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

by Ozan Varol

This mindset translates to a six-word mantra: “Reward excellent failures, punish mediocre successes,”

Catmull, the former president of Pixar, talks about the mistakes he has made at new-employee orientations: “We do not want people to assume that because we are successful, everything we do is right,”

Science, as George Bernard Shaw writes, “becomes dangerous only when it imagines that it has reached its goal.”

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.

As Bill Gates says, success is “a lousy teacher” because it “seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.”

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

Surviving your own success can be more difficult than surviving your own failure.

But to Hastings, this proportion was a bad omen. “Our hit ratio is too high right now,” he said, “We should have a higher cancel rate overall.”

The psychologist Gerald Wilde calls this phenomenon risk homeostasis.75 The phrase is fancy, but the idea is simple. Measures intended to decrease risk sometimes backfire. Humans compensate for the reduced risk in one area by increasing risk in another.

In every annual letter to Amazon shareholders, Jeff Bezos includes the same cryptic line: “It remains Day 1.” After repeating this mantra for a few decades, Bezos was asked what Day 2 would look like. He replied, “Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.”