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

by Ozan Varol

We tend to see ourselves at the center of everything. But from the vantage of outer space, the Earth is “a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.” Reflecting on the deeper meaning of the Pale Blue Dot, Sagan said, “Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner.”

Ask yourself, What’s the worst-case scenario? And how likely is that scenario, given what I know? Writing down your concerns and uncertainties—what you know and what you don’t know—undresses them. Once you lift up the curtain and turn the unknown unknowns into known unknowns, you defang them. After you see your fears with their masks off, you’ll find that the feeling of uncertainty is often far worse than what you fear. You’ll also realize that in all likelihood, the things that matter most to you will still be there, no matter what happens. And don’t forget the upside. In addition to considering the worst-case scenario, also ask yourself, What’s the best that can happen? Our negative thoughts resonate far more than our positive ones do.

Think about it: Where are the redundancies in your own life? Where’s the emergency brake or the spare tire in your company? How will you deal with the loss of a valuable team member, a critical distributor, or an important client? What will you do if your household loses a source of income? The system must be designed to continue operating even if a component fails.

Embracing the Far-Fetched Imagine a glass bottle with its base pointed toward a light. If you put half a dozen bees and flies into the bottle, which species would find its way out first? Most people assume the answer is bees. After all, bees are known for their intelligence. They can learn highly complex tasks—such as lifting or sliding a cap to access a sugar solution in a lab—and teach what they learned to other bees.23 But when it comes to finding their way out of the bottle, the bees’ intelligence gets in their way. The bees love the light. They’ll keep bumping up against the base of the bottle—located at the light source—until they die of exhaustion or hunger. In contrast, the flies disregard “the call of the light,” as Maurice Maeterlinck writes in The Life of the Bee. They “flutter wildly hither and thither” until they stumble on the opening at the other end of the bottle that restores their liberty.24 The flies and the bees, respectively, represent what’s known as divergent and convergent thinking. The flies are the divergent thinkers, fluttering freely until they find the exit. The bees are the convergent thinkers, zeroing in on the seemingly most obvious exit path with a behavior that is ultimately their undoing. Divergent thinking is a way of generating different ideas in an open-minded and free-flowing manner—like flies bouncing around in a glass bottle.

Researchers divided expert chess players into two groups and gave them a chess problem to solve.9 The players were asked to achieve checkmate using the fewest possible moves. For the first group of players, the board contained two solutions: (1) a solution that was familiar to any skilled chess player and would achieve checkmate in five moves and (2) a less familiar, but better, solution that would produce a checkmate in three moves. Many experts in the first group couldn’t find the better solution. The researchers tracked the players’ eye movements and found that they spent much of their time tracing the familiar solution on the board. Even when they claimed to be searching for alternatives, the experts literally couldn’t keep their eyes away from what they knew. When they could see the familiar solution—the hammer to their nail—their performance was effectively reduced by three standard deviations.

For the second group of players in the study, the researchers changed the setup so that the familiar solution was no longer an available option. Instead, only the optimal solution would achieve checkmate. Without the familiar solution to distract them, the experts in this second group all found the best solution. In the end, the study confirmed a statement attributed to several world chess champions: “When you see a good move, don’t make it immediately. Look for a better one.” When the Einstellung effect gets in the way—when we can’t see the better move—we can change our definition of the problem by questioning the question.

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”

In the end, if we don’t prove ourselves wrong, others will do it for us. If we pretend to have all the answers, our cover will eventually be blown. If we don’t recognize the flaws in our own thinking, those flaws will come to haunt us. As cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber point out, a mouse “bent on confirming its belief that there are no cats around” will end up as food for those cats.51 Our goal should be to find what’s right—not to be right.

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?’”57 Everything we observe in the world is through our own eyes. What may be obvious to others—we’re swimming in water—isn’t obvious to us. Others have that seemingly freakish ability to spot the mismatch in our units of measurement or our collective delusion about a signal from a dead Martian lander. They’re not wedded to our vision of the world, they don’t have the same emotional attachment to our opinions, and they won’t swat away conflicting information like we do. “The road to self-insight,” psychologist David Dunning said, “runs through other people.”

“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.’”

Consider Clever Hans the horse.48 Hans was the closest thing a horse could come to a rocket scientist. He became a worldwide sensation for his ability to perform basic math. Its owner, Wilhelm von Osten, would ask the audience for a math problem. Someone would shout out, “What is six plus four?” and Hans would tap his hoof ten times. His ability went beyond addition. He could subtract, multiply, and even divide. People suspected fraud, but independent investigators found no foul play. It was a young psychology student named Oskar Pfungst who figured out what was really going on. Hans could find the right answer only if he could see the human questioner. His mathematical genius disappeared if he was wearing blinders or otherwise couldn’t see the human intermediary. In the end, it was the human questioners who were unwittingly providing cues to the horse. As Stuart Firestein writes, “People would tense the muscles of their body and face at the beginning of Hans’s answer and release the tension when he arrived at the correct hoof tap.” Remarkably, even after Pfungst discovered Hans’s secret, he couldn’t prevent himself from unconsciously giving cues to the horse. As long as he knew the answer, Pfungst’s demeanor would involuntarily shift when Hans arrived at the correct hoof tap.

There are conferences, such as FailCon, dedicated to celebrating failure and FuckUp Nights, where thousands have gathered in more than eighty-five countries to toast their failures.

There are funerals for failed start-ups, complete with bagpipes, DJs, sponsorships by liquor companies, and slogans like “Putting the Fun in Funeral.”

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.”

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

“Failure hovers uncomfortably close to greatness,” wrote James Watson, the codiscoverer of DNA’s double-helix structure.

Consider another example from the pharma industry. In 1989, Pfizer scientists developed a new drug called 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.49

Curiosity takes a failure, turns the volume of drama all the way down, and makes failure interesting.

It provides emotional distance, perspective, and an opportunity to view things through a different lens.

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.

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.

“Human beings,” social psychologist Daniel Gilbert explains, “are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.”

Our default mode is regress—not progress. When left to their own devices, space agencies decline. Writers wither. Actors flare out. Internet millionaires collapse under the weight of their egos. Young and scrappy companies turn into the same acronym-driven, bloated bureaucracies they were seeking to displace. We return to black-and-white.