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

by Ozan Varol

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.