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

by Ozan Varol

Put differently, these surveys failed the test-as-you-fly rule. Filling out a survey about reading a newspaper, and the actual act of reading a newspaper, are two different things. Gallup knew that for the test to work, it had to closely resemble the flight. So what did Gallup do to remedy the problem? He sent a team of interviewers into people’s homes to watch them read newspapers and mark each part of the paper as read or unread. Awkward? Yes. More accurate than surveys? Absolutely. “Almost without exception,” Gallup wrote, “later questioning proved… preliminary statements [in surveys] false.” Gallup’s analog experiment was the precursor to modern digital tracking. If you think his approach was creepy, remember that Netflix knows exactly what you watch, when you watch it, and whether you stopped the last season of House of Cards before it ended. Netflix knows, as Gallup did, that observation is far more accurate than self-reporting.