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

by Ozan Varol

Unwittingly, knowledge can make us a slave to convention. And conventional thoughts lead to conventional results.

Process, by definition, is backward looking. It was developed in response to yesterday’s troubles. If we treat it like a sacred pact—if we don’t question it—process can impede forward movement. Over time, our organizational arteries get clogged with outdated procedures.

thinking isn’t just for finding the fundamental components of a product or practice—whether it’s a rocket or your meditation ritual—and building something new. You can also use this thinking to find the raw materials within you and build the new you. This, in turn, requires risking your significance.

The noise in any system—whether it’s a rocket, a business, or your résumé—reduces its value. There’s a temptation to always add more, but the taller the Jenga tower, the more fragile it gets.

On a typical day, we switch from one form of social media to the next, check our email, catch up on the news—all within a span of twenty minutes. We prefer the certainty of these distractions over the uncertainty of boredom (I don’t know what to do with myself, and I’d rather not find out).

If you keep collecting apples and oranges and spending time with them, ideas for new fruits will begin arriving soon enough.

Consider the result of one study, where researchers separated the participants into three groups and asked them to solve a complex problem.78 The first group worked in complete isolation, the second group was in constant interaction, and the third group alternated between interaction and isolation. The best-performing group was the third. “Intermittent breaks in interaction improve collective intelligence,” the researchers observed.

If you go through this exercise, and the idea sounds like torture, then stop. If any of this seems strangely fun to you—as writing does to me—then by all means, go for it. With this reorientation, you also condition yourself to derive intrinsic value from the process rather than chasing elusive outcomes.

In the first part of this book (“Launch”), you learned how to reason from first principles and ignite your thinking by conducting thought experiments and taking moonshots to generate radical solutions to thorny problems. But often, the question we originally conceived isn’t the best one to ask, and the first problem we identified isn’t the best one to tackle.

What is the five-dollar tactic in your own life? How can you ignore it and find the two-hour window? Or even better, how do you find the most valuable three minutes in your arsenal?

fall apart, or your health doesn’t break down. Each time we validate what we think we know, we narrow our vision and ignore alternative possibilities