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

by Ozan Varol

We find ourselves on that fragile platform far more often than we realize. In our certainty-obsessed public discourse, we avoid reckoning with nuances. The resulting public discussion operates without a rigorous system for discerning proven facts from best guesses. A lot of what we know simply isn’t accurate, and it’s not always easy to recognize which part lacks real evidence.

This is a great excerpt that showcases the gradient of truthfulness. Facts aren’t always synonymous with absolute truth.

“People wish to be settled,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, but “only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.”63 Those who cling to the past get left behind as the world marches forward.

Particularly in conditions of uncertainty, we tend to copy and paste from our peers and competitors, assuming they know something we don’t.

This happens frequently in software and at your favorite startups.

If they wanted, instead of losing themselves in thought, the students could self-administer an electric shock by pressing a button. In the study, 67 percent of men and 25 percent of women chose to shock themselves instead of sitting undisturbed with their thoughts (including one person who delivered a whopping 190 shocks to himself during the fifteen-minute period).

“We are drowning in information,” biologist E. O. Wilson said, “while starving for wisdom.”28 If we don’t take the time to think—if we don’t pause, understand, and deliberate—we can’t find wisdom or form new ideas. We end up sticking with the first solution or thought that pops into our mind, instead of staying with the problem. But problems worth solving don’t yield immediate answers. As author William Deresiewicz explains, “My first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom.”29

“If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success,” says

The flies and the bees, respectively, represent what’s known as divergent and convergent thinking. The flies are the divergent thinkers, fluttering freely until they find the exit. The bees are the convergent thinkers, zeroing in on the seemingly most obvious exit path with a behavior that is ultimately their undoing.

No one comes equipped with a critical-thinking chip that diminishes the human tendency to let personal beliefs distort the facts. Regardless of your intelligence, Feynman’s adage holds true: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”11

From a scientific perspective, opinions present several problems. Opinions are sticky. Once we form an opinion—our own very clever idea—we tend to fall in love with it, particularly when we declare it in public through an actual or a virtual megaphone. To avoid changing our mind, we’ll twist ourselves into positions that even seasoned yogis can’t hold.

When you’ve got multiple hypotheses, you reduce your attachment to any one of them and make it more difficult to quickly settle on one. With this strategy, as Chamberlin explains, the scientist becomes “the parent of a family of hypotheses: and, by his parental relation to all, he is forbidden to fasten his affections unduly upon any one.”24 Ideally,

Success is the wolf in sheep’s clothing. It drives a wedge between appearance and reality. When we succeed, we believe everything went according to plan. We ignore the warning signs and the necessity for change. With each success, we grow more confident and up the ante.

NASA gradually morphed into a hierarchical organization where compliance with rules and procedures became more important than contribution.

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.