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

by Ozan Varol

ghastly

You’ve just been put in charge of a particularly audacious project at work. Your boss says you have to get a monkey to stand on a pedestal and train it to recite passages from Shakespeare. How do you begin? If you’re like most people, you begin with building a pedestal. At some point, “the boss is going to pop by and ask for a status update,

But here’s the problem: Building the pedestal is the easiest part. “You can always build the pedestal,” Teller says. “All of the risk and the learning comes from the extremely hard work of first training the monkey.”87 If the project has an Achilles heel—if the monkey can’t be trained to talk, let alone recite Shakespeare—you want to know that up front.

the more time you spend building the pedestal, the harder it becomes to walk away from moonshots that shouldn’t be pursued.

sunk-cost f...

The more we invest time, effort, or money, the harder it becom...

We continue to read a terrible book because we already spent an hour reading the first few chapters or pursue a dysfunctional relationship bec...

The monkey-first attitude requires developing a set of “kill metrics,” as X calls them, a set of go/no-go criteria for determining when to press ahead and when to quit.

taking carbon dioxide out of seawater and turning the carbon dioxide into affordable, liquid fuel with the potential to replace gasoline.

What’s easy often isn’t important, and what’s important often isn’t easy.

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world,” George Bernard Shaw famously said, but “the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”90

jettisons

This chapter examines the importance of searching for a better question instead of a better answer.

When we immediately launch into answer mode, we end up chasing the wrong problem.

The difficulty lies, as John Maynard Keynes said, “not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.”4

When we’re familiar with a problem, and when we think we have the right answer, we stop seeing alternatives. This tendency is known as the Einstellung effect.

In our adult lives, problems often aren’t handed to us fully formed. We have to find, define, and redefine them ourselves.

Over time, we become a hammer, and every problem looks like a nail.

“When you see a good move, don’t make it immediately. Look for a better one.”

Think of questions as different camera lenses. Put on a wide-angle lens, and you’ll capture the entire scene. Put on a zoom lens, and you’ll get a close-up shot of a butterfly.

“What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning,” said Werner Heisenberg,

When we reframe a question—when we change our method of questioning—we have the power to change the answers.

doppelganger.

the Embrace infant warmer.

the five-dollar challenge.35 Students break up into teams, and each team gets five dollars in funding. Their goal is to make as much money as possible within two hours and then give a three-minute presentation

The teams that make the most money don’t use the five dollars at all. They realize that the five dollars is a distracting, and essentially worthless, resource. So they ignore it. Instead, they reframe the problem more broadly as “What can we do to make money if we start with absolutely nothing?”

the candle problem, designed by Duncker.

Functional fixedness

If you didn’t know what you know, what else could you do with it?

swaddle.

George de Mestral created Velcro after he saw his pants covered in cockleburs following a walk.39 He examined the cockleburs under a microscope and discovered a hooklike shape that he then emulated to create the hook-and-loop fastener called Velcro

It’s also helpful to separate function from form.

Frank McClure was also thunderstruck by Sputnik,

GPS.

Dick Fosbury

instead of jumping face down to the bar, Fosbury did the reverse. He jumped backward.

The Fosbury flop,

THE NEXT TIME you’re tempted to engage in problem solving, try problem finding instead. Ask yourself, Am I asking the right question? If I changed my perspective, how would the problem change?

when I was attempting to persuade someone, I would back my arguments with hard, cold, irrefutable data and expect immediate results. Drowning the other person with facts,

Drowning the other person with facts,

The mind doesn’t follow the facts.

contortions.

Our tendency toward skewed judgment partly results from the confirmation bias. We undervalue evidence that contradicts our beliefs and overvalue evidence that confirms them.

For parents with the least favorable attitude toward vaccines, the campaigns actually backfired and made the parents less likely to vaccinate their children. For already-hesitant parents, the fear-based campaign—bearing tragic images of children suffering from measles—paradoxically increased the belief that the MMR vaccine causes autism.

For already-hesitant parents, the fear-based campaign—bearing tragic images of children suffering from measles—paradoxically increased the belief that the MMR vaccine causes autism.

“The best response to false beliefs,” the researchers concluded, “is not necessarily providing correct information.”

the navigation error that killed the Mars Climate Orbiter.

Lockheed Martin, which built the orbiter, was using the English inch-pound system, but JPL, which navigated the orbiter, was using the metric system.

you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”

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,