardwiring for conformity causes us emotional distress—literally. A neurological study showed that nonconformity activates the amygdala and produces what the authors describe as “a pain of independence.”10 To avoid this pain, we pay lip service to being original, but we become the by-products of other people’s behaviors. It’s like that Chinese proverb: One dog barks at something, and a hundred others bark at that sound.

As Warren Buffett put it, “The five most dangerous words in business are ‘Everybody else is doing it.’” This monkey see, monkey do approach creates a race to the exceedingly crowded center—even though there’s far less competition on the edges. “When you try to improve on existing techniques,” says Astro Teller, the head of X, Google’s moonshot factory, “you’re in a smartness contest with everyone who came before you. Not a good contest to be in.”11

The credit for first-principles thinking goes to Aristotle, who defined it as “the first basis from which a thing is known.”12 The French philosopher and scientist René Descartes described it as systematically doubting everything you can possibly doubt, until you’re left with unquestionable truths.13 Instead of regarding the status quo as an absolute, you take a machete to it. Instead of letting your original vision—or the visions of others—shape the path forward, you abandon all allegiances to them. You hack through existing assumptions as if you’re hacking through a jungle until you’re left with the fundamental components. Everything else is negotiable.

When you apply first-principles thinking, you switch from being a cover band that plays someone else’s songs to an artist that does the painstaking work of creating something new. You go from what author James Carse calls a finite player, someone playing within boundaries, to an infinite player, someone playing with boundaries.

SpaceX and Blue Origin had one thing going for them: They were new to the industry. They had the benefit of writing on a blank slate. There were no fixed internal ideas, no long-established practices, and no legacy components. Without the tug of their own past, they could let first principles drive rocket design.

We then make things worse by defending our self-imposed limitations. We could do things differently, we say, but our supply chain, our software, our budget, our skill set, our education, our whatever, doesn’t allow it. As the saying goes, argue for your limitations, and you get to keep them.

“Your assumptions are your windows on the world,” said Alan Alda, in a quote often misattributed to Asimov. “Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.”21

Which unnecessary relic of the past clouds your thinking and hampers your progress? What do you assume you’re supposed to do simply because everyone around you is doing it? Can you question t...

With each commitment, each presumption, each budget item, ask yourself, What if this weren’t true? Why am I doing it this way? Can I get rid of this or replace it with something better?

Be careful if you find yourself coming up with multiple reasons to keep something. “By invoking more than one reason,” observes author and scholar Nassim Nicholas Taleb, “you are trying to convince yourself to do something.”22

Demand current—not historical—supporting evidence. Many of our invisible rules were developed in response to problems that no longer exist (like the cat in the meditation fable). But the imm...

The best way to expose invisible rules is to violate them. Go for a seeming moonshot you don’t think you’ll achieve. Ask for a raise you don’t think you deserve....

But instead of us shaping the story, it shapes us. Over time, the story becomes our identity. We don’t change the story, because changing it would mean changing who we are. We fear losing everything we worked so hard to build, we fear that others might laugh, and we fear making fools of ourselves. Like all others, the story of your significance is just that: a story. A narrative. A tale. If you don’t like the story, you can change the story. Even better, you can drop it altogether and write a new one. “In order to change skins, evolve into new cycles,” author Anaïs Nin writes, “one has to learn to discard.”25

When we don’t act—when we stick to the illusion of our significance—the risks are far greater. Only by leaving where we are can we get to where we want to go. You have to be “carbonized and mineralized,” Henry Miller writes, “in order to work upwards from the last common denominator of the self.”27 When you risk your significance, you won’t change who you are. You’ll discover it. As the ashes and clutter settle, something beautiful will soar.

“If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves.”30 Unless you change the underlying patterns of thought, you can expect more of the same—regardless of how many times you hold a sledgehammer party.

If you’re trying to transform an industry, it makes sense to look outside the industry for talent. That’s where you’ll find people who aren’t blinded by the invisible rules—the white tablecloths—that constrain their thinking. In its early days, SpaceX would often hire people from the automotive and cell-phone industries. These are fields where technologies change rapidly, requiring quick learning and adaptation—the hallmark of first-principles thinkers.

It’s one thing to say “let’s think outside the box.” It’s another to actually step outside the box and examine your company or product from the viewpoint of a competitor seeking to destroy it. By viewing our weaknesses through this out-of-company experience, we realize we may be standing on a burning platform. The urgency of change becomes clear.

The US military also uses a version of the kill-the-company exercise in war-gaming. It’s called red teaming, a term that’s a relic of the Cold War. In simulations, the red team plays the role of the enemy and finds ways to scuttle the blue team’s mission. Red teams expose the flaws in planning and execution so that the problems can be fixed before the mission begins.

As Major Patrick Lieneweg, who teaches red-teaming seminars, explained to me, the process plays a critical role in mitigating groupthink in the otherwise hierarchical environment of the military: “It improves the quality of thinking by challenging preva...

• Why might my boss pass me up for a promotion? • Why is this prospective employer justified in not hiring me? • Why are customers making the right decision by buying from our competitors?

Ask yourself, Why are they making that choice? It’s not because they’re stupid. It’s not because they’re wrong and you’re right. It’s because they see something that you’re missing. It’s because they believe something you don’t believe. And you can’t change that worldview or that belief by calling the same plays from the same old playbook. Once you’ve got a good answer to these questions, switch perspectives and find ways to defend against these potential threats.

As Einstein said, everything should be made “as simple and as few as possible.”36 This principle is known as Occam’s razor.

The model is often stated as a rule: The simplest solution to a problem is the correct one. This popular description happens to be wrong. Occam’s razor is a guiding principle—not a hard-and-fast rule. Nor is it a preference for the simple at all costs. Rather, it’s a preference for the simple, all other things being equal. Carl Sagan put it well: “When faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well,” you should “choose the simpler.”37 In other words, “when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not unicorns.”38

The most elegant solutions, the rocket scientist David Murray writes, “use the least number of components to solve the greatest number of problems.”39

“The more we understand something,” Peter Attia explained to me, “the less complicated it becomes. This is classic Richard Feynman teaching.” Attia is a mechanical engineer turned medical doctor, a renowned expert in increasing people’s life span and health span. If you’re reading a study in medicine, he said, “and you see words like multifaceted, multifactorial, complex, to explain the current understanding,” the authors are basically saying, “We don’t know what the heck we’re talking about yet.”

“Every decision we’ve made,” Musk says, “has been with consideration to simplicity.… If you’ve got fewer components, that’s fewer components to go wrong and fewer components to buy.”44

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex,” economist E. F. Schumacher said in a quote often misattributed to Einstein. “It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”47

If you want to soar, you must cut what weighs you down. You can take your cue, once again, from Alinea. 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.”53

Paint yourself a vivid picture of the future with the excesses wiped off your plate. What does it look like? Ask yourself, as one innovative CEO does, “What if you had not already hired this person, installed this equipment, implemented this process, bought this business, or pursued this strategy? Would you do the same thing you are doing today?”54

Like all sharp objects, Occam’s razor can cut both ways. In some cases, the complex solution will lead to a better result. Don’t use Occam’s razor to validate the natural human craving for simplicity in the face of nuance and complexity. Don’t confuse a simple solution, as H. L. Mencken cautioned, with one that is “neat, plausible, and wrong.”55 Even as you seek to simplify, remain open to new facts that complicate matters. A...

To cut is to make whole. To subtra...

3 A MIND AT PLAY How to Ignite Breakthroughs with Thought Experiments

Thought experiments construct a parallel universe in which things work differently. They require us, as philosopher Kendall Walton explains, to “imagine specific fictional worlds, as kinds of situational setups that when you run, perform, or simply imagine them, lead to specific results.”3 Through thought experiments, we transcend everyday thinking and evolve from passive observers to active interveners in our reality.4

my intention is to guide, not to constrain.

This external search for answers impedes first-principles thinking by focusing our attention on how things are rather than how they could be. Thought experiments take this external inquiry and turn it inward—just you and your imagination.

There’s an idiom in the English language dedicated to this idea: Curiosity killed the cat. Or as Russians say with far more dramatic flair, “The nose of curious Barbara was torn off at the market.”12 These idioms, according to the ever-reliable Wikipedia, are “used to warn of the dangers of unnecessary investigation or experimentation.” Curiosity, in cats or in Russian market-goers, isn’t just annoying or inconvenient. People who ask questions or pose thought experiments aren’t just pesky troublemakers who can’t be satisfied with the status quo. They’re downright dangerous. 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?”13

We discourage curiosity also because it requires an admission of ignorance. Asking a question or posing a thought experiment means that we don’t know the answer, and that’s an admission that few of us are willing to make. For fear of sounding stupid, we assume most questions are too basic to ask, so we don’t ask them.

Instead of making curiosity the norm, we wait until a crisis occurs to become curious. Only when we’re laid off do we begin to ponder alternative career paths. And only when our business is disrupted by a young, scrappy, and hungry competitor do we gather the troops to spend a few futile hours to “think outside the box.”

For answers, we rely on the same methods, the same brainstorming approaches, and the same stale neural pathways. It’s no wonder that the resulting innovations aren’t innovations at all. They’re at best insignificant deviations from the status quo. Look at any monstrous company or bloated bureaucracy collapsing under its own weight, and you’ll find a historical lack of curiosity.