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

by Ozan Varol

Fear of the outcome is another reason we shun curiosity. We don’t ask hard questions when we’re afraid of what we might find (which is why people are reluctant to visit their doctor when they fear the diagnosis). Worse, we’re afraid that we may not find anything at all—that our inquiry led us nowher...

Although thought experiments don’t come naturally to most adults, we mastered them as children. Before the world stuffed us with facts, memos, and right answers, we were moved by genuine curiosity. We stared at the world, wrapped in awe, and took nothing for granted. We were blissfully unaware of social rules and viewed the world as our very own thought experiment. We approached life not with the assumption that we knew (or should know) the answers, but with the desire to learn, experiment, and absorb.

A potential title for questioning norms, "think like a kid" -- for polaroid, why can't I see the picture now?

Children intuitively grasp one cosmic truth that eludes most adults: It’s all just a game—a big, marvelous game. In the popular children’s book Harold and the Purple Crayon, the four-year-old protagonist has the power to create things just by drawing them. There’s no path to walk on, so he draws a path. There’s no moon to light his path, so he draws the moon. There are no trees to climb on, so he draws an apple tree. Throughout the story, his imagination brings things into existence.17

Thought experiments are your very own reality-distortion field, your choose-your-own-adventure game—your purple crayon.

Although Einstein and Newton managed to retain their childlike curiosity, it is beaten out of most people. Our conformist education system, designed to churn out industrial workers, is partly to blame (“No one knows what God looks like”). Our natural curiosity is also suppressed by busy, well-meaning parents who believe that everything important has already been settled. One can imagine an annoyed father in Edwin Land’s place dismissing his daughter’s question as absurd (“Patience, Jennifer! Learn to wait for the photo”). Or a busy mother missing the genius in sixteen-year-old Einstein’s beam-riding experiment (“Go back to your room, Albert. And stop the crazy talk”).

A thought experiment sets up a sandbox in the controlled environment of your mind. If it doesn’t work, nothing bad happens.

Recapturing our childlike curiosity can boost originality—and there’s plenty of research to back this up.22

Without boredom, our creativity muscles begin to atrophy from disuse.

If we don’t take the time to think—if we don’t pause, understand, and deliberate—we can’t find wisdom or form new ideas. We end up sticking with the first solution or thought that pops into our mind, instead of staying with the problem. But problems worth solving don’t yield immediate answers. As author William Deresiewicz explains, “My first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom.”29

Falling into boredom allows our brain to tune out the external world and tune into the internal. This state of mind lets loose the most complex instrument known to us, switching the brain from the focused to the diffused mode of thinking. 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.31

Research shows that incubation periods—the time you spend feeling stuck—boosts the ability to solve problems.40

When he got stuck—which was often—Wiles would stop, let his mind relax, and go for a walk by the lake. “Walking,” he explains, “has a very good effect in that you’re in this state of relaxation, but at the same time you’re allowing the sub-conscious to work on you.”42 As Wiles knew, a watched pot never boils. You often have to walk away from the problem—literally and metaphorically—for the answer to arrive.43

“Art training alone,” the study suggests, “can help to teach medical students to become better clinical observers.”58

Life, it turns out, doesn’t happen in compartmentalized silos. There’s little to be learned from comparing similar things. “To create,” biologist François Jacob said, “is to recombine.”59 Decades later, Steve Jobs echoed the same sentiment: “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.… [T]hey’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.”60

Put differently, it’s easier to “think outside the box” when you’re playi...

a revolution in one industry can begin with an idea from another. In most cases, the fit won’t be perfect. But the mere act of comparing and combining will spark new lines of thinking. We can’t combine ideas if we don’t see the similarities between them.

Most of us don’t do what Dumas did. We instinctively dismiss the opinions of amateurs like Pasteur. They don’t know what they’re talking about. They haven’t attended the relevant meetings. They don’t have the necessary background. They’re out of their element. Yet it’s precisely for these reasons that outsider opinions hold value.

Unlike the insiders, whose identity or salary can depend on the existing state of affairs, outsiders have no stake in the status quo. Conventional wisdom is easier to tune out when you’re not smothered by it.

In Zen Buddhism, this principle is known as shoshin, or beginner’s mind.87 As the Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki writes, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.”88

Experts also benefit from intermittent periods of collaboration, particularly when amateurs are brought into the mix.

4 MOONSHOT THINKING The Science and Business of the Impossible

Moonshots force you to reason from first principles. If your goal is 1 percent improvement, you can work within the status quo. But if your goal is to improve tenfold, the status quo has to go. Pursuing a moonshot puts you in a different league—and often an entirely different game—from that of your competitors, making the established plays and routines largely irrelevant.

If your goal is to improve car safety, you can make gradual improvements to the design of a car to better protect human life in an accident. But 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.

Altitude, as any pilot will tell you, is your friend. If your engine quits when you’re flying high, you’ve got options for gliding your plane to safety. But at low altitudes, the possibilities in flight—like the possibilities in life—are more limited. Businesses that fly at higher altitudes tend to perform better.

“If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success,” says James Cameron, the filmmaker behind such blockbusters as The Terminator and Titanic.21

Many of us refrain from moonshots because we assume we’re not cut out for them. We believe the kind of people who can fly high have better wings impervious to melting. Michelle Obama dispelled this myth in a 2018 interview. “I have been at probably every powerful table that you can think of,” she explained, “I have worked at nonprofits, I have been at foundations, I have worked in corporations, served on corporate boards, I have been at G-summits, I have sat in at the UN: They are not that smart.”22 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.

At the initial stages of idea formation, “the pure rationalist has no place,” as the physicist Max Planck put it. Discovery, as Einstein also explained, “is not a work for logical thought, even if the final product is bound in logical form.”26 To activate divergent thinking, you must shut down the rational thinker in you, the part responsible for otherwise safe, beneficial grown-up behaviors. Set aside the spreadsheets, and let your brain run wild. Investigate the absurd. Reach beyond your grasp. Blur the line between fantasy and reality.

To one group, they asked, “What should you do?” To the other group, they asked, “What could you do?” The “should” group zeroed in on the most obvious solutions—often not the best ones—but the “could” group stayed open-minded and generated a broader range of possible approaches.

But forecasting, by definition, doesn’t start with first principles. With forecasting, we look in the rearview mirror and at the raw materials in front of us, rather than the possibilities ahead. When we forecast, we ask, “What can we do with what we have?” Often, the status quo itself is part of the problem. Forecasting takes all our problematic assumptions and biases and propels them into the future. In so doing, it artificially restricts our vision of what is feasible, given the current circumstances.

Backcasting flips the script. Rather than forecasting the future, backcasting aims to determine how an imagined future can be attained. “The best way to predict the future,” Alan Kay says, “is to invent it.”83 Instead of letting our resources drive our vision, backcasting lets our vision drive the resources.

When we backcast, we take our bold ambition and introduce actionable steps. We visualize our ideal job and sk...

To counter the sunk-cost fallacy, put the monkey first—tackle the hardest part of the moonshot up front.

The monkey-first attitude requires developing a set of “kill metrics,” as X calls them, a set of go/no-go criteria for determining when to press ahead and when to quit.88 The criteria must be defined at the outset—when you’re relatively clearheaded—before your emotional and financial investments might trigger the sunk-cost fallacy and cloud your judgment.

What’s easy often isn’t important, and what’s important often isn’t easy.

In the end, we have a choice. We can keep building pedestals and wait for a magical monkey to show up reciting Shakespeare (spoiler: there are no magical monkeys). Or we can focus on the important instead of the easy, and try to teach that monkey to talk, one syllable at a time.

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world,” George Bernard Shaw famously said, but “the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”90

That’s my moonshot for you: Be more unreasonable. Breakthroughs, after all, are reasonable only in hindsight.

STAGETWO ACCELERATE

In this second stage of the book, you’ll learn how to propel the ideas you devised in the first stage. You’ll discover how to reframe questions to generate better answers; why proving yourself wrong is the path to finding what’s right; and how to test and experiment like a rocket scientist to make sure your moonshot has the best shot at landing.

5 WHAT IF WE SENT TWO ROVERS INSTEAD OF ONE? How to Reframe Questions to Generate Better Answers

A problem well defined is a problem half solved. —UNKNOWN

In solving problems, we instinctively want to identify answers. Instead of generating cautious hypotheses, we offer bold conclusions. Instead of acknowledging that problems have multiple causes, we stick with the first cause that pops to mind. Doctors assume they have the right diagnosis, which they base on symptoms they have seen in the past. In boardrooms across America, executives, eager to appear decisive, fall over each other to be the first to deliver the correct answer to a perceived problem.

But this approach puts the cart before the horse—or the sentence before the verdict. When we immediately launch into answer mode, we end up chasing the wrong problem.

When we’re familiar with a problem, and when we think we have the right answer, we stop seeing alternatives. This tendency is known as the Einstellung effect. In German, einstellung means “set,” and in this context, the term refers to a fixed mental set or attitude. The initial framing of the question—and the initial answer—both stick.

In our adult lives, problems often aren’t handed to us fully formed. We have to find, define, and redefine them ourselves. But once we find a problem, our educational conditioning kicks in, launching us into answer mode rather than asking whether there’s a better problem to solve. Although we pay lip service to the importance of finding the right problem, we double down on the same tactics that have failed us in the past.

In the end, the study confirmed a statement attributed to several world chess champions: “When you see a good move, don’t make it immediately. Look for a better one.”

But Adler came up with a better problem to solve. When I asked him about his thought process, he told me it was “really, really simple.” The way Adler saw it, our problem wasn’t the lander. It was gravity. We were preoccupied with the obvious question: “How do we design a better three-legged lander?” Adler stepped back and asked, “How do we defeat gravity and land our rover safely on Mars?” The same force that causes an apple to fall from a tree also causes unhappy meetings between a spacecraft and the Martian surface unless you do something to cushion the fall. Adler’s solution was to abandon the three-legged lander design. Instead, he proposed using giant airbags with our rover cocooned inside a lander.

Problem finding, according to these researchers, doesn’t end with the preparation stage. Even after spending time viewing the problem from different angles, the more creative individuals keep an open mind as they enter the solution stage and stand ready to make changes to their initial definition of the problem.

In the end, two questions that reframed the problems ended up producing one of the most successful interplanetary missions of all time: What if we used airbags instead of a three-legged lander? What if we sent two rovers instead of one? These questions may appear obvious, but they were obvious only in hindsight.

In light of this experience, the Stanford team reframed the problem. Premature babies didn’t need incubators. Premature babies needed warmth.