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

by Ozan Varol

At its core, a rocket launch is the controlled explosion of a small nuclear bomb—controlled being the operative word. A rocket burns with unbelievable fury. One wrong step, one miscalculation, and you can expect the worst. “There are a thousand things that can happen when you go to light a rocket engine,” explains SpaceX propulsion chief Tom Mueller, “and only one of them is good.”

“We spend far more time and effort on trying to control the world,” Yuval Noah Harari writes, “than on trying to understand it.”11 We look for the step-by-step formula, the shortcut, the hack—the right bag of peanuts. Over time, we lose our ability to interact with the unknown.

If you stick to the familiar, you won’t find the unexpected. Those who get ahead in this century will dance with the great unknown and find danger, rather than comfort, in the status quo.

Einstein described his own discovery process in similar terms: “Our final results appear almost self-evident,” he said, “but the years of searching in the dark for a truth that one feels, but cannot express; the intense desire and the alternations of confidence and misgiving, until one breaks through to clarity and understanding, are only known to him who has himself experienced them.”

Our ability to make the most out of uncertainty is what creates the most potential value. We should be fueled not by a desire for a quick catharsis but by intrigue. Where certainty ends, progress begins.

“The great obstacle to discovering,” historian Daniel J. Boorstin writes, “was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.”

“I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing,” he remarked, “than to have answers which might be wrong.”

The uncertainty of quantum mechanics particularly bothered Einstein. As science writer Jim Baggott explains, “Physics before the quantum had always been about doing this and getting that,” but “the new quantum mechanics appeared to say that when we do this, we get that only with a certain probability” (even then, in some circumstances, “we might get the other”).

But as a Chinese proverb goes, many a false step was made by standing still.

The path, as the mystic poet Rumi writes, won’t appear until you start walking.

“When you try to improve on existing techniques,” says Astro Teller, the head of X, Google’s moonshot factory, “you’re in a smartness contest with everyone who came before you. Not a good contest to be in.”

The credit for first-principles thinking goes to Aristotle, who defined it as “the first basis from which a thing is known.”12 The French philosopher and scientist René Descartes described it as systematically doubting everything you can possibly doubt, until you’re left with unquestionable truths.

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?

“Your assumptions are your windows on the world,” said Alan Alda, in a quote often misattributed to Asimov. “Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.”

Getting fired unshackled Jobs from his own history and forced him to return to first principles. “The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life,”

Occam’s razor is a guiding principle—not a hard-and-fast rule. Nor is it a preference for the simple at all costs. Rather, it’s a preference for the simple, all other things being equal. Carl Sagan put it well: “When faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well,” you should “choose the simpler.”37 In other words, “when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not unicorns.”

“The more we understand something,” Peter Attia explained to me, “the less complicated it becomes.

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex,” economist E. F. Schumacher said in a quote often misattributed to Einstein. “It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”

Don’t confuse a simple solution, as H. L. Mencken cautioned, with one that is “neat, plausible, and wrong.”55 Even as you seek to simplify, remain open to new facts that complicate matters.

They require us, as philosopher Kendall Walton explains, to “imagine specific fictional worlds, as kinds of situational setups that when you run, perform, or simply imagine them, lead to specific results.”3 Through thought experiments, we transcend everyday thinking and evolve from passive observers to active interveners in our reality.

George Bernard Shaw once said, “Few people think more than two or three times a year. I’ve made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.”15

Minds are far more malleable than we assume. If we pretend that life is one long kindergarten, our minds just might follow.

“We are drowning in information,” biologist E. O. Wilson said, “while starving for wisdom.”

Specialization is all the rage these days. In the English-speaking world, a generalist is a Jack or Jill of all trades, but the master of none. The Greeks caution that a person “who knows a lot of crafts lives in an empty house.”55 The Koreans believe a person of “12 talents has nothing to eat for dinner.”56

The best-performing group was the third. “Intermittent breaks in interaction improve collective intelligence,” the researchers observed.79 Cycling between isolation and interaction improved the average score of the group while also leading the group to find the best solutions more frequently. Importantly, both low performers and high performers in the group benefited from intermittent interaction. These results suggest that learning flowed in both directions, with one person’s conclusions becoming input for the others.

In Zen Buddhism, this principle is known as shoshin, or beginner’s mind.87 As the Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki writes, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.”

If your goal is 1 percent improvement, you can work within the status quo. But if your goal is to improve tenfold, the status quo has to go.

At the initial stages of idea formation, “the pure rationalist has no place,” as the physicist Max Planck put it.

Discovery, as Einstein also explained, “is not a work for logical thought, even if the final product is bound in logical form.”

Michio Kaku, the cofounder of string theory, would agree. “What we usually consider impossible are nothing but engineering problems,” he says. “There’s no law of physics preventing them.”

In the end, all moonshots are impossible. Until you decide to go.

When we’re familiar with a problem, and when we think we have the right answer, we stop seeing alternatives. This tendency is known as the Einstellung effect.

“Every answer,” Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen says, “has a question that retrieves it.”

But tools, as author Neil Gaiman reminds us, “can be the subtlest of traps.”

THE NEXT TIME you’re tempted to engage in problem solving, try problem finding instead. Ask yourself, Am I asking the right question? If I changed my perspective, how would the problem change? How can I frame the question in terms of strategy, instead of tactics? How do I flip the thumbtack box and view this resource in terms of its form, not its function? What if we did the reverse? Breakthroughs, contrary to popular wisdom, don’t begin with a smart answer. They begin with a smart question.

Facts, as John Adams put it, are stubborn things, but our minds are even more stubborn.

The problem was diagnosed by Francis Bacon nearly four centuries ago: “It is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human understanding to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than negatives.”

Ideally, the hypotheses you spin should conflict with each other. “The test of a first-rate intelligence,” F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

What we don’t see can be scarier than what we do see.

Falsification is what separates science from pseudoscience. When we keep opposing arguments at bay through unfalsifiable arguments and disable others from challenging our beliefs, misinformation thrives.

When Harlan’s critics accused him of flip-flopping, his answer was simple: I’d rather be right than consistent.

“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.”

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.”

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 more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war.”

“Experiments are by their very nature prone to failure,” Jeff Bezos explained. “But a few big successes compensate for dozens and dozens of things that didn’t work.”

Thomas Edison recounted the story of a conversation with an associate who lamented that after thousands of experiments, he and Edison had failed to discover anything. “I cheerily assured him that we had learned something,” Edison recalled. “For we had learned for a certainty that the thing couldn’t be done that way, and that we would have to try some other way.”

As Malcolm Forbes, the founder of Forbes magazine, put it, “Failure is success if we learn from it.”

“There are two parts to failure,” Pixar’s former president Ed Catmull writes. “There is the event itself, with all its attendant disappointment, confusion, and shame, and then there is our reaction to it.” We don’t control the first part, but we do control the second. The goal, as Catmull puts it, should be “to uncouple fear and failure—to create an environment in which making mistakes doesn’t strike terror into your employees’ hearts.”

Psychological safety means, in Edmondson’s words, “no one will be punished or humiliated for errors, questions, or requests for help, in the service of reaching ambitious performance goals.”