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

by Ozan Varol

For most of us, planning for the future means forecasting. In our businesses, we review the current supply and demand for widgets and extrapolate them into the future. In our personal lives, we let our current skill set drive our vision for who we might become. 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 sketch out a roadmap to get there. We picture the perfect product and ask what it takes to build it. Only when you face the real prospect of sketching a blueprint for success—now, not later—will you be forced to separate fact from fiction.