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

by Ozan Varol

Often, we fall in love with our favorite solution and then define the problem as the absence of that solution. “The problem is, we need a better three-legged lander.” “The problem is, we don’t have enough incubators.” In each case, we pursue technology for the sake of technology. We lose the forest for the trees, the purpose for the method, the function for the form. This approach mistakes tactics for strategy.

Although the terms are often used interchangeably, they refer to different concepts. A strategy is a plan for achieving an objective. Tactics, in contrast, are the actions you take to implement the strategy.

We often lose sight of the strategy, fixate on the tactics and the tools, and become dependent on them. But tools, as author Neil Gaiman reminds us, “can be the subtlest of traps.”33 Just because a hammer is sitting in front of you doesn’t mean it’s the right tool for the job. Only when you zoom ...

To find the strategy, ask yourself, What problem is this tactic here to solve? This question requires abandoning the what and the how and focusing on the why. The three-legged lander was a tactic, and landing safely on Mars was the strategy. The inc...

If you’re having trouble zooming out, bring outsiders into the conversation. People who don’t regularly use hammers are less likely to be distract...

Once you identify the strategy, it becomes easier to play with different tactics. If you frame the problem more broadly as one of gravity—not as a flawed three-legged lander—airbags can present a better alternative. If you frame the problem more broadly as the risk involved in landing on Mars—not just as a defec...

When people are looking for the ‘right answers,’ they are almost always asking tactical questions. By focusing on the strategy, this allows you to be much more malleable with the tactics.” For Attia, whether to use a statin is “a tactical question that is in service of the much broader strategy” of delaying death from atherosclerosis.34

What is the five-dollar tactic in your own life? How can you ignore it and find the two-hour window? Or even better, how do you find the most valuable three minutes in your arsenal? Once you move from the what to the why—once you frame the problem broadly in terms of what you’re trying to do instead of your favored solution—you’ll discover other possibilities in the peripheries.

The barometer story is a good example of functional fixedness. As psychologist Karl Duncker explains, the concept refers to a “mental block against using an object in a new way that is required to solve a problem.” Just as we treat problems and questions as fixed, we do the same with tools. Once we learn that a barometer measures pressure, we blind ourselves to other uses for it. Like the chess players whose eyes kept darting to the familiar solution on the chess board, our minds fixate on the function we know.

Combinatory play also helps. You can draw inspiration from how objects are used in other fields. For example, the airbags that landed my group’s rovers safely on Mars used the same mechanism that cushions a collision with your steering wheel in a car accident. The same fabric used in astronaut spacesuits is also used by Embrace to make a temperature-controlling swaddle.38 George de Mestral created Velcro after he saw his pants covered in cockleburs following a walk.39 He examined the cockleburs under a microscope and discovered a hooklike shape that he then emulated to create the hook-and-loop fastener called Velcro—with one side stiff like the cockleburs and the other side smooth like his pants.

It’s also helpful to separate function from form. When we look at an object, we tend to see its function. A barometer, we think, is for measuring pressure. A hammer is for driving in nails. A box is for storing objects. But this natural inertia toward the function also gets in the way of innovation. If we can look past the function to the form, we can discover other ways that the product, service, or technology can be used. For example, if you can view the typical barometer simply as a round object, it can also be used as a weight. If you view a box as a flat platform with sides, it can also be used as a stand.

McClure’s approach illustrates a powerful way of reframing questions: taking an idea and flipping it on its head. This method dates back at least to the nineteenth century, when the German mathematician Carl Jacobi introduced the idea with a powerful maxim: “Invert, always invert” (Man muss immer umkehren).47

The serial entrepreneur Rod Drury calls this approach the “George Costanza theory of management.”54 In an episode of Seinfeld, Costanza sets out to improve his life by doing the exact opposite of what he had done before. Drury, who founded and led the accounting software company Xero, would outsmart his far bigger competitors by asking himself, “What is the exact opposite of what an incumbent would expect us to do?” Asking this question in 2005, Drury went all in on using a cloud-based platform when his competitors were all still stuck on desktop applications.55

You can’t beat a stronger competitor by copying them. But you can beat them by doing the opposite of what they’re doing.

Instead of adopting a common best practice or the industry standard, reframe the question by asking, “What if I did the reverse?” Even if you don’t execute, the simple process of thinking through the opposite will make you question your assumptions and jolt you out of your current perspective.

THE NEXT TIME you’re tempted to engage in problem solving, try problem finding instead. Ask yourself, Am I asking the right question? If I changed my perspective, how would the problem change? How can I frame the question in terms of strategy, instead of tactics? How do I flip the thumbtack box and view this resource in terms of its form, not its function? What if we did the reverse? Breakthroughs, contrary to popular wisdom, don’t begin with a smart answer. They begin with a smart question.

6 THE POWER OF FLIP-FLOPPING How to Spot the Truth and Make Smarter Decisions

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. —SHERLOCK HOLMES

The mind doesn’t follow the facts. Facts, as John Adams put it, are stubborn things, but our minds are even more stubborn.

our beliefs and overvalue evidence that confirms them.

We don’t seek multiple references or filter out low-quality information. We quickly jump from “This sounds right to me” to “This is true.”

Regardless of your intelligence, Feynman’s adage holds true: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”11

From a scientific perspective, opinions present several problems. Opinions are sticky. Once we form an opinion—our own very clever idea—we tend to fall in love with it, particularly when we declare it in public through an actual or a virtual megaphone. To avoid changing our mind, we’ll twist ourselves into positions that even seasoned yogis can’t hold.

Over time, our beliefs begin to blend into our identity. Your belief in CrossFit makes you a CrossFitter, your belief in climate change makes you an environmentalist, and your belief in primal eating makes you paleo.

When your beliefs and your identity are one and the same, changing your mind means changing your identity—which is why disagreements ofte...

Opinions are defended, but working hypotheses are tested.

author Robertson Davies put it, “The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”23 If the mind anticipates a single answer—the Mars Polar Lander may be alive—that’s what the eye will see.

Before announcing a working hypothesis, ask yourself, what are my preconceptions? What do I believe to be true? Also ask, do I really want this particular hypothesis to be true? If so, be careful. Be very careful. Much as in life, if you like someone, you’ll tend to overlook their flaws. You’ll find signals from a love interest—or a spacecraft—even when they’re not sending any.

To make sure you don’t fall in love with a single hypothesis, generate several. When you’ve got multiple hypotheses, you reduce your attachment to any one of them and ma...

Ideally, the hypotheses you spin should conflict with each other. “The test of a first-rate intelligence,” F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”25

In focusing on the facts in front of us, we don’t focus enough—or at all—on the missing facts. As the focal facts scream for attention, we must ask, “What am I not seeing? What fact should be present, but is not?”

wrong.” When our focus shifts from proving ourselves right to proving ourselves wrong, we seek different inputs, we combat deeply entrenched biases, and we open ourselves up to competing facts and arguments. “I don’t like that man,” Abraham Lincoln is said to have observed. “I must get to know him better.” The same approach should apply to opposing arguments.

Our goal should be to find what’s right—not to be right.

If you can’t find opposing voices, manufacture them. Build a mental model of your favorite adversary, and have imaginary conversations with them. This is what Marc Andreessen does. “I have a little mental model of Peter Thiel,” explains Andreessen, referring to fellow venture capitalist and PayPal cofounder, “a simulation that lives on my shoulder, and I argue with him all day long.”59 He added, “People might look at you funny while it’s happening,” but it’s well worth the ridicule.

7 TEST AS YOU FLY, FLY AS YOU TEST How to Nail Your Next Product Launch or Job Interview

We don’t rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training. —UNKNOWN

Self-deception is only part of the problem. The other part is the disconnect between testing conditions and reality. Focus groups and test audiences are often placed in artificial conditions and asked questions they would never get in real life. As a result, these “experiments” spit out perfectly polished, and perfectly incorrect, conclusions.

Rocket science offers a way forward with a deceptively simple principle: test as you fly, fly as you test. According to the principle, experiments on Earth must mimic, to the greatest extent possible, the same conditions in flight.

In a proper test, the goal isn’t to discover everything that can go right. Rather, the goal is to discover everything that can go wrong and to find the breaking point.

The best way to determine an object’s breaking point is to break it. Rocket scientists try to break the spacecraft on Earth—to reveal all its flaws—before the faults reveal themselves in space. This objective requires exposing every component, down to the screws, to the same type of shocks, vibrations, and extreme temperatures awaiting them in space. Scientists and engineers must think through all the ways that they can trick these components and lines of computer code into committing fatal errors.

Testing can help turn unknowns into knowns.

Sufi teaching: “You think that because you understand ‘one’ that you must therefore understand ‘two’ because one and one make two. But you forget that you must also understand ‘and.’”10

failure to conduct systems-level testing can produce unpredictable consequences. When you make a last-minute change to a product and ship it out the door without retesting the whole thing, you’re risking disaster. When you make a change to a section of a legal brief without examining how the change interacts with the whole, you’re dancing with malpractice. When you subcontract the design of a major government program to sixty contractors but fail to test the combined system—as happened with healthcare.gov—you’re courting catastrophe.14

After Hadfield returned to Earth from a successful mission, he was asked if things had gone as planned. “The truth is that nothing went as we’d planned,” he responded, “but everything was within the scope of what we prepared for.”29

Boone’s secret is the same as any self-respecting astronaut: test as you fly. Train in the same environment you’ll experience on race day—while your competition trains from the comfort of a gym because it happens to be raining outside. “You don’t race on a treadmill with Netflix in front of you,” Boone says, “so you shouldn’t be doing your training like that.”

The rain, the snow, the dark, the cold, the wetsuit—they all beckon Boone. By the time the race rolls around, she has been desensitized to the brutal conditions awaiting her. She greets them with a smile that seems to say, “Nice to see you again. Let’s dance.”

In our lives, we don’t do what Roberts and Boone do. We train in conditions that don’t mimic reality. We practice a major speech in the comfort of our home, when we’re fully rested and awake. We do mock job interviews in our sweatpants with a friend using a predetermined set of questions. If we applied the test-as-you-fly rule, we would practice our speech in an unfamiliar setting, after downing a few espressos to give us the jitters....

The iPhone didn’t prove the survey wrong. As author Derek Thompson explains, the survey accurately measured the participants’ “indifference to a product they had never seen and did not understand.” In other words, the survey had failed to follow the test-as-you-fly rule. Hypothetically thinking about the iPhone was nothing like seeing it in person. Once consumers saw the iPhone in an Apple Store—once they stepped into the brand and held the revolutionary new device in their hands—they couldn’t let it go. Their indifference quickly morphed into desire.

Netflix knows, as Gallup did, that observation is far more accurate than self-reporting.

When one health-care organization brought in IDEO to redesign the patient experience, the executives were probably expecting a stylish PowerPoint presentation with new, creative designs for the hospital rooms. Instead, what they got was a mind-numbing six-minute video clip. The video showed nothing but the ceiling of a hospital room. “When you lie in a hospital bed all day,” IDEO’s chief creative officer Paul Bennett explained, “all you do is look at the roof, and it’s a really shitty experience.”42 What Bennett describes as “a blinding glimpse of the bleeding obvious” came after IDEO employees put themselves in a patient’s shoes. An IDEO designer checked in to the hospital as a patient and lay in an actual patient bed for hours, getting wheeled around, staring at the ceiling tiles, and capturing the abysmal experience on a video camera. That six-minute clip of the dull tiles was a small glimpse of the overall patient journey—a “mix of boredom and anxiety from feeling lost, uninformed, and out of control,” as IDEO’s CEO Tim Brown said.43 Six minutes of footage was sufficient for the hospital employees to spring into action. They decorated the ceilings, put up whiteboards for visitors to leave messages to the patients, and transformed the style and color of the patient rooms to make them more personal. They also put rearview mirrors on hospital stretchers to allow patients to see and connect with the doctors and nurses wheeling them around. IDEO’s presentation ultimately ki...