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

by Ozan Varol

This giant leap—taken within a human lifespan—is often hailed as the triumph of technology. But it’s not. Rather, it’s the great triumph of a certain thought process rocket scientists used to turn the impossible into the possible.

To think like a rocket scientist is to look at the world through a different lens. Rocket scientists imagine the unimaginable and solve the unsolvable. They transform failures into triumphs and constraints into advantages. They view mishaps as solvable puzzles rather than insurmountable roadblocks. They’re moved not by blind conviction but by self-doubt; their goal is not short-term results but long-term breakthroughs. They know that the rules aren’t set in stone, the default can be altered, and a new path can be forged.

When something breaks, as it inevitably does, rocket scientists must isolate the signal from the noise and home in on the potential culprits, which may be in the thousands.

Science, as Carl Sagan put it, is “a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.”12

We’re hesitant to think big, reluctant to dance with uncertainty, and afraid of failure. These were necessary during the Paleolithic Period, keeping us safe from poisonous foods and predators. But here in the information age, they’re bugs.

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.”

Genius hesitates. —Carlo rovelli

it takes about six minutes for a spacecraft to descend from the top of the Martian atmosphere down to the surface. All we can do is load up the spacecraft with instructions ahead of time and put Sir Isaac Newton in the driver’s seat.

We’re all programmed with the same fear of the uncertain. Our predecessors who weren’t afraid of the unknown became food for saber-toothed tigers. But the ancestors who viewed uncertainty as life-threatening lived long enough to pass their genes on to us.

“We spend far more time and effort on trying to control the world,” Yuval Noah Harari writes, “than on trying to understand it.”

If you stick to the familiar, you won’t find the unexpected. Those who get ahead in this century will dance with the great unknown and find danger, rather than comfort, in the status quo.

In some cases, scientists keep stumbling around in the dark room, and the search continues well past their lifetime. Even when they find the light switch, it may illuminate only part of the room, revealing that the remainder is far bigger—and far darker—than they imagined. But to them, stumbling around in the dark is far more interesting than sitting outside in well-lit corridors.

The laws that Newton failed to establish—most notably his experiments in alchemy, which attempted, and spectacularly failed, to turn lead into gold—don’t make the cut as part of the one-dimensional story told in physics classrooms. Instead, our education system turns the life stories of these scientists from lead to gold.

Here’s the problem: Answers are no longer a scarce commodity, and knowledge has never been cheaper.

the answers simply serve as a launch pad to discovery. They’re the beginning, not the end.

Our ability to make the most out of uncertainty is what creates the most potential value. We should be fueled not by a desire for a quick catharsis but by intrigue. Where certainty ends, progress begins.

“The great obstacle to discovering,” historian Daniel J. Boorstin writes, “was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.”

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

Even after physicist Richard Feynman earned a Nobel prize, he thought of himself as a “confused ape” and approached everything around him with the same level of curiosity, which enabled him to see nuances that others dismissed. “I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing,” he remarked, “than to have answers which might be wrong.”

Science, as George Bernard Shaw said, “can never solve one problem without raising 10 more problems.”26 As some gaps in our knowledge are filled, others emerge.

Instead of freaking out over their collective ignorance, they thrive on it. The uncertain becomes a call to action.

Spielberg describes it as “the greatest feeling in the world.” He knows that only conditions of tremendous uncertainty bring out his creative best.

I find it comforting that there isn’t a theory of everything, the definitive answer to every question asked. The theories and the paths are multiple. There’s more than one right way to land on Mars, more than one right way to organize this book (as I keep telling myself), or more than one right strategy for scaling your business.

The discovery of quantum mechanics, X-rays, DNA, oxygen, penicillin, and others, all occurred when the scientists embraced, rather than disregarded, anomalies.

In Douglas Adams’s hilarious book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the supercomputer Deep Thought is asked for the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything.” After seven and a half million years of deep thought, it spits out a clear, but ultimately meaningless, answer: 42. Although the book’s fans have tried to ascribe some symbolic meaning to this number, I think there is none. Adams was simply mocking how humans crave and cling to certainty.

Science didn’t care about feelings, emotions, or irrational attachments to planets.

Astronauts maintain their calm not because they have superhuman nerves. It’s because they have mastered the art of using knowledge to reduce uncertainty.

“Fear comes from not knowing what to expect and not feeling you have any control over what’s about to happen,” writes Hadfield.

Determining what to be alarmed about requires following the timeless wisdom of Yoda: “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?

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.

If our group had postponed until the choices presented themselves with perfect clarity—until we had perfect information about our landing sites so we could design the perfect set of tools for them—we never would have gotten to Mars. Someone else willing to tango with uncertainty would have beaten us to the finish line.

The path, as the mystic poet Rumi writes, won’t appear until you start walking.

The default carries immense power, even in advanced industries like rocket science. This idea is called path dependence: What we’ve done before shapes what we do next.

Change can be costly. Abandoning the qwerty layout for an alternative, for example, would require us to learn to type from scratch (though there’s a tribe of people who have made the switch and who argue it’s worth the effort). And sometimes things change for the worse. But more often than not, we stick with the default even when the benefits of change far exceed the costs.

When necessary, we must unlearn what we know and start over.

The tyranny of our knowledge is only part of the problem. We’re constrained not only by what we’ve done in the past, but also by what others have done as well.

Warren Buffett put it, “The five most dangerous words in business are ‘Everybody else is doing it.’”

Talent hits a target no one else can hit,” philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said, but “genius hits a target no one else can see.”

We used to assume that late fees and physical stores were necessary for video rentals. Questioning these assumptions gave us Netflix.

The best way to expose invisible rules is to violate them. Go for a seeming moonshot you don’t think you’ll achieve.

When you risk your significance, you won’t change who you are. You’ll discover it. As the ashes and clutter settle, something beautiful will soar.

Like most executives, Frazier wanted to promote innovation at Merck. But unlike most executives who simply ask their employees to innovate, Frazier asked them to do something they had never done before: destroy Merck. Frazier had the company executives play the role of Merck’s top competitors and generate ideas to put Merck out of business. They then reversed their roles, went back to being Merck employees, and devised strategies to avert these threats.

The story of the “write stuff” is a myth.35 Pencil tips have a habit of breaking and getting into nooks and crannies—which may be okay on Earth, but not okay on a spacecraft, where they can find their way into mission-critical equipment or end up floating into an astronaut’s eyeball.

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

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex,” economist E. F. Schumacher said in a quote often misattributed to Einstein. “It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”

Curiosity is a crucial ingredient in any thought experiment.

Isaac Newton purportedly used similar words in describing himself as “a boy playing on the seashore … whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

Over time, as we settle into adulthood, as student loans and mort-gages begin to mount, our curiosity is replaced by complacency. We view intelligent urges as a virtue and playful urges as a vice.

play and intelligence should be complements, not competitors. Play, put differently, can be a portal to intelligence.