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

by Ozan Varol

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. —SHERLOCK HOLMES

In the last chapter, we explored how to refine and reframe the ideas you generated in the first part of the book (“Launch”) by asking better questions and finding better problems. In this chapter, we’ll take those refined ideas and learn how to stress-test them. I’ll reveal the rocket scientist’s tool kit for spotting flaws in your decision making, rooting out misinformation, and detecting errors before they snowball into catastrophe. You’ll learn the test of a first-rate intelligence and the one question that will make you a better problem solver. I’ll explain why a simple change in vocabulary can make your mind more flexible and what you can learn from a basic puzzle that 80 percent of people fail to solve. We’ll explore the benefits of switching our default from convincing others that we’re right to convincing ourselves that we’re wrong.

The mind doesn’t follow the facts. Facts, as John Adams put it, are stubborn things, but our minds are even more stubborn. Doubt isn’t always resolved in the face of facts for even the most enlightened among us, however credible and convincing those facts might be. The same brains that empower rational thinking also skew our judgments and introduce subjective contortions. Our tendency toward skewed judgment partly results from the confirmation bias. We undervalue evidence that contradicts our beliefs and overvalue evidence that confirms them. “It [is] a puzzling thing,” Robert Pirsig writes. “The truth knocks on the door and you say, ‘Go away, I’m looking for the truth,’ and so it goes away.”

No one comes equipped with a critical-thinking chip that diminishes the human tendency to let personal beliefs distort the facts. Regardless of your intelligence, Feynman’s adage holds true: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”

When your beliefs and your identity are one and the same, changing your mind means changing your identity—which is why disagreements often turn into existential death matches. As a result, at the outset of their investigation, scientists refrain from stating opinions. Instead, they form what’s called a working hypothesis. The operative word is working. Working means it’s a work in progress. Working means it’s less than final. Working means the hypothesis can be changed or abandoned, depending on the facts. Opinions are defended, but working hypotheses are tested. The test is performed, as geologist and educator T. C. Chamberlin explains, “not for the sake of the hypothesis, but for the sake of facts.”14 Some hypotheses mature into theories, but many others don’t.

Whenever someone challenged one of my opinions during an academic presentation, I’d get defensive. My heart rate would skyrocket, I would tense up, and my answer would reflect the annoyance with which I viewed the question and the questioner. I then went back to my scientific training and began to reframe my opinions as working hypotheses. I changed my vocabulary to reflect this mental shift. At conferences, instead of saying “I argue…,” I began to say “This paper hypothesizes.…” In my case, this subtle verbal tweak tricked my mind into separating my arguments from my personal identity. Obviously, I was the one who came up with the ideas, but once they were out of my body, they took on a life of their own. They became separate, abstract things I could view with some objectivity. It was no longer personal. It was a working hypothesis that simply needed more work.

As author Robertson Davies put it, “The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”

From a human perspective, not all facts are equal. We tend to incessantly focus on the facts in front of us and neglect other facts that may be hidden in a blind spot. This blind spot results, in part, from our genetic programming. As psychologist Robert Cialdini explains, “It is easier to register the presence of something than its absence.”30 We’re wired to respond to the obvious signs: the rattling in the dark, the smell of gas, the sight of smoke, the screeching of tires. Our pupils dilate, our heart starts pumping faster, and adrenaline is released. Our minds zero in on the potential threat, filtering all other sensory inputs. These mechanisms are essential to our survival, but they also supersede other operations and cause us to miss crucial pieces of data.

The numbers game, as you may have guessed, is a microcosm for life. Our instinct in our personal and professional lives is to prove ourselves right. Every yes makes us feel good. Every yes makes us stick to what we think we know. Every yes gets us a gold star and a hit of dopamine. But every no brings us one step closer to the truth. Every no provides far more information than a yes does. Progress occurs only when we generate negative outcomes by trying to rebut rather than confirm our initial hunch. The point of proving yourself wrong isn’t to feel good. The point is to make sure your spacecraft doesn’t crash, your business doesn’t fall apart, or your health doesn’t break down. Each time we validate what we think we know, we narrow our vision and ignore alternative possibilities—in the same way each nod of approval from the experimenter led participants to fixate on the wrong hypothesis.

A scientific theory is never proven right. It’s simply not proven wrong. Only when scientists work hard—but fail—to beat the crap out of their own ideas can they begin to develop confidence in those ideas. Even after a theory gains acceptance, new facts often emerge, requiring the refinement or complete abandonment of the status quo. “Nothing in the physical world seems to be constant or permanent,” physicist Alan Lightman writes. “Stars burn out. Atoms disintegrate. Species evolve. Motion is relative.”37 The same is true for facts. Most facts have a half-life. What we’re advised with confidence this year is reversed the next.

“One mark of a great mind,” Walter Isaacson said, “is the willingness to change it.”48 When the world around you changes—when the tech bubble bursts or self-driving cars become the norm—the ability to change with the world confers an extraordinary advantage. “The successful executive is faster to recognize the bad decisions and adjust,” explains Walt Bettinger, the CEO of Charles Schwab, “whereas failing executives often dig in and try to convince people that they were right.”

“One thing a person cannot do, no matter how rigorous his analysis or heroic his imagination,” Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling once observed, “is to draw up a list of things that would never occur to him.”

In one of my favorite commencement speeches of all time, David Foster Wallace tells the story of two young fish. The fish are swimming along, “and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, ‘Morning, boys, how’s the water?’” The two young fish swim on, “and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?’”

In constructing a model of how an adversary thinks, you must be as objective and fair as possible. Avoid the instinct to caricature the opposing position, making it easier to debunk—a tactic called the straw man. For example, a political candidate advocates increased regulation on greenhouses gases from cars. Another candidate responds that cars are essential for people to get to work and that the proposal will destroy the economy. The argument is a straw man because the proposal calls for increased regulation—not elimination of cars—but it’s far simpler to rebut the more extreme version of the idea. Instead of using a straw man tactic, engage in its opposite, the steel man. This approach requires you to find and articulate the strongest, not the weakest, form of the opposition’s argument. Charlie Munger, vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, is a major proponent of this idea. “You’re not entitled to take a view,” he cautions, “unless and until you can argue better against that view than the smartest guy who holds that opposite view.”61

Rockets and websites are different beasts, but they have at least one thing in common. They’ll crash unless you follow a cardinal rocket-science principle called test as you fly, fly as you test.

In a well-designed test, outcomes can’t be predetermined. You must be willing to fail. The test must run forward to shed light on uncertainty, rather than run backward to confirm preconceptions. Feynman said it best: “If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is—if it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong.”

The best way to determine an object’s breaking point is to break it. Rocket scientists try to break the spacecraft on Earth—to reveal all its flaws—before the faults reveal themselves in space. This objective requires exposing every component, down to the screws, to the same type of shocks, vibrations, and extreme temperatures awaiting them in space. Scientists and engineers must think through all the ways that they can trick these components and lines of computer code into committing fatal errors.

In our daily lives, we are miscalibrated far more often than we assume. We need a calibration target, preferably multiple trusted advisers, who can warn us when our reading of the events is off—when we’re looking at a green block but seeing red. Pick your calibration targets carefully, and make sure you can trust their judgment. If their judgment is off, yours will be too.

Testing as you fly requires a multilayered approach. Rocket scientists begin testing with the subcomponents—for example, the individual cameras that will form a rover’s vision system, as well as the cables and connectors. Once the cameras are fully assembled, the vision system is tested again as a whole. The reason for this approach is well summarized by a Sufi teaching: “You think that because you understand ‘one’ that you must therefore understand ‘two’ because one and one make two. But you forget that you must also understand ‘and.’”10 Components that otherwise function properly may refuse to play nice with each other after assembly. Put another way, systems may produce different effects than do the individual components standing alone. These system-level effects can be disastrous. A medication may deliver terrific results on its own but prove lethal when it interacts with other drugs. Plug-ins on your website may work well in isolation but cause catastrophe as a system. Individually talented athletes may function horribly when assembled as a team. We can call this problem Frankenstein’s monster. Its limbs come from human bodies. But once the pieces are stitched together, the result is unhuman.

Consider the case of another monster’s awakening. When Adolf Hitler came to power, the German constitution was one of the “most sophisticated” of its day.11 It contained two seemingly harmless provisions. One provision allowed the German president to declare a state of emergency—a declaration that the parliament could cancel by a simple majority vote. The other allowed the president to dissolve the parliament and call for new elections. German parliaments had a habit of fragmenting and deadlocking, so this second provision was intended to check against that problem. Although they seemed benevolent when viewed in isolation, these two provisions turned malevolent in combination, producing what constitutional law scholar Kim Lane Scheppele calls a “Frankenstate.” In the early 1930s, President Paul von Hindenburg invoked his constitutional power to dissolve a hopelessly deadlocked parliament. Before elections were held to elect a new parliament, Hindenburg issued a state of emergency at the urging of Chancellor Hitler. The declaration suspended almost all civil liberties in Germany. Although the parliament had the constitutional power to override the emergency decree, there was no legislature in place to invoke that power.12 Schutzstaffel (SS) and Sturmabteilung (SA) agents immediately began a widespread cleansing of all opponents of the Nazi cause. Using the state of emergency as a pretext, the Nazis began to consolidate control and establish a one-party dictatorship with Hit...

In many ways, these simulations are tougher than the actual flight. They follow the old adage “The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war.” When Neil Armstrong first began walking on the lunar surface, he noted how the actual experience was “perhaps easier than the simulations at one-sixth g,” referring to the reduced gravity on the Moon.28 Sweating the small stuff on Earth ensured that the same stuff didn’t make Armstrong bleed in space.

For example, the TV show Seinfeld performed abysmally before test audiences.47 When creating the show’s premise, the producers asked a question we encountered in an earlier chapter: “What if we did the opposite of what everyone else is doing?” At the time, the sitcom playbook was set in stone. A group of characters would run into problems, resolve those problems, learn something from the experience, and hug each other. From the get-go, Seinfeld producers were clear on their mission. They would flip the script. There would be no hugging. There would be no learning. The characters on Seinfeld would draw laughs from constantly repeating their mistakes and overlooking their own faults. In case there was any confusion, the writers wore jackets that said No Hugging, No Learning. But test audiences, accustomed to the standard sitcom playbook, were expecting lots of hugging and learning. As a result, Seinfeld was a spectacular failure in focus groups. Yet the show went on to become one of the most popular sitcoms of all time.

Treat your testing instruments like your investments and diversify them. If you’re building a website, test it using different browsers and different computers. If you’re designing a children’s toothbrush, watch many children brush their teeth—lest you get the one miracle child who uses a toothbrush like an adult. If you’re deciding which job offer to take, consult multiple calibration targets. One person’s opinion might provide only a fuzzy perspective. It’s only through independent validation and multiple testing sources that you get closer to twenty-twenty vision.

In this chapter, I’ll use a rocket-science framework to explain why it’s as dangerous to celebrate failure as it is to demonize it. Rocket scientists apply a more balanced approach to failure. They don’t celebrate it; nor do they let it get in their way.

Unlike the high of success, which quickly dissipates, the sting of failure lingers—sometimes for a lifetime. To ward off the bogeyman of failure, we keep a safe distance from it. We stay off the edges, avoid healthy risks, and play it safe. If we aren’t guaranteed to win, we assume the game isn’t worth playing. This natural tendency to avoid failure is a recipe for failing. Behind every rocket unlaunched, every canvas unpainted, every goal unattempted, every book unwritten, and every song unsung is the looming fear of failure. Thinking like a rocket scientist requires redefining our troubled relationship with failure.

A moratorium on failure is a moratorium on progress.

“When it comes to idea generation,” Adam Grant writes in Originals, “quantity is the most predictable path to quality.”

The fail-fast mantra has no place in rocket science. When each failure is horrifically expensive—in terms of both money and human lives—we can’t rush to the launch pad with a crappy rocket and fail as fast as possible. Even outside rocket science, the fail-fast refrain is misguided. When entrepreneurs are too busy failing fast and celebrating it, they stop learning from their mistakes. The clinking of champagne glasses mutes the feedback they might otherwise receive from failure. Failing fast, in other words, doesn’t magically produce success. When we fail, we’re often none the wiser.

When we fail, we often conceal it, distort it, or deny it. We make the facts fit our self-serving theory rather than adjust the theory to fit the facts. We attribute our failure to factors beyond our control. In our own failures, we overestimate the role of bad luck (“Better luck next time”). We blame the failure on someone else (“She got the job because the boss likes her more”). We come up with a few superficial reasons for why things went south (“If only we had more cash reserves”). But personal culpability seldom makes the list.

If we don’t acknowledge we failed—if we avoid a true reckoning—we can’t learn anything. In fact, failure can make things worse if we get the wrong messages from it.

We should be celebrating the lessons from failure—not failure itself.

There are two responses to negative feedback from a credible source: Deny it or accept it. Every great scientist chooses the latter, and Squyres did the same. Each proposal he submitted to NASA was better than the one that came before it.

These failures are what business school professor Sim Sitkin calls “intelligent failures.” They happen when you’re exploring the edges, solving problems that haven’t been solved, and building things that may not work. We often speak of intelligent failures as losses. “I lost five years of my life.” “We lost millions of dollars.” But these are losses only if you call them that. You can also frame them as investments. Failure is data—and it’s often data you can’t find in a self-help book. Intelligent failures, if you pay them proper attention, can be the best teachers. These errors can have staying power that lessons from success often lack. Intelligent failures can produce a sense of urgency for change and produce the shock necessary to unlearn what we know. “Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections,” Vilfredo Pareto wrote, “You can keep your sterile truth for yourself.”

Learning can also take the stigma out of failure. “The best thing for being sad,” the author T. H. White wrote, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then—to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it.”

Breakthroughs are often evolutionary, not revolutionary. Take a look at any scientific discovery, and you’ll find there is no magical it. No single aha moment. Science weaves from failure to failure, with each version better than the one that came before. From a scientific perspective, failure isn’t a roadblock. It’s a portal to progress. We embodied this mindset as children. When we learned how to walk, we didn’t get it right on the first try. No one told us, “You’d better think hard about how you take that very first step because you get one step and that’s it.” We repeatedly fell. With each fall, our bodies learned what to do and what not to do. By learning not to fall, we learned how to walk.

In the movie version of the terrific book The Martian, Damon’s character, Mark Watney, teaches astronauts-in-training what to do in case of impending doom. “At some point, everything’s gonna go south on you and you’re going to say, ‘This is it. This is how I end,’” Watney says. You can either accept that as a failure—or you can get to work. “You do the math. You solve one problem. And you solve the next one. And then the next. If you solve enough problems, you get to come home.” If you solve enough problems, you get to land your rovers on Mars. If you solve enough problems, you get to build the Roman Empire. If you solve enough problems, you get to land on the Moon. That’s how you change the world. One problem at a time. Changing the world one problem at a time requires delaying gratification.

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.

The goal, then, is to focus on the variables you can control—the inputs—instead of the outputs.

By taking the pressure off the outcome, you get better at your craft. Success becomes a consequence, not the goal.

Failure, as we’ve seen, is the portal to discovery, innovation, and long-term success. But most organizations suffer from collective amnesia over their failures. Mistakes remain concealed because employees are too afraid to share them. Most companies tell their employees, explicitly or implicitly, that if you succeed—according to short-term, quantifiable metrics like profits—you get a big pot of money, a better office, and a better title. If you fail, you get nothing. Or worse, you get shown the door. This incentive scheme only exacerbates the deeply ingrained inertia against owning up to our failures. When we reward success and punish failure, employees will underreport failures, overreport successes, and reframe anything that falls in between in the best possible light. When we shoot the messengers, people stop delivering messages—particularly if they work for us. In one study, 42 percent of surveyed scientists across nine federal agencies (including NASA) feared retaliation for speaking out.52 Of more than forty thousand employees surveyed at a tech company, 50 percent believed it wasn’t safe to speak up at work.

If management had viewed the lander as part of a comprehensive whole—one probe among many interplanetary probes—then a communications device crucial for long-term learning should have been included.

If these individuals now appear more endearing to you, you’re experiencing what researchers call the “beautiful mess effect.”75 Exposing your vulnerability can make you more desirable in the eyes of others. But there’s one caveat. You must establish your competence before revealing your failures. Otherwise, you risk damaging your credibility and coming across as a mess—and not a beautiful one.

I’ll explain why it can be just as dangerous to celebrate success as it is to celebrate failure, and I’ll reveal why a postmortem should follow both triumph and defeat. We’ll explore why success is the wolf in sheep’s clothing and how it conceals small failures that can snowball into the biggest disasters.

Success is the wolf in sheep’s clothing. It drives a wedge between appearance and reality. When we succeed, we believe everything went according to plan. We ignore the warning signs and the necessity for change. With each success, we grow more confident and up the ante. But just because you’re on a hot streak doesn’t mean you’ll beat the house.

“Whom the Gods wish to destroy,” wrote literary critic Cyril Connolly, “they first call promising.”

Luck, as E. B. White put it, “is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men.”

Surviving your own success can be more difficult than surviving your own failure. We must treat success like a seemingly friendly group of Greeks bearing a big, beautiful gift called a Trojan horse. We must take measures to maintain humility before the Greeks arrive. We must treat our work—and ourselves—as permanent works in progress.

The moment we pretend an activity is routine is the moment we let our guard down and rest on our laurels. The remedy is to drop the word routine from our vocabulary and treat all our projects—particularly the successful ones—as permanent works in progress. NASA didn’t lose a single crew member in space during the Apollo, Mercury, and Gemini missions, when human spaceflight was viewed as a risky work in progress. The only fatalities during those early years occurred during a launch rehearsal test on the ground, when the Apollo 1 spacecraft caught fire. It was only after human spaceflight was viewed as routine that we lost a NASA crew during flight. “We’ve grown used to the idea of space,” President Reagan said after the Challenger disaster, “and perhaps we forget that we’ve only just begun.”29

“Human beings,” social psychologist Daniel Gilbert explains, “are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.”30 The five-time world track-and-field champion Maurice Greene didn’t make that mistake and saw himself as a permanent work in progress. Even if you’re a world champion, Greene would caution, you must train like you’re number two.31 When you’re ranked second—or at least you pretend you are—you’re less likely to grow complacent. You’ll rehearse that speech until you know it cold, overprepare for that job interview, and work harder than your competitors.

The modern world doesn’t call for finished products. It calls for works in progress, where perpetual improvement wins the game.