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

by Ozan Varol

The result was the Embrace infant warmer. It’s a small, light sleeping bag that wraps around the infant. A pouch of phase-change material—which is an innovative wax—keeps the baby at the right temperature for up to four hours. You can “recharge” the warmer in only a few minutes by putting it in boiling water. And compared with the $20,000 to $40,000 price tag of a traditional incubator, the Embrace costs only $25. By 2019, the cheap and reliable product has embraced hundreds of thousands of premature infants in over twenty countries. 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 out and determine the broader strateg...