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

by Ozan Varol

Einstein’s secret to success was escaping the intellectual prison that confined other physicists. When he published his paper on special relativity, he was an unknown clerk in a Swiss patent office. As an outsider to the physics establishment, he was able to move beyond the collective body of knowledge—which, in his case, was a Newtonian perspective that treated time and space as absolute. His revolutionary paper on special relativity, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” looks nothing like a typical physics paper. It cites the names of only a handful of scientists and contains virtually no citations to existing works—a highly unconventional move by academic standards.86 In Einstein’s case, creating a revolution meant searching beyond incremental improvement, untethered by citations to works past. Other examples abound. Musk was a latecomer to rocket science, which he picked up by reading textbooks. Bezos came to retail from the finance world, and Hastings was a software developer before he cofounded Netflix. Standing outside the establishment, these gate-crashers were in a better position to see its flaws and recognize its outdated methods.