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

by Ozan Varol

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.