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

by Ozan Varol

The problem with the modern world, as Bertrand Russell put it, is that “the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”

The closer you are to the massive bowling ball that is the Sun—and Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun—the stronger the warping of space and time and the greater the deviation from Newton’s laws.

If you’re not sure what to be alarmed about, everything is alarming.”

“If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves.”

Today’s authoritarians frequently come to power by democratic elections and then erode democracy through seemingly legitimate means. They conceal authoritarian tactics under the trappings of democracy.

In the popular children’s book Harold and the Purple Crayon, the four-year-old protagonist has the power to create things just by drawing them. There’s no path to walk on, so he draws a path. There’s no moon to light his path, so he draws the moon. There are no trees to climb on, so he draws an apple tree. Throughout the story, his imagination brings things into existence.17

Only by taking a playful attitude toward our own beliefs can we challenge and change them.

Werner Heisenberg devised the uncertainty principle during a late-night walk through a park in Copenhagen.46 For two years, he had been frustrated that his equations could predict the momentum of a quantum particle but not its position.

“Art training alone,” the study suggests, “can help to teach medical students to become better clinical observers.” 58

Malthus argued that humans tend to outgrow resources like food, creating a competition for survival. This competition, Darwin believed, drove the evolutionary process, leading the species best adapted to their environment to survive.

Iron Maiden’s music combines the unlikely elements of Shakespeare, history, and heavy metal. Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” considered one of the greatest rock songs of all time, is like a musical sandwich, blending an opening and closing ballad with hard rock and opera in the middle.

David Bowie was another master blender. When writing lyrics, he used a custom-developed computer program called the Verbasizer.70 Bowie would type up sentences from different sources—newspaper articles, journal entries, and the like—into the Verbasizer, which would cut them up into words and mix and match them. “What you end up with,” Bowie explained, “is a real kaleidoscope of meanings and topic[s] and nouns and verbs all sort of slamming into each other.” These combinations would then serve as inspiration for song lyrics.

We become optimists in the way that physicist David Deutsch defines the term—as someone who believes that anything permitted by the laws of physics is doable.

At the initial stages of idea formation, “the pure rationalist has no place,” as the physicist Max Planck put it. Discovery, as Einstein also explained, “is not a work for logical thought, even if the final product is bound in logical form.”

Regular makes vulnerable. Irregular makes nimble.

Neuroplasticity is a real thing. Your neurons, just like your muscles, can rewire and grow through discomfort. As Norman Doidge, a leading expert in neuroplasticity, explains, the brain can “change its own structure and function in response to activity and mental experience.”41 Through reps and sets, thought experiments and moonshot thinking force our minds to rise above our daily trance.

We often fall in love with a destination, but not the path. We don’t want to climb a mountain. We want to have climbed a mountain. We don’t want to write a book. We want to have written one.