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

by Ozan Varol

“Thoroughly conscious ignorance,” physicist James Maxwell said, “is the prelude to any real advance in knowledge.”

He knows that only conditions of tremendous uncertainty bring out his creative best.

First chaos, then breakthrough. When the dance stops, so does progress.

Uranus proved to be an unruly planet. It would erratically speed up and then slow down. It refused to cooperate with Newton’s laws of gravity, which accurately predicted motion everywhere from objects here on Earth to the trajectories of planets in space.42 This anomaly led the French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier to speculate about the existence of another planet located beyond Saturn. This planet, Le Verrier surmised, might be tugging at Uranus and, depending on their respective locations, either pulling Uranus forward and speeding it up or pulling it back and slowing it down. Using only math—with just “the point of his pen,” as Le Verrier’s contemporary François Arago put it—Le Verrier found another planet. This new planet, Neptune, was later observed within one degree of where Le Verrier predicted it would be.43 The astonishing match was produced by a set of laws written by Newton nearly 160 years before.

Goddamn!

“People wish to be settled,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, but “only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.”63 Those who cling to the past get left behind as the world marches forward.

“Fear comes from not knowing what to expect and not feeling you have any control over what’s about to happen,” writes Hadfield. “When you feel helpless, you’re far more afraid than you would be if you knew the facts. If you’re not sure what to be alarmed about, everything is alarming.”

“Named must your fear be before banish it you can.”72 The naming, I’ve found, must be done in writing—with paper and pencil (or pen, if you’re into technology). Ask yourself, What’s the worst-case scenario? And how likely is that scenario, given what I know?

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. The brain, to paraphrase psychologist Rick Hanson, is like Velcro for the negative but Teflon for the positive. Unless you consider the best-case scenario along with the worst, your brain will steer you toward the seemingly safest path—inaction. But as a Chinese proverb goes, many a false step was made by standing still. You’re more likely to take that first step into the unknown when there’s the proverbial pot of gold awaiting at the end.

Positive wonder as much as negative.

“If you have a successful business,” Kokonas explains, “it’s actually harder to change it.” The inertia required for changing course is too strong, particularly when you’re at the top of your game. “It’s hard to make incremental changes,” he says. “Every now and then you just need to destroy it and rebuild it better.”

Keep working even when happy with the job. Never be satisfied.

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.” 38

Our expectations morph reality and become self-fulfilling prophecies. What you strive for becomes your ceiling. Go for mediocrity, and mediocrity is what you’ll get—at best.

Aiming to be average will make you average.

“If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success,”

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

“Convergent thinking alone is dangerous because you’re just relying on the past. What will succeed in the future may not resemble what succeeded in the past.”

One such exercise is a “bad-idea brainstorm.” This might strike you as odd—why waste time with bad ideas?—but X is onto something. “You can’t get to the good ideas without spending a lot of time warming up your creativity with a bunch of bad ones,” Teller explains.67 “A terrible idea is often the cousin of a good idea, and a great one is the neighbor of that.”

Warm up with bad ideas.

Backcasting flips the script. Rather than forecasting the future, backcasting aims to determine how an imagined future can be attained. “The best way to predict the future,” Alan Kay says, “is to invent it.”83 Instead of letting our resources drive our vision, backcasting lets our vision drive the resources.

There’s far more certainty in building a pedestal than in getting a monkey to talk. We don’t know how to train a monkey, but we know how to build pedestals, so we build them. In our lives, we spend our time doing what we know best—writing emails, attending endless meetings—instead of tackling the hardest part of a project.

Monkey first, razzle dazzle later.

Regardless of your intelligence, Feynman’s adage holds true: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”

I changed my vocabulary to reflect this mental shift. At conferences, instead of saying “I argue …,” I began to say “This paper hypothesizes.…”

The history of science, as clinician and author Chris Kresser says, “is the history of most scientists being wrong about most things most of the time.” 38 Aristotle’s ideas were falsified by Galileo’s, whose ideas were replaced by Newton’s, whose ideas were modified by Einstein. And Einstein’s own theory of relativity broke down at the subatomic level—in the imperceptible land of tiny particles like quarks, gluons, and hadrons—where quantum field theory now rules. We were certain about each of these facts—until we were not. The “here today, gone tomorrow” nature of scientific theory is simply its “natural rhythm,” Gary Taubes writes.

Once we create falsifiable hypotheses, we must follow the successful participants in the numbers study and attempt to falsify these hypotheses, rather than searching out information to prove them right. Ideological lock-in happens without our awareness. We must therefore deliberately expose ourselves to the discomfort of self-falsification instead of merely repeating platitudes like “I’m open to proving myself wrong.” When our focus shifts from proving ourselves right to proving ourselves wrong, we seek different inputs, we combat deeply entrenched biases, and we open ourselves up to competing facts and arguments. “I don’t like that man,” Abraham Lincoln is said to have observed. “I must get to know him better.” The same approach should apply to opposing arguments.

Our goal should be to find what’s right—not to be right.

Bohr and Einstein turned to each other to stress-test their opinions because the men were too close to their perspectives to see their own blind spots. “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.” This is why in Contact, Arroway yells “Make me a liar, Fish,” asking her colleague to prove her wrong.

“There’s a silly notion that failure’s not an option at NASA,” Elon Musk says. “Failure is an option here [at SpaceX]. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”

“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.”

“When it comes to idea generation,” Adam Grant writes in Originals, “quantity is the most predictable path to quality.”

The opening doesn’t have to be grand, as long as the finale is.

Just start. Don't start pretty, just start.

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.

Focusing on inputs has another upside. You avoid the wild swings of misery and euphoria that come with chasing outcomes. Instead, you become curious—no, fascinated—about tweaking and perfecting the inputs.

“Reward excellent failures, punish mediocre successes,”

Parents can take a cue from Sara Blakely. She went from selling fax machines door-to-door to becoming the world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire. She credits her success partly to a question that her father would ask her every week when she was growing up. “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

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.

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.”16 The moment we think we’ve made it is the moment we stop learning and growing. When we’re in the lead, we assume we know the answers, so we don’t listen. When we think we’re destined for greatness, we start blaming others if things don’t go as planned. Success makes us think we have the Midas touch—that we can walk around turning everything into gold.

It is just as important to keep working when you succeed as it is when you fail.

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

We must treat success like a seemingly friendly group of Greeks bearing a big, beautiful gift called a Trojan horse. We must take measures to maintain humility before the Greeks arrive. We must treat our work—and ourselves—as permanent works in progress.

“If you think your IQ is 160 but it’s 150, you’re a disaster. It’s much better to have a 130 IQ and think it’s 120.”

To prevent complacency, knock yourself off the pedestal once in a while. “You have to disrupt yourself,” Steve Forbes says, “or others will do it for you.”

“If you’re not humble,” said former world heavyweight champion Mike Tyson, “life will visit humbleness upon you.” One way to stay humble is to pay attention to near misses.

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.

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.

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. It forces you to think about what could go wrong before you act.

When we pretend that curing the first-order cause will also eliminate the second- and third-order causes, we end up masking them and exposing ourselves to future catastrophe. Treating the most obvious flaws gives us certainty and the satisfaction of doing something about the problem. But we’re only playing a never-ending game of cosmic Whac-A-Mole. Once one problem is nailed down, another will pop up.

In 2012, shortly before his death, Neil Armstrong reportedly invoked the baseball legend Yogi Berra to describe the agency’s predicament: “If you don’t know where you are going, you might not get there.”

No vision, no result.

But the world doesn’t work this way. 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.

The rocket-science mindset requires remaining in Day 1 and repeatedly introducing color into the monochromatic world. We must keep devising thought experiments, taking moonshots, proving ourselves wrong, dancing with uncertainty, reframing problems, testing as we fly, and returning to first principles.

“However shelter’d this port and however calm these waters, we must not anchor here.”

Comfort is death.

A new verse. Even a whole new story. Your story. What will it say?