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

by Ozan Varol

This giant leap—taken within a human lifespan—is often hailed as the triumph of technology. But it’s not. Rather, it’s the great triumph of a certain thought process rocket scientists used to turn the impossible into the possible. It’s the same thought process that has allowed these scientists to score dozens of interplanetary holes in one with supersonic spacecraft, sending them millions of miles through outer space and landing them on a precise spot. It’s the same thought process that brings humanity closer and closer to colonizing other planets and becoming an interplanetary species. And it’s the same thought process that will make affordable commercial space tourism the new norm.

Rocket scientists imagine the unimaginable and solve the unsolvable. They transform failures into triumphs and constraints into advantages. They view mishaps as solvable puzzles rather than insurmountable roadblocks. They’re moved not by blind conviction but by self-doubt; their goal is not short-term results but long-term breakthroughs. They know that the rules aren’t set in stone, the default can be altered, and a new path can be forged.

In the modern era, rocket-science thinking is a necessity. The world is evolving at dizzying speed, and we must continuously evolve with it to keep pace. Although not everyone aspires to calculate burn-rate coefficients or orbital trajectories, we all encounter complex and unfamiliar problems in our daily lives. Those who can tackle these problems—without clear guidelines and with the clock ticking—enjoy an extraordinary advantage. Despite its tremendous benefits, we often assume that thinking like a rocket scientist is beyond the ability of mere mortals without a special kind of genius (hence the common saying “It’s not rocket science”). We identify with Elton John’s Rocket Man, who, despite being selected for a Mars mission, laments about “all this science I don’t understand.”

Companies fail because they stare at the rearview mirror and keep calling the same plays from the same playbook. Instead of risking failure, they stick with the status quo. In our daily lives, we fail to exercise our critical-thinking muscles and instead leave it to others to draw conclusions. As a result, these muscles atrophy over time.

The Voyager 1 spacecraft took off in 1977 to paint the first portrait of the outer solar system, photographing Jupiter, Saturn, and beyond. When it completed its mission at the fringes of our solar system, Sagan came up with the idea of turning its cameras around and pointing them at Earth to take one final image. The now-iconic photo, known as the Pale Blue Dot, depicts Earth as a tiny pixel—a barely perceptible “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam,” in Sagan’s memorable words.

stop fighting uncertainty and harness its power. You’ll learn how our obsession with certainty leads us astray and why all progress takes place in uncertain conditions.

it’s only when we sacrifice the certainty of answers, when we take our training wheels off, and when we dare to wander away from the street lamps that breakthroughs happen. If you stick to the familiar, you won’t find the unexpected. Those who get ahead in this century will dance with the great unknown and find danger, rather than comfort, in the status quo.

conditioning. We believe (or pretend to believe) there is one right answer to each question. We believe that this right answer has already been discovered by someone far smarter than us. We believe the answer can therefore be found in a Google search, acquired from the latest “3 Hacks to More Happiness” article, or handed to us from a self-proclaimed life coach.

Our ability to make the most out of uncertainty is what creates the most potential value. We should be fueled not by a desire for a quick catharsis but by intrigue. Where certainty ends, progress begins.

mortis.21 When we prefer the seeming stability of stories to the messy reality of uncertainty, facts become dispensable and misinformation thrives. Fake news is not a modern phenomenon. Between a good story and a bunch of data, the story has always prevailed. These mentally vivid images strike a deep, lasting chord known as the narrative fallacy. We remember what so-and-so told us about how his male-pattern baldness was caused by too much time in the sun. We fall for the story, throwing logic and skepticism to the wind.

The problem with the modern world, as Bertrand Russell put it, is that “the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” Even after physicist Richard Feynman earned a Nobel prize, he thought of himself as a “confused ape” and approached everything around him with the same level of curiosity, which enabled him to see nuances that others dismissed. “I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing,” he remarked, “than to have answers which might be wrong.”

At the beginning of each movie scene, Steven Spielberg finds himself surrounded by enormous uncertainty. “Every time I start a new scene, I’m nervous,” he explains. “I don’t know what I’m gonna think of hearing the lines, I don’t know what I’m gonna tell the actors, I don’t know where I’m gonna put the camera.”30 Placed in the same situation, others might panic, but Spielberg describes it as “the greatest feeling in the world.” He knows that only conditions of tremendous uncertainty bring out his creative best.

We believe that, as Asimov describes, “everything that isn’t perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong.”48 This oversimplification helps us make sense of the world as children. But as we mature, we fail to outgrow this misleading theory. We go around trying to fit square pegs into round holes and pigeonholing things—and people—into neat categories to create the satisfying, but misleading, illusion of having restored order to a disorderly world.

In Douglas Adams’s hilarious book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the supercomputer Deep Thought is asked for the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything.” After seven and a half million years of deep thought, it spits out a clear, but ultimately meaningless, answer: 42. Although the book’s fans have tried to ascribe some symbolic meaning to this number, I think there is none. Adams was simply mocking how humans crave and cling to certainty.

The secret is to start walking before you see a clear path. Start walking, even though there will be stuck wheels, broken drills, and exploding oxygen tanks ahead.

Research shows that we become increasingly rule bound as we grow older.4 Events begin to rhyme. Days begin to repeat. We regurgitate the same overworn sound bites, stick to the same job, talk to the same people, watch the same shows, and maintain the same product lines. It’s a choose-your-own-adventure book that always has the same ending.

Warren Buffett put it, “The five most dangerous words in business are ‘Everybody else is doing it.’” This monkey see, monkey do approach creates a race to the exceedingly crowded center—even though there’s far less competition on the edges. “When you try to improve on existing techniques,” says Astro Teller, the head of X, Google’s moonshot factory, “you’re in a smartness contest with everyone who came before you. Not a good contest to be in.”11

less likely to create combustion instability, which can cause what rocket scientists call a rapid unscheduled disassembly—or what laypeople call an explosion.

first-principles thinking should be deployed where it matters the most. To mop the mist collected on your mental windshield in those areas and expose the invisible rules governing your life, spend a day questioning your assumptions. With each commitment, each presumption, each budget item, 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 Demand current—not historical—supporting evidence. Many of our invisible rules were developed in response to problems that no longer exist (like the cat in the meditation fable). But the immune response remains long after the pathogen leaves.

When we don’t act—when we stick to the illusion of our significance—the risks are far greater. Only by leaving where we are can we get to where we want to go. You have to be “carbonized and mineralized,” Henry Miller writes, “in order to work upwards from the last common denominator of the self.”27 When you risk your significance, you won’t change who you are. You’ll discover it. As the ashes and clutter settle, something beautiful will soar.

The kill-the-company exercise isn’t just for megacorporations or law-school classrooms. You can employ variations of it in your own life by asking questions like the following: • Why might my boss pass me up for a promotion? • Why is this prospective employer justified in not hiring me? • Why are customers making the right decision by buying from our competitors?

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex,” economist E. F. Schumacher said in a quote often misattributed to Einstein. “It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”

climbed to the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, dropped two objects of different weights, and chuckled in delight while calling Aristotle funny names when both objects hit the ground at the same time. Except he didn’t. This entire episode turned out to be a myth manufactured by Galileo’s earliest biographer. Most contemporary historians agree that Galileo instead conducted a thought experiment—not a physical one. He imagined a heavy cannonball and a light musket ball chained together to form a single, combined system to be dropped at the same time.9 If Aristotle were right, the attached system should fall faster than the heavy cannonball alone because the combination weighs more. But it would also mean the light musket ball in the attached system should fall slower than the heavy cannonball. In other words, if Aristotle’s theory is correct, the light musket ball should act as a drag on the combined system, causing it to fall slower than the heavy cannonball alone. Both statements can’t be true: The attached system can’t fall both faster and slower than the heavy cannonball on its own. The thought experiment reveals a contradiction in Aristotle’s theory and obliterates it.

Thought experiments are your very own reality-distortion field, your choose-your-own-adventure game—your purple crayon. The purple crayon was Einstein’s favorite scientific tool, one that he carried with him even as an adult.18 As he wrote to a friend, “You and I never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.”19 Centuries earlier, Isaac Newton purportedly used similar words in describing himself as “a boy playing on the seashore… whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

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). In a 2017 survey, roughly 80 percent of Americans reported that they spent no time whatsoever “relaxing or thinking.”26 During rare moments of tranquility, we feel almost guilty. As notifications scream their hundred-decibel sirens for attention, we feel compelled to take a furtive glance at them so we don’t miss out. Rather than being proactive, we spend most of our days—and our lives—playing defense. We self-soothe with the same distractions that ultimately make us feel worse.

A breakthrough begins with asking a good question, laboring over the answer intensely, and being stuck in idleness for days, weeks, and sometimes years. Research shows that incubation periods—the time you spend feeling stuck—boosts the ability to solve problems.