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

by Ozan Varol

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.”