Think Like a Rocket Scientist Quotes

“it’s far better to be uncomfortably uncertain than comfortably wrong. In the end, it’s the confused apes—the connoisseurs of uncertainty—that transform the world.”
― Ozan Varol, Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

“our obsession with certainty leads us astray and why all progress takes place in uncertain conditions.”
― Ozan Varol, Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

“Over time, our beliefs begin to blend into our identity. Your belief in CrossFit makes you a CrossFitter, your belief in climate change makes you an environmentalist, and your belief in primal eating makes you paleo. When your beliefs and your identity are one and the same, changing your mind means changing your identity—which is why disagreements often turn into existential death matches.”
― Ozan Varol, Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

“scientific development often begins by someone noticing an anomaly and saying, “That’s funny…”50 The discovery of quantum mechanics, X-rays, DNA, oxygen, penicillin, and others, all occurred when the scientists embraced, rather than disregarded, anomalies.”
― Ozan Varol, Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

“The path, as the mystic poet Rumi writes, won’t appear until you start walking. William Herschel started walking, grinding mirrors, and reading astronomy-for-dummies books even though he had no idea he would discover Uranus. Andrew Wiles started walking when he picked up a book on Fermat’s last theorem as a teenager, not knowing where his curiosity might lead. Steve Squyres started walking in search of his blank canvas, even though he had no idea it would one day lead him to Mars. The secret is to start walking before you see a clear path. Start walking, even though there will be stuck wheels, broken drills, and exploding oxygen tanks ahead. Start walking because you can learn to walk backward if your wheel gets stuck or you can use duct tape to block catastrophe. Start walking, and as you become accustomed to walking, watch your fear of dark places disappear. Start walking because, as Newton’s first law goes, objects in motion tend to stay in motion—once you get going, you will keep going. Start walking because your small steps will eventually become giant leaps. Start walking, and if it helps, bring a bag of peanuts with you for good luck. Start walking, not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard. Start walking because it’s the only way forward.”
― Ozan Varol, Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

“Walking,” he explains, “has a very good effect in that you’re in this state of relaxation, but at the same time you’re allowing the sub-conscious to work on you.”
― Ozan Varol, Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

“Remember, the thought experiment is the starting point, not the end. The process is messy and nonlinear. And the answer, as we’ll see in the next section, will often come when you’re least expecting it.”
― Ozan Varol, Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

“Critical thinking and creativity don’t come naturally to us. 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.”
― Ozan Varol, Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies for Giant Leaps in Work and Life

“Much as in life, if you like someone, you’ll tend to overlook their flaws. You’ll find signals from a love interest—or a spacecraft—even when they’re not sending any.”
― Ozan Varol, Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies for Giant Leaps in Work and Life

“Charlie Munger, vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, is a major proponent of this idea. “You’re not entitled to take a view,” he cautions, “unless and until you can argue better against that view than the smartest guy who holds that opposite view.”
― Ozan Varol, Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

“Moonshots force you to reason from first principles. If your goal is 1 percent improvement, you can work within the status quo. But if your goal is to improve tenfold, the status quo has to go. Pursuing a moonshot puts you in a different league—and often an entirely different game—from that of your competitors, making the established plays and routines largely irrelevant.”
― Ozan Varol, Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

“Be careful if you spend your days finding right answers by following a straight path to the light switch. If the drugs you’re developing were certain to work, if your client were certain to be acquitted in court, or if your Mars rover were certain to land, your jobs wouldn’t exist.”
― Ozan Varol, Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies for Giant Leaps in Work and Life

“Let’s pause there for a moment. As shocking as it sounds, we can generate breakthroughs simply by thinking. No Google. No self-help books. No focus groups or surveys. No advice from a self-proclaimed life coach or an expensive consultant. No copying from competitors. This external search for answers impedes first-principles thinking by focusing our attention on how things are rather than how they could be.”
― Ozan Varol, Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

“...Teller doesn’t buy it: “Taking good, smart risks is something that anyone can do, whether you’re on a team of 5 or in a company of 50,000.”18 Bezos would agree. “Given a ten percent chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time,” he wrote...”
― Ozan Varol, Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

“Our ability to make the most out of uncertainty is what creates the most potential value.”
― Ozan Varol, Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

“Here’s the problem. Process, by definition, is backward looking. It was developed in response to yesterday’s troubles. If we treat it like a sacred pact—if we don’t question it—process can impede forward movement. Over time, our organizational arteries get clogged with outdated procedures.”
― Ozan Varol, Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

“Talent hits a target no one else can hit,” philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said, but “genius hits a target no one else can see.” When”
― Ozan Varol, Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

“When you try to improve on existing techniques,” says Astro Teller, the head of X, Google’s moonshot factory, “you’re in a smartness contest with everyone who came before you. Not a good contest to be in.”11”
― Ozan Varol, Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

“Do we own the process or does the process own us?”7”
― Ozan Varol, Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

“The great obstacle to discovering,” historian Daniel J. Boorstin writes, “was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.”
― Ozan Varol, Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

“Without an informed public willing to question confident claims, democracy decays and misinformation spreads. Once alternative facts are reported and retweeted, they become the truth. Pseudoscience becomes indistinguishable from real science.”
― Ozan Varol, Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

“Vested interests also reinforce the status quo. High-level executives at Fortune 500 companies shun innovation because their compensation is tied to short-term quarterly outcomes that may be temporarily disrupted by forging a new path. “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something,” Upton Sinclair said, “when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
― Ozan Varol, Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

“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.”
― Ozan Varol, Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

“We’ve all been in that meeting before. People are gathered around a conference table, with half-empty cups of lukewarm coffee strewn around, to “brainstorm ideas” and “explore options.” But instead of exploring ideas, everyone’s busy shooting them down. “We’ve tried that before.” “We don’t have the budget.” “The management would never approve.” Idea generation stops before it even begins. As a result, instead of trying something new, we end up doing what we did yesterday. The goal should be to resist the tendency to activate convergent thinking through a “This can’t be done” attitude. Instead, begin with a divergent “This could be done if …” mindset.”
― Ozan Varol, Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies for Giant Leaps in Work and Life

“THERE’S A DIFFERENCE, as Morpheus said, between knowing the path and walking the path. Once you’ve stress-tested your ideas by trying to prove yourself wrong, it’s now time to collide those ideas with reality in tests and experiments.”
― Ozan Varol, Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

“Pursuing a thought experiment—even one that leads nowhere—can lead to breakthroughs. Fantasies, as Walter Isaacson writes, can be “paths to reality.”
― Ozan Varol, Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

“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.”
― Ozan Varol, Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

“Instead of letting your original vision—or the visions of others—shape the path forward, you abandon all allegiances to them. You hack through existing assumptions as if you’re hacking through a jungle until you’re left with the fundamental components.”
― Ozan Varol, Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

“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.”
― Ozan Varol, Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

“If we explore only well-trodden paths, if we avoid games we don’t know how to play, we’ll remain stagnant. Only when you’re dancing in the dark, only when you don’t know where the light switch is—or even what a light switch is—can progress begin.”
― Ozan Varol, Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life