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

by Ozan Varol

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.