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

by Ozan Varol

ask yourself, What if this weren’t true? Why am I doing it this way? Can I get rid of this or replace it with something better? Be careful if you find yourself coming up with multiple reasons to keep something. “By invoking more than one reason,” observes author and scholar Nassim Nicholas Taleb, “you are trying to convince yourself to do something.”22

Why You Should Risk Your Significance

Californication,

When you risk your significance, you won’t change who you are. You’ll discover it.

When ebooks began to threaten Amazon’s physical book business, Bezos embraced the challenge instead of turning away from it. He told one of his associates, “I want you to proceed as if your job is to put everyone selling books out of a job,” including Amazon itself.

Simple also has fewer points of failure. Complicated things break more easily.

Simplicity also reduces costs.

the quote attributed to many luminaries

winnow

“Seek simplicity and distrust it.”56

Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, who championed learning through visualization.

epiphanies

malleable

boredom—which I define as large chunks of unstructured time free of distractions—

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

boredom should “be recognized as a legitimate human emotion that can be central to learning and creativity.”30 Falling into boredom allows our brain to tune out the external world and tune into the internal. This state of mind lets loose the most complex instrument known to us, switching the brain from the focused to the diffused mode of thinking.

Being stuck, according to Wiles, is “part of the process.”41 But “people don’t get used to that,” he says. “They find it very stressful.” When he got stuck—which was often—Wiles would stop, let his mind relax, and go for a walk by the lake.

You often have to walk away from the problem—literally and metaphorically—for the answer to arrive.43

footslogging

Some scientists turn to music to tap into their subconscious. Einstein, for example, played his violin to decipher the music of the cosmos. As one friend recalled, “He would often play his violin in his kitchen late at night, improvising melodies while he pondered complicated problems. Then suddenly, in the middle of playing, he would announce excitedly, ‘I’ve got it!’ As if by inspiration, the answer to the problem would have come to him in the midst of music.”47

The magic is the intention of a designated time to pause and reflect—a moment for interior silence to oppose contemporary chaos.

creativity often comes as a subtle whisper—not a big bang. You must be patient enough to pursue the whisper and perceptive enough to receive it when it arrives. If you live with the question long enough, “you will gradually, without noticing it, one distant day live right into the answer,”

flummoxed

There’s little to be learned from comparing similar things.

motley

Olympia Academy,

Darwin read Lyell’s book while sailing on the Beagle and applied the geological idea to biology.

Darwin also drew inspiration from the late-eighteenth-century economist Thomas Malthus. Malthus argued that humans tend to outgrow resources like food, creating a competition for survival. This competition, Darwin believed, drove the evolutionary process, leading the species best adapted to their environment to survive.68

platitudes,

“What’s the most interesting thing you’re working on right now?”

Medici effect.

cognitive diversity

smothered

shoshin, or beginner’s mind.

lore

polymath

crutching

loony

“The story of the human race,” psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote in 1933, “is the story of men and women selling themselves short.”13

The flies and the bees, respectively, represent what’s known as divergent and convergent thinking.

The researchers laid out a scenario where the ethical choice wasn’t obvious and divided the study’s participants into groups. To one group, they asked, “What should you do?” To the other group, they asked, “What could you do?” The “should” group zeroed in on the most obvious solutions—often not the best ones—but the “could” group stayed open-minded and generated a broader range of possible approaches.

We need the idealism of divergent thinking to be followed by the pragmatism of convergent thinking. “The creative process is not about one state,” science historian Steve Johnson explains. “It’s the ability to move between different mental states.”

individuals who were more creative had decreased activity in the sections of the brain associated with evaluation.

When Benjamin Franklin was watching the first hot-air balloon with humans aboard take off in 1783, someone asked him, “What good is flight?” Franklin purportedly replied, “It is a child who is just born, one cannot say what it will become.”

Regular makes vulnerable. Irregular makes nimble.

One way to shock your brain and generate wacky ideas is to ask, What would a science-fiction solution look like? Fiction transports us to a reality far different from our own—without the need to ever leave our couch.

“Anything that one man can imagine,” Jules Verne said, “another man can make real.”

treacherous

backcasting.

smother