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

by Ozan Varol

Think back on the failures you’ve had in your life. If you’re like most people, you’ll picture the bad outcomes—the business that never took off, the penalty kick you missed, or the job interview you bombed. Poker players, as Annie Duke explains in Thinking in Bets, refer to this tendency to “equate the quality of a decision with the quality of its outcome” as “resulting.”41 But as Duke argues, the quality of an input isn’t the same as the quality of the output. Focusing on outputs leads us astray because good decisions can lead to bad outcomes. In conditions of uncertainty, outcomes aren’t completely within your control. An unforeseeable dust storm can cripple a perfectly designed Martian spacecraft. A bad wind can misdirect a perfectly shot soccer ball. A hostile judge or jury can derail a great case. If we engage in resulting, we reward bad decisions that lead to good outcomes. Conversely, we change good decisions merely because they produced a bad outcome. We start shaking things up, reorganizing departments, or firing or demoting people. As one study shows, National Football League (NFL) coaches change their lineup after a one-point loss, but don’t change it after a one-point win—even though these minor score differences are often poor indicators of player performance.42 Most of us act like American football coaches, treating success and failure as binary outcomes. But we don’t live in a binary world. The line between success and failure is often razor thin.