Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies for Giant Leaps in Work and Life

by Ozan Varol

We don’t rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training. —unknown

The test rover was lovingly named FIDO, short for Field Integrated Design and Operations.

The closest you can come to Mars on Earth is Sandusky, Ohio. The small city boasts NASA’s Space Power Facility, the world’s largest vacuum chamber. It can simulate the conditions of space travel, including high vacuums, low pressures, and extreme temperature variations.

Instead of dismissing Black Rock as an outlier—the type of rock we would be unlikely to bump up against on Mars—the EDL team members did the opposite.

They isolated the problem and then exaggerated it. They made replicas of Black Rock, scattered them across the chamber, and started flinging the airbags against them. Although the same airbags had successfully landed the Pathfinder on the Martian surface back in 1997, the success didn’t mean the airbag design was flawless.

The EDL team compared apples and oranges, copying this design for our airbags and designing a double bladder for double protection. Even if the outer bladder failed, the airbag (and therefore the lander) would survive. The new design was tested and retested until the airbags survived the punishment.

“The more catastrophic the better, until repetition began to groove instinct into all the participants, and dying helped the men learn to survive.”

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.

“He was able to take complicated points, distill them to their essence and respond with an absolute minimum of verbiage, and make it seem that his argument is so obviously correct that you have no choice but to agree with him.”

The World’s Toughest Mudder makes a marathon look like a casual stroll. The race is run for twenty-four hours nonstop. Participants must fight off sleep while conquering roughly twenty of the “biggest, baddest” obstacles scattered across a five-mile course. It’s survival of the fittest: Whoever completes the most laps wins.

Boone’s secret is the same as any self-respecting astronaut: test as you fly. Train in the same environment you’ll experience on race day—while your competition trains from the comfort of a gym because it happens to be raining outside.

it turned out—that when it comes to reporting their own behavior, people tend to bend the truth. Readers would claim in surveys that they read the front page of the newspaper in full, but in reality, they would skip to the sports or the style section.

Netflix knows exactly what you watch, when you watch it, and whether you stopped the last season of House of Cards before it ended. Netflix knows, as Gallup did, that observation is far more accurate than self-reporting.

before hosting the Oscars in 2016, Chris Rock dropped by the Comedy Store, a comedy club in Los Angeles, to test his material.39 Ricky Gervais and Jerry Seinfeld also visit tiny comedy clubs and adjust their jokes—or drop them altogether—in light of audience reaction.

The act of observation disturbs humans in a different way. When people know they’re being observed, they behave differently.

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.

The distortions introduced by the observer effect are significant. The effect can fool you into believing that a hit show will be a flop or that a horse is a mathematical genius.

In December 1957, two months after the Soviet satellite Sputnik had become the first in Earth orbit, Americans attempted to even the score.1 The rocket, called Vanguard, launched about four feet above the pad, hesitated, and then sank back down, exploding on national television and earning itself nicknames like Flopnik, Kaputnik, and Stayputnik.

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.

“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.”

As Shane Snow describes it, Musk told his troops they would “learn what had happened tonight and they would use that knowledge to make a better rocket. And they would use that better rocket to make even better rockets. And those rockets would one day take man to Mars.”

On September 28, 2008, SpaceX’s Falcon 1 launched out of the atmosphere and into the record books, becoming the world’s first privately built spacecraft to reach Earth’s orbit.

In December 2008, three months after Falcon 1’s successful voyage, NASA handed SpaceX a lifeline in the form of a $1.6 billion contract for resupply missions to the International Space Station. When NASA officials called to give him the good news, an otherwise stern Musk broke out of character and screamed, “I love you guys!” For SpaceX, Christmas had come early.

Changing the world one problem at a time requires delaying gratification. Most things in life are “first-order positive, second-order negative,” as Shane Parrish writes on his website Farnam Street.37 They give us pleasure in the short term but pain in the long. Spending money now instead of saving for retirement, using fossil fuels instead of renewable energy, guzzling sugar-laden beverages instead of water are all in that category.

These people delay gratification in a world that has become obsessed with it. They don’t quit simply because their rocket blew up on the launch pad, they had a bad quarter, or their audition fell flat. They reorient their calibration for the long term, not for the short.

When it comes to creating long-lasting change, there are no hacks or silver bullets, as venture capitalist Ben Horowitz says. You’ll need to use a lot of lead bullets instead.

Maria Sharapova describes focus on outcomes as the worst mistake that beginning tennis players make.45 Watch the ball as long as you can, Sharapova cautions, and zero in on the inputs. By taking the pressure off the outcome, you get better at your craft. Success becomes a consequence, not the goal.

sildenafil citrate.

Researchers hoped the drug would expand blood vessels to treat angina and high blood pressure associated with heart disease. By the early 1990s, the drug appeared to be ineffective for its intended purpose. But the participants in the trials reported an interesting side effect—erections. It wasn’t long before researchers abandoned their initial hypothesis to pursue the astonishing alternative. And Viagra was born.

I get it. It’s painful to fail, and airing your failures can compound the pain. But the opposite approach—denial and avoidance—makes things worse. To learn and grow, we must acknowledge our failures without celebrating them.

Overcoming this fear requires exposure therapy. In other words, we must expose ourselves to failure regularly. Think of this as vaccination: Just as introducing weak antigens can stimulate “learning” in our immune system and prevent future infection, exposure to intelligent failures can allow us to recognize and learn from them. Each dose builds resilience and breeds familiarity. Each crisis becomes training for the next one.

“What have you failed at this week?” If Sara didn’t have an answer, her father would be disappointed. To her father, failing to try was far more disappointing than failure itself.

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same … Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it. —rudyard kiplinG

Feynman described NASA’s decision-making process as “Russian roulette.” Because no catastrophe had ensued after numerous shuttles flew with O-ring problems, NASA believed that “for the next flight we can lower our standards a little bit because we got away with it last time.”

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

With the Apollo missions to the Moon, NASA had turned the impossible into the possible when the odds were heavily stacked against the agency. The successes blunted the most capable minds and boosted their egos. According to the Rogers Commission report, the improbable successes of the Apollo era produced a “We can do anything” attitude at NASA.

Bo Jackson, the only player to be named an all-star in both football and baseball, wouldn’t get thrilled when he hit a home run or ran for a touchdown. He would say that he “hadn’t done it perfect.”

Netflix realized it wasn’t in the DVD-delivery business. That was a tactic. Rather, it was in the movie-delivery business. That was its strategy. Delivering DVDs through the mail was simply one tactic among many others—including streaming media—in service of that strategy.

The story is a common one. Most corporations perish because they ignore the baby steps, the weak signals, the near misses that don’t immediately affect outcomes.

When small failures “are not widely identified, discussed, and analyzed, it is very difficult for larger failures to be prevented,” as business school professors Amy Edmondson and Mark Cannon explain.

Near misses are a rich source of data for a simple reason. They happen far more frequently than accidents. They’re also significantly less costly. By examining near misses, you can gather crucial data without incurring the costs of failure.

The next time you’re tempted to start basking in the glory of your success while admiring the scoreboard, stop and pause for a moment. Ask yourself, What went wrong with this success? What role did luck, opportunity, and privilege play? What can I learn from it? If we don’t ask these questions, luck will eventually run its course, and the near misses will catch up with us.

“There are two different occasions upon which we examine our own conduct,” wrote Adam Smith, “and endeavour to view it in the light in which the impartial spectator would view it: first, when we are about to act; and secondly, after we have acted.”

If you’re a job candidate, a premortem might involve an interview. You would assume you didn’t get the job and generate as many reasons as possible for the failure. Perhaps you were late for the interview. Perhaps a difficult question about why you left your previous job stumped you. You then figure out how to avoid those potential pitfalls.

Think of premortems as the opposite of backcasting, which we explored in the chapter on moonshot thinking. Backcasting works backward from a desired outcome. A premortem works backward from an undesired outcome.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”74 But remembering isn’t enough. History is an exercise in self-deception if we get the wrong messages from it.

The drivers of the ABS-equipped cars became far more reckless. They tailgated more often. Their turns were sharper. They drove faster. They switched lanes dangerously. They were involved in more near misses. Paradoxically, a measure introduced to boost safety promoted unsafe driving behavior.

The safety net may be there to catch you if you fall, but you’re better off pretending it doesn’t exist.

The tickets cost $81 million per passenger—nearly $20 million more than the launch of an entire SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.3 In an ironic twist, the space agency, established to beat the Russians, became dependent on them.

We must keep walking the untrodden paths, sailing the wild seas, and flying the savage skies. “However sweet these laid-up stores, however convenient this dwelling, we cannot remain here,” Walt Whitman wrote. “However shelter’d this port and however calm these waters, we must not anchor here.”