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

by Ozan Varol

As these examples show, instead of creating artificial testing environments disconnected from reality, we’re better off observing customer behavior in real life. If you want to design a better newspaper, watch people read the paper. If you want to design a better kid’s toothbrush, watch kids brush their teeth. If you want to see if people will love the iPhone, put an iPhone in their hands. “If you want to improve a piece of software,” as IDEO’s founder David Kelley explains, “all you have to do is watch people using it and see when they grimace.”45

The act of observation disturbs humans in a different way. When people know they’re being observed, they behave differently.

“What if we did the opposite of what everyone else is doing?”

The observer effect is often an unconscious process. Even when we assume we’re not affecting the participants—even when we’re careful to not dislodge that coin in the couch cushion—we might be cuing them in subtle but significant ways.

For example, in drug trials, both the participants in the study and the scientists running it are kept in the dark—hence double-blind—about whether the participants are getting the actual drug or the fake one, called a placebo. If the methods aren’t double-blind, scientists may insert their hopes and prejudices into the study, treating the participants differently or unconsciously cuing them like Hans’s human questioners.

WHETHER IT’S LAUNCHING a rocket, training for a sporting event, arguing before the Supreme Court, or designing a telescope, the underlying principle is the same. Test as you fly—subject yourself to the same conditions you’ll experience during the flight—and you’ll soon begin to soar.

STAGE THREE ACHIEVE In this last section of the book, you’ll learn why the final ingredients for unlocking your full potential include both failure and success.

8 NOTHING SUCCEEDS LIKE FAILURE How to Transform Failure into Triumph

In this chapter, I’ll use a rocket-science framework to explain why it’s as dangerous to celebrate failure as it is to demonize it. Rocket scientists apply a more balanced approach to failure. They don’t celebrate it; nor do they let it get in their way.

Kathy Cooper of X explains, “there’s just an understanding that a lot of them aren’t going to work. So it’s not seen as surprising or the fault of anyone if something doesn’t work.”16 By normalizing failure, X makes moonshot thinking the path of least resistance.

Treating failure as an option is the key to originality. “When it comes to idea generation,” Adam Grant writes in Originals, “quantity is the most predictable path to quality.”17 Shakespeare, for example, is known for a small number of his classics, but in the span of two decades, he penned 37 plays and 154 sonnets, some of which have been “consistently slammed for unpolished prose and incomplete plot and character development.”18 Pablo Picasso produced 1,800 paintings, 1,200 sculptures, 2,800 ceramics, and 12,000 drawings—only a fraction of which are noteworthy.19 Just a handful of Einstein’s hundreds of publications had real impact.20 Tom Hanks, one of my all-time favorite actors, admits, “I’ve made an awful lot of movies that didn’t make any sense, and didn’t make any money.”21

Even outside rocket science, the fail-fast refrain is misguided. When entrepreneurs are too busy failing fast and celebrating it, they stop learning from their mistakes. The clinking of champagne glasses mutes the feedback they might otherwise receive from failure. Failing fast, in other words, doesn’t magically produce success. When we fail, we’re often none the wiser.

When we fail, we often conceal it, distort it, or deny it. We make the facts fit our self-serving theory rather than adjust the theory to fit the facts. We attribute our failure to factors beyond our control. In our own failures, we overestimate the role of bad luck (“Better luck next time”). We blame the failure on someone else (“She got the job because the boss likes her more”). We come up with a few superficial reasons for why things went south (“If only we had more cash reserves”). But personal culpability seldom makes the list.

Learn Fast, Not Fail Fast

There are two responses to negative feedback from a credible source: Deny it or accept it.

Each failure proved to be an invaluable learning opportunity. Each failure revealed a flaw that required correction. Each failure was followed by progress toward the ultimate goal. Although these failures took their toll on us, we couldn’t have landed safely on Mars without them. These failures are what business school professor Sim Sitkin calls “intelligent failures.” They happen when you’re exploring the edges, solving problems that haven’t been solved, and building things that may not work.

We often speak of intelligent failures as losses. “I lost five years of my life.” “We lost millions of dollars.” But these are losses only if you call them that. You can also frame them as investments. Failure is data—and it’s often data you can’t find in a self-help book. Intelligent failures, if you pay them proper attention, can be the best teachers.

These errors can have staying power that lessons from success often lack. Intelligent failures can produce a sense of urgency for change and produce the shock necessary to unlearn what we know. “Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections,...

To paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, there’s a difference between a single failure and final defeat.34 A single failure, as SpaceX’s story illustrates, can be the beginning, not the end. Many outside observers called the three Falcon 1 crashes failures—mistakes committed by a team of amateurs led by a rich kid playing with expensive toys. But labeling these crashes failures was like calling a tennis match before it’s over. “I’ve come from behind too often,” the great tennis champion Andre Agassi writes, “and had too many opponents come roaring back against me, to think that’s a good idea.”35 The opening doesn’t have to be grand, as long as the finale is.

Breakthroughs are often evolutionary, not revolutionary.

Nothing comes to existence perfectly formed. Rome, as the saying goes, wasn’t built in a day. The Apollo 11 spacecraft that put Armstrong and Aldrin on the Moon didn’t just spring out of the factory. It took numerous iterations—through the Mercury, Gemini, and earlier Apollo missions—to get it right. For scientists, each iteration is progress. If we get a glimpse into the dark room, that’s a contribution. If we don’t find what we thought we’d find, that’s a contribution. If we change a single unknown unknown to a known unknown, that’s a contribution. If we ask a better question than the ones asked before, that’s a contribution, even if the answers elude us.

If you solve enough problems, you get to land your rovers on Mars. If you solve enough problems, you get to build the Roman Empire. If you solve enough problems, you get to land on the Moon. That’s how you change the world. One problem at a time.

Changing the world one problem at a time requires delaying gratification. Most things in life are “first-order positive, second-order negative,” as Shane Parrish writes on his website Farnam Street.37 They give us pleasure in the short term but pain in the long. Spending money now instead of saving for retirement, using fossil fuels instead of renewable energy, guzzling sugar-laden beverages instead of water are all in that category.

perspective. “A real advantage is conferred on people who can do things that are first-order negative, second-order positive,” Parrish writes.39 These people delay gratification in a world that has become obsessed with it. They don’t quit simply because their rocket blew up on the launch pad, they had a bad quarter, or their audition fell flat. They reorient their calibration for the long term, not for the short.

When it comes to creating long-lasting change, there are no hacks or silver bullets, as venture capitalist Ben Horowitz says. You’ll need to use a lot of lead bullets instead.40

Inputs over ...

Focusing on outputs leads us astray because good decisions can lead to bad outcomes. In conditions of uncertainty, outcomes aren’t completely within your control.

If we engage in resulting, we reward bad decisions that lead to good outcomes. Conversely, we change good decisions merely because they produced a bad outcome. We start shaking things up, reorganizing departments, or firing or demoting people. As one study shows, National Football League (NFL) coaches change their lineup after a one-point loss, but don’t change it after a one-point win—even though these minor score differences are often poor indicators of player performance.42

Most of us act like American football coaches, treating success and failure as binary outcomes. But we don’t live in a binary world. The line between success and failure is often razor thin.

The same decision that produced a failure in one scenario can lead to triumph in others.

The goal, then, is to focus on the variables you can control—the inputs—instead of the outputs. You should ask, “What went wrong with this failure?” and if the inputs need fixing, you should fix them. But this question isn’t enough. You must also ask, “What went right with this failure?” You should retain the good-quality decisions, even if they produced a failure.

Even if the project fails, you can take the inputs that worked and use them in future projects.

an input-focused mind is the mark of anyone who has achieved anything extraordinary. The amateur focuses on getting hits and expects short-term results. The professional plays the long game and prioritizes inputs, perfecting them for years with no immediate payoff.

By taking the pressure off the outcome, you get better at your craft. Success becomes a consequence, not the goal.

There’s a question that frequently shows up in self-help books: What would you do if you knew that you could not fail? This isn’t the right question to ask. Instead, do as Elizabeth Gilbert does, and flip the question on its head: “What would you do even if you knew that you might very well fail? What do you love doing so much that the words failure and success essentially become irrelevant?”46 When we switch to an input-focused mindset, we condition ourselves to derive intrinsic value out of the activity. The input becomes its own reward.

With an input-focused mindset, you’re free to change your destination. Goals can help you focus, but that focus can also turn into tunnel vision if you refuse to budge or pivot from your initial path.

Focusing on inputs has another upside. You avoid the wild swings of misery and euphoria that come with chasing outcomes. Instead, you become curious—no, fascinated—about tweaking and perfecting the inputs.

What can I learn from this? What if this failure was actually good for me?

Failure, as we’ve seen, is the portal to discovery, innovation, and long-term success. But most organizations suffer from collective amnesia over their failures. Mistakes remain concealed because employees are too afraid to share them. Most companies tell their employees, explicitly or implicitly, that if you succeed—according to short-term, quantifiable metrics like profits—you get a big pot of money, a better office, and a better title. If you fail, you get nothing. Or worse, you get shown the door.

But failures transmit invaluable signals. Your goal should be to pick up these signals before your competitors do. But in most environments, these signals are elusive whispers that don’t rise above the noise. If you can’t hear them, if you suppress them, or if you shed them before they stick, you can’t learn from them.

“There are two parts to failure,” Pixar’s former president Ed Catmull writes. “There is the event itself, with all its attendant disappointment, confusion, and shame, and then there is our reaction to it.” We don’t control the first part, but we do control the second. The goal, as Catmull puts it, should be “to uncouple fear and failure—to create an environment in which making mistakes doesn’t strike terror into your employees’ hearts.”57

Rewarding intelligent failure sounds simple in theory, but it’s difficult to implement in practice. A superficial commitment to “innovation” or “taking risks” won’t create a culture of intelligent failures.

The assistant discovered that better teams weren’t making more mistakes. Instead, they were simply reporting more mistakes. The teams that had a climate of openness—where the staff felt safe to discuss mistakes—performed better because employees were more willing to share failures and actively work to reduce them. Edmondson refers to this climate as “psychological safety.”

Psychological safety means, in Edmondson’s words, “no one will be punished or humiliated for errors, questions, or requests for help, in the service of reaching ambitious performance goals.”60

“Reward excellent failures, punish mediocre successes,”

There must be a clear commitment to supporting intelligent failure and well-intentioned risk taking. People must know that intelligent failure is necessary for future success, that they won’t be punished for it, and that their careers won’t be ended for it. If the signals are mixed, employees will err on the side of caution and hide their mistakes instead of revealing them.

If these individuals now appear more endearing to you, you’re experiencing what researchers call the “beautiful mess effect.”75 Exposing your vulnerability can make you more desirable in the eyes of others. But there’s one caveat. You must establish your competence before revealing your failures. Otherwise, you risk damaging your credibility and coming across as a mess—and not a beautiful one.76

one surgeon repeatedly told his team, “I need to hear from you because I’m likely to miss things.”80 Another surgeon would say, “I screwed up. My judgment was bad in this case.” What made these messages effective was their repetition. Entrenched behaviors don’t change with one impassioned speech. As team members heard these messages over and over again, they felt psychologically safe to speak up—even in an environment as hierarchical as an operating room. “There are no sacred cows,” a member of one surgery team explained. “If somebody needs to be told something, then they are told—surgeon or orderly.”81

Whether you’re in the operating room, the boardroom, or the mission control room, the principle is the same. The road to success is filled with potholes. You’re better off acknowledging them than pretending they don’t exist.

How to Fail Gr...