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

by Ozan Varol

To think like a rocket scientist is to look at the world through a different lens. 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.

Science, as Carl Sagan put it, is “a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.”

Although we glamorize rocket scientists, there’s an enormous mismatch between what they have figured out and what the rest of the world does. Critical thinking and creativity don’t come naturally to us. We’re hesitant to think big, reluctant to dance with uncertainty, and afraid of failure. These were necessary during the Paleolithic Period, keeping us safe from poisonous foods and predators. But here in the information age, they’re bugs. 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. Without an informed public willing to question confident claims, democracy decays and misinformation spreads. Once alternative facts are reported and retweeted, they become the truth. Pseudoscience becomes indistinguishable from real science.

Just like rockets, this book comes in stages. The first stage—launch—is dedicated to igniting your thinking.

The second stage—accelerate—is focused on propelling the ideas you created in the first stage.

The third and final stage is achieve. You’ll learn why the final ingredients for unlocking your full potential include both success and failure.

By the end of the third stage, instead of letting the world shape your thoughts, you’ll let your thoughts shape the world. And instead of simply thinking outside the box, you’ll be able to bend the box to your will.

I had to learn how to think like a rocket scientist—fast. I spent the first few months listening intently to conversations, reading mountains of documents, and trying to decode the meaning of a whole new set of acronyms. In my spare time, I also worked on the Cassini-Huygens mission, which sent a spacecraft to study Saturn and its surroundings.

Translating elusive concepts to plain language often requires someone on the outside looking in—someone who knows how rocket scientists think, who can dissect their process, but who is sufficiently removed from that world.

Every living thing on Earth bears traces of the big bang. As the Roman poet Lucretius wrote, “We are all sprung from celestial seed.” Every person on Earth is “gravitationally held on the same 12,742-kilometer-wide wet rock hurtling through space,” explains Bill Nye. “There’s no option to go it alone. We are all on this ride together.”

We tend to see ourselves at the center of everything. But from the vantage of outer space, the Earth is “a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.” Reflecting on the deeper meaning of the Pale Blue Dot, Sagan said, “Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner.” Rocket science teaches us about our limited role in the cosmos and reminds us to be gentler and kinder to one another. We’re in this life for a momentary blip, making the briefest of stands. Let’s make that brief stand count. When you learn how to think like a rocket scientist, you won’t just change the way you view the world. You’ll be empowered to change the world itself.

This chapter is about how to 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.

“We spend far more time and effort on trying to control the world,” Yuval Noah Harari writes, “than on trying to understand it.”

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.

Einstein described his own discovery process in similar terms: “Our final results appear almost self-evident,” he said, “but the years of searching in the dark for a truth that one feels, but cannot express; the intense desire and the alternations of confidence and misgiving, until one breaks through to clarity and understanding, are only known to him who has himself experienced them.”

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.

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

“We can’t live in a state of perpetual doubt,” Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman explains, “so we make up the best story possible and we live as if this story were true.”

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.”

“Thoroughly conscious ignorance,” physicist James Maxwell said, “is the prelude to any real advance in knowledge.”

All progress—in rocket science, in movies, in your fill-in-the-blank enterprise—takes place in dark rooms. Yet most of us are afraid of the dark. Panic begins to set in the moment we abandon the comfort of light. We fill the dark rooms with our worst fears and stockpile goods waiting for the apocalypse to arrive. But uncertainty rarely produces a mushroom cloud. Uncertainty leads to joy, discovery, and the fulfillment of your full potential. Uncertainty means doing things no one has done before and discovering things that, for at least a brief moment, no other person has seen. Life offers more of itself when we treat uncertainty as a friend, not a foe. What’s more, most dark rooms come with two-way—not one-way—doors. Many of our excursions into the unknown are reversible. As business magnate Richard Branson writes, “You can walk through, see how it feels, and walk back through to the other side if it isn’t working.”31 You just have to leave the door unlocked.

The search for certainty in a world of uncertainty is a human quest. We all long for absolutes, action and reaction, and neat cause-and-effect relationships where A inexorably leads to B. In our approximations and PowerPoint decks, one variable produces one result, in a straight line. There are no curves or fractions to muddy the waters. But the reality—as is often the case with reality—is far more nuanced.

As T. C. Chamberlin writes, “From the good the child expects nothing but good; from the bad, nothing but bad. To expect a good act from the bad, or a bad act from the good, is radically at variance with childhood’s mental methods.”47 We believe that, as Asimov describes, “everything that isn’t perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong.”48

“Discovery comes not when something goes right,” physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn explains, “but when something is awry, a novelty that runs counter to what was expected.”49 Asimov famously disputed that “Eureka!” is the most exciting phrase in science. Rather, he observed, scientific development often begins by someone noticing an anomaly and saying, “That’s funny…”50 The discovery of quantum mechanics, X-rays, DNA, oxygen, penicillin, and others, all occurred when the scientists embraced, rather than disregarded, anomalies.51

Like planets, science wanders. Upheaval precedes progress, and progress generates more upheaval. “People wish to be settled,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, but “only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.”63 Those who cling to the past get left behind as the world marches forward.

In pop culture, astronauts like Lovell and Glenn are depicted as a bunch of risk-taking, swaggering hotshots with the guts to breezily sit on top of a dangerous rocket. It makes for good drama, but it misleads. Astronauts maintain their calm not because they have superhuman nerves. It’s because they have mastered the art of using knowledge to reduce uncertainty. As astronaut Chris Hadfield explains, “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

“Fear comes from not knowing what to expect and not feeling you have any control over what’s about to happen,” writes Hadfield. “When you feel helpless, you’re far more afraid than you would be if you knew the facts. If you’re not sure what to be alarmed about, everything is alarming.” Determining what to be alarmed about requires following the timeless wisdom of Yoda: “Named must your fear be before banish it you can.”72 The naming, I’ve found, must be done in writing—with paper and pencil (or pen, if you’re into technology). Ask yourself, What’s the worst-case scenario? And how likely is that scenario, given what I know? Writing down your concerns and uncertainties—what you know and what you don’t know—undresses them. Once you lift up the curtain and turn the unknown unknowns into known unknowns, you defang them. After you see your fears with their masks off, you’ll find that the feeling of uncertainty is often far worse than what you fear. You’ll also realize that in all likelihood, the things that matter most to you will still be there, no matter what happens. And don’t forget the upside. In addition to considering the worst-case scenario, also ask yourself, What’s the best that can happen? Our negative thoughts resonate far more than our positive ones do. The brain, to paraphrase psychologist Rick Hanson, is like Velcro for the negative but Teflon for the positive. Unless you consider the best-case scenario along with the worst, your brain will steer you toward the se...

Think about it: Where are the redundancies in your own life? Where’s the emergency brake or the spare tire in your company? How will you deal with the loss of a valuable team member, a critical distributor, or an important client? What will you do if your household loses a source of income? The system must be designed to continue operating even if a component fails.

In addition to including redundancies, rocket scientists address uncertainty by building in margins of safety.

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

The path, as the mystic poet Rumi writes, won’t appear until you start walking. William Herschel started walking, grinding mirrors, and reading astronomy-for-dummies books even though he had no idea he would discover Uranus. Andrew Wiles started walking when he picked up a book on Fermat’s last theorem as a teenager, not knowing where his curiosity might lead. Steve Squyres started walking in search of his blank canvas, even though he had no idea it would one day lead him to Mars. The secret is to start walking before you see a clear path.

Before I explain how first-principles thinking works, we’ll begin by exploring two obstacles to it. You’ll learn why knowledge can be a vice, rather than a virtue, and how a road engineer in the Roman Empire ended up determining the width of NASA’s space shuttle. You’ll discover the invisible rules that are holding you back and learn how to get rid of them. I’ll explain how a pharmaceutical giant and the US military use the same strategy to fend off threats and why killing your business might be the best way to save it. We’ll explore why subtracting, rather than adding, is the key to innovation and how a mental model can help simplify your life. You’ll walk away from the chapter with practical strategies for putting first-principles thinking to work in your own life.

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. Here’s an example. The width of the engines that powered the space shuttle—one of the most complex machines humankind has ever created—was determined over two thousand years ago by a Roman road engineer.3 Yes, you read that correctly. The engines were 4 feet 8.5 inches wide because that was the width of the rail line that would carry them from Utah to Florida. The width of that rail line, in turn, was based on the width of tramlines in England. The width of the tramlines, in turn, was based on the width of the roads built by the Romans: 4 feet 8.5 inches.

Vested interests also reinforce the status quo. High-level executives at Fortune 500 companies shun innovation because their compensation is tied to short-term quarterly outcomes that may be temporarily disrupted by forging a new path. “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something,” Upton Sinclair said, “when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

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.

We’re genetically programmed to follow the herd. Thousands of years ago, conformity to our tribe was essential to our survival. If we didn’t conform, we would be ostracized, rejected, or, worse, left for dead.

Resisting this hardwiring for conformity causes us emotional distress—literally. A neurological study showed that nonconformity activates the amygdala and produces what the authors describe as “a pain of independence.”10 To avoid this pain, we pay lip service to being original, but we become the by-products of other people’s behaviors. It’s like that Chinese proverb: One dog barks at something, and a hundred others bark at that sound.

The same path that led to glory for one person can cause catastrophe for another. Conversely, the same path that led to catastrophe for one person can yield glory for another. Friendster and Myspace both fizzled out, yet Facebook’s market capitalization was over half a trillion dollars by mid-2019.

As 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.

The credit for first-principles thinking goes to Aristotle, who defined it as “the first basis from which a thing is known.”12 The French philosopher and scientist René Descartes described it as systematically doubting everything you can possibly doubt, until you’re left with unquestionable truths.13 Instead of regarding the status quo as an absolute, you take a machete to it. Instead of letting your original vision—or the visions of others—shape the path forward, you abandon all allegiances to them. You hack through existing assumptions as if you’re hacking through a jungle until you’re left with the fundamental components. Everything else is negotiable. First-principles thinking allows you to see the seemingly obvious insight that’s hiding under everyone’s nose. “Talent hits a target no one else can hit,” philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said, but “genius hits a target no one else can see.” When you apply first-principles thinking, you switch from being a cover band that plays someone else’s songs to an artist that does the painstaking work of creating something new. You go from what author James Carse calls a finite player, someone playing within boundaries, to an infinite player, someone playing with boundaries.

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

Author Elizabeth Gilbert tells the fable of a great saint who would lead his followers in meditation.20 Just as the followers were dropping into their zen moment, they would be disrupted by a cat that would “walk through the temple meowing and purring and bothering everyone.” The saint came up with a simple solution: He began to tie the cat to a pole during meditation sessions. This solution quickly developed into a ritual: Tie the cat to the pole first, meditate second. When the cat eventually died (of natural causes), a religious crisis ensued. What were the followers supposed to do? How could they possibly meditate without tying the cat to the pole? This story illustrates what I call invisible rules. These are habits and behaviors that have unnecessarily rigidified into rules. They’re unlike written rules, which are visible. The written rules appear right there in the standard operating procedures and can be amended or deleted. Although written rules, as we saw above, can be resistant to change, invisible rules are even more stubborn. They’re the silent killers that constrain our thinking without our being aware of it. They turn us into a rat trapped in a Skinner box, pressing the same lever over and over again—except the box was designed by us and we’re free to venture out anytime. We’re perfectly capable of meditating without the cat, but we don’t realize it.

When we look at the mirror, we tell ourselves a story. It’s a story about who we are and who we aren’t and what we should and shouldn’t do.

You have to be “carbonized and mineralized,” Henry Miller writes, “in order to work upwards from the last common denominator of the self.”27

Foodies dubbed the new restaurant Alinea 2.0. But Kokonas and Achatz just call it Alinea. The restaurant may have been destroyed and rebuilt, but its core identity—and the founders’ underlying commitment to first-principles thinking—remained unchanged. This is an important point: Destruction, by itself, isn’t enough if it’s not accompanied by a commitment to the right thought process. “If a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory,” Robert Pirsig explains in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. “If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves.”30 Unless you change the underlying patterns of thought, you can expect more of the same—regardless of how many times you hold a sledgehammer party. Changing the underlying patterns of thought requires hiring the right people.

If you’re trying to transform an industry, it makes sense to look outside the industry for talent. That’s where you’ll find people who aren’t blinded by the invisible rules—the white tablecloths—that constrain their thinking. In its early days, SpaceX would often hire people from the automotive and cell-phone industries. These are fields where technologies change rapidly, requiring quick learning and adaptation—the hallmark of first-principles thinkers.

This is called the kill-the-company exercise. As Lisa Bodell, the mastermind behind the exercise, explains, “To create the company of tomorrow, you must break down the bad habits, silos, and inhibitors that exist today.”33 These habits are difficult to break down because we often adopt the same internal perspective. It’s like trying to “psychoanalyze yourself,” Bodell says. We’re too close to our own problems and weaknesses to evaluate them objectively. The kill-the-company exercise forces you to switch perspectives and play the role of an antagonist who doesn’t care about your rules, habits, and processes. The participants must employ first-principles thinking, use new neural pathways, and come up with original ideas that move beyond mere platitudes. It’s one thing to say “let’s think outside the box.” It’s another to actually step outside the box and examine your company or product from the viewpoint of a competitor seeking to destroy it. By viewing our weaknesses through this out-of-company experience, we realize we may be standing on a burning platform. The urgency of change becomes clear. The US military also uses a version of the kill-the-company exercise in war-gaming. It’s called red teaming, a term that’s a relic of the Cold War. In simulations, the red team plays the role of the enemy and finds ways to scuttle the blue team’s mission. Red teams expose the flaws in planning and execution so that the problems can be fixed before the mission begins. As Major Patrick...

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? Avoid answering these questions as you would that dreadful interview prompt, “Tell me about your weaknesses,” which tends to induce humblebragging (“I work too hard”). Instead, really get into the shoes of the people who might reject your promotion, refuse to hire you, or buy from your competitors. Ask yourself, Why are they making that choice? It’s not because they’re stupid. It’s not because they’re wrong and you’re right. It’s because they see something that you’re missing. It’s because they believe something you don’t believe. And you can’t change that worldview or that belief by calling the same plays from the same old playbook. Once you’ve got a good answer to these questions, switch perspectives and find ways to defend against these potential threats.

As Einstein said, everything should be made “as simple and as few as possible.”36 This principle is known as Occam’s razor. The name, I admit, is unfortunate. It sounds like a cheap late-night horror flick, but it’s actually a mental model named after William of Ockham, a fourteenth-century philosopher. The model is often stated as a rule: The simplest solution to a problem is the correct one. This popular description happens to be wrong. Occam’s razor is a guiding principle—not a hard-and-fast rule. Nor is it a preference for the simple at all costs. Rather, it’s a preference for the simple, all other things being equal. Carl Sagan put it well: “When faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well,” you should “choose the simpler.”37 In other words, “when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not unicorns.”