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

by Ozan Varol

When people ask Gaiman for advice on how to be a writer, his answer is simple: “Get bored.”48 Stephen King agrees: “Boredom can be a very good thing for someone in a creative jam.”

Getting bored landed a woman named Joanne her first publishing deal. In 1990, her train from Manchester to London was delayed for four hours. While waiting for the train, a story “came fully formed” into her mind—about a young boy who attends a wizardry school.50 That four-hour delay ended up being a blessing for Joanne “J. K.” Rowling, whose Harry Potter series captivated millions around the world.

The next time you feel boredom arising, resist the temptation to take a hit of data or do something “productive.” Boredom might just be the most productive thing you can do.

It was a beginner who created a billion-dollar author. When J. K. Rowling submitted a draft copy of the first Harry Potter book to publishing houses, they were unanimous in their opinion: They thought the book was not worth printing. Her manuscript was rejected by numerous publishers, until it ended up on the desk of Nigel Newton, the chairman of Bloomsbury Publishing.89 Newton saw potential in the book where his rivals missed it. How? His secret was his eight-year-old bookworm daughter, Alice.90 After Newton handed a sample from the book to Alice, she devoured it and nagged him for more. “Dad,” she said, “this is so much better than anything else.” Alice’s input convinced her father to write a £ 2,500 check to Rowling as a meager advance for acquiring the rights to publish her book. The rest is history.

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things,” Kennedy said, “not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

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.

Regular makes vulnerable. Irregular makes nimble.

“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.

If we restrict ourselves to what’s possible given what we have, we’ll never reach escape velocity and create a future worth getting excited about. In the end, all moonshots are impossible. Until you decide to go.

A problem well defined is a problem half solved. —unknown

five-dollar challenge.

Interesting challenge and technic

It’s also helpful to separate function from form. When we look at an object, we tend to see its function. A barometer, we think, is for measuring pressure. A hammer is for driving in nails. A box is for storing objects. But this natural inertia toward the function also gets in the way of innovation. If we can look past the function to the form, we can discover other ways that the product, service, or technology can be used. For example, if you can view the typical barometer simply as a round object, it can also be used as a weight. If you view a box as a flat platform with sides, it can also be used as a stand.

Our tendency toward skewed judgment partly results from the confirmation bias. We undervalue evidence that contradicts our beliefs and overvalue evidence that confirms them. “It [is] a puzzling thing,” Robert Pirsig writes. “The truth knocks on the door and you say, ‘Go away, I’m looking for the truth,’ and so it goes away.”

“One mark of a great mind,” Walter Isaacson said, “is the willingness to change it.”48 When the world around you changes—when the tech bubble bursts or self-driving cars become the norm—the ability to change with the world confers an extraordinary advantage.

In writing this book, I adopted a strategy from Stephen King, who puts away his draft chapters for weeks before returning to them. When he comes back with some psychological separation, it’s easier to pretend that someone else wrote the chapter. Seeing the work from a fresh perspective removes his blinders and enables him to hack away at the writing. King’s approach finds support from research.

We can call this problem Frankenstein’s monster. Its limbs come from human bodies. But once the pieces are stitched together, the result is unhuman.

In many ways, these simulations are tougher than the actual flight. They follow the old adage “The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war.”

Test as you fly—subject yourself to the same conditions you’ll experience during the flight—and you’ll soon begin to soar.

“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.”9 It’s only when we reach into the unknown and explore ever-greater heights—and in so doing, break things—that we move forward.

“What’s a little white lie?” you might ask. After all, putting a positive spin on failure can help us save face. But here’s the problem: If we don’t acknowledge we failed—if we avoid a true reckoning—we can’t learn anything. In fact, failure can make things worse if we get the wrong messages from it. When we attribute our failures to external factors—the regulators, the customers, the competitors—we have no reason to change course.

“Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections,” Vilfredo Pareto wrote, “You can keep your sterile truth for yourself.”

“At some point, everything’s gonna go south on you and you’re going to say, ‘This is it. This is how I end,’” Watney says. You can either accept that as a failure—or you can get to work. “You do the math. You solve one problem. And you solve the next one. And then the next. If you solve enough problems, you get to come home.”

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.

To encourage the reporting of failures, Google’s moonshot factory, X, takes an unusual approach.65 In most companies, it’s a senior leader who decides to pull the plug on a faltering project. But employees at X are empowered to kill their own projects as soon as they realize, for one reason or another, that the project isn’t viable. Here’s the interesting part: For this act of hara-kiri, the entire team receives a bonus. Recall from an earlier chapter that X led a project called Foghorn to convert seawater into fuel by sucking carbon dioxide out of the ocean water. Although the technology was promising, it wasn’t economically viable, so the team decided to shut down its own project. “Thank you!” X’s head, Astro Teller, announced at an all-hands meeting. “By ending their project, this team has done more to speed up innovation at X this month than any other team in this room.”

The notion of giving bonuses for failing might strike you as odd. It’s one thing to tolerate failure, but something else to reward it. But there’s genius in this incentive scheme. It’s more expensive for nonviable projects to continue; they waste money and resources.67 If a project has no future, shutting it down frees up precious resources for other moonshots that have better odds of landing.

“Reward excellent failures, punish mediocre successes,”

It’s not easy for smart, competitive people to own up to their blunders, particularly when no one else has noticed them. But astronauts are expected to advertise their own missteps and put them under a microscope for everyone to see.70 Talking openly about screwups is mandatory because one astronaut’s admission of a boneheaded move can save another’s life.

Anyone who has done anything meaningful has failed in some fashion.

Science, as George Bernard Shaw writes, “becomes dangerous only when it imagines that it has reached its goal.”

Bill Gates says, success is “a lousy teacher” because it “seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.”

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

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 we don’t experience variability in our track record—if we don’t prevent our confidence from inflating after a string of random successes—then a catastrophic failure will do that for us.

The next time you’re tempted to start basking in the glory of your success while admiring the scoreboard, stop and pause for a moment. 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.

We tend to assume good outcomes resulted from good decisions and bad outcomes resulted from bad decisions. It’s hard to find mistakes when we know we succeeded, and it’s hard to avoid the blame game when we know we failed.

History, if you look carefully, can provide invaluable lessons. The ritual gives us a time to pause, to reassess and recalibrate, to learn and to change.

A quote by George Santayana seems to appear in every museum depicting historical horrors: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

The journey cannot end once the mission is accomplished. That’s when the real work begins. When success brings complacency—when we tell ourselves that now that we’ve discovered the New World, there’s no reason to return—we become a shadow of our former selves.

Kurt Vonnegut once said, “Write to please just one person.”