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

by Ozan Varol

Breakthroughs are often evolutionary, not revolutionary. Take a look at any scientific discovery, and you’ll find there is no magical it. No single aha moment. Science weaves from failure to failure, with each version better than the one that came before. From a scientific perspective, failure isn’t a roadblock. It’s a portal to progress. We embodied this mindset as children. When we learned how to walk, we didn’t get it right on the first try. No one told us, “You’d better think hard about how you take that very first step because you get one step and that’s it.” We repeatedly fell. With each fall, our bodies learned what to do and what not to do. By learning not to fall, we learned how to walk. 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.