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

by Ozan Varol

At its core, a rocket launch is the controlled explosion of a small nuclear bomb

Wall Street now employs so-called financial rocket scientists to turn investing from an art into a science.

slapdash

rote

hurtling

speck

harness

glossed over

If you stick to the familiar, you won’t find the unexpected.

tizzy:

lofty

Our ability to make the most out of uncertainty is what creates the most potential value.

Where certainty ends, progress begins.

Anosognosic

“The great obstacle to discovering,” historian Daniel J. Boorstin writes, “was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.”

glinted

Any future breakthroughs will occur only when scientists embrace uncertainty and pay close attention to one of the primary drivers of progress: anomalies.

How certain is the author of this statement? ;-)

discord

strife.

My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas”

Mnemonic order of planets based on proximity to the sun.

ensued

plutoed

mnemonic

Mean Very Evil Men Just Shortened Up Nature.59

The origin of the word planet makes this clear. Planet is derived from a Greek word that means “wanderer.”

contraption?

quips.

“In order to stay calm in a high-stress, high-stakes situation, all you really need is knowledge.… Being forced to confront the prospect of failure head-on—to study it, dissect it, tease apart all its components and consequences—really works.”67

infants as young as six months old had some expectations of certainty as to the identity and location of the person. When these variables changed unexpectedly, so did the infants’ enjoyment.

pejorative

For redundancies to work, they must function independently.

Although redundancy is a good insurance policy, it obeys the law of diminishing returns. After a certain point, piling up additional redundancies unnecessarily increases complexity, weight, and cost.

Excessive redundancy can also backfire and compromise reliability, instead of improving it. Redundancies add additional points of failure.

versatile

absolute certainty is a mirage. In life, we’re required to base our opinions on imperfect information and make a call with sketchy data.

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

The default carries immense power, even in advanced industries like rocket science. This idea is called path dependence: What we’ve done before shapes what we do next.

The QWERTY layout (named after the first six letters on the keyboard) was created specifically to slow down typing speed to prevent mechanical key blockage.

the past drowns out the future. Steady as she goes—until you hit an iceberg.

The deeper the snow tracks, the harder it is to escape them. An established method of doing things can conceal the exit gate.

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.

fickle,

dabble

As Warren Buffett put it, “The five most dangerous words in business are ‘Everybody else is doing it.’”

dilettante

“Talent hits a target no one else can hit,” philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said, but “genius hits a target no one else can see.”

switch from being a cover band that plays someone else’s songs to an artist that does the painstaking work of creating something new.

pintle

Skinner box,

argue for your limitations, and you get to keep them. “Your assumptions are your windows on the world,”