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

by Ozan Varol

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.