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

by Ozan Varol

The journey cannot end once the mission is accomplished. That’s when the real work begins. When success brings complacency—when we tell ourselves that now that we’ve discovered the New World, there’s no reason to return—we become a shadow of our former selves. In every annual letter to Amazon shareholders, Jeff Bezos includes the same cryptic line: “It remains Day 1.” After repeating this mantra for a few decades, Bezos was asked what Day 2 would look like. He replied, “Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.”11 The rocket-science mindset requires remaining in Day 1 and repeatedly introducing color into the monochromatic world. We must keep devising thought experiments, taking moonshots, proving ourselves wrong, dancing with uncertainty, reframing problems, testing as we fly, and returning to first principles. We must keep walking the untrodden paths, sailing the wild seas, and flying the savage skies. “However sweet these laid-up stores, however convenient this dwelling, we cannot remain here,” Walt Whitman wrote. “However shelter’d this port and however calm these waters, we must not anchor here.”12 In the end, there’s no hidden playbook. No secret sauce. The power is there for the taking. Once you learn how to think like a rocket scientist—and nurture that thinking in the long term—you can turn the unimaginable into the imaginable, mold science fiction into fact, and stre...