Think Like a Rocket Scientist | Ozan Varol

Think Like a Rocket Scientist inspires you to take your own moonshot and enables you to achieve lift-off.

Today, thinking like a rocket scientist is a necessity. We all encounter complex and unfamiliar problems in our lives. Those who can tackle these problems -- without clear guidelines and with the clock ticking -- enjoy an extraordinary advantage.

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.

We all encounter complex and unfamiliar problems in our daily lives. Those who can tackle these problems—without clear guidelines and with the clock ticking—enjoy an extraordinary advantage.

Although we glamorize rocket scientists, there’s an enormous mismatch between what they have figured out and what the rest of the world does. 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.

In our daily lives, we fail to exercise our critical-thinking muscles and instead leave it to others to draw conclusions. As a result, these muscles atrophy over time. 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.

Take ownership of your life.

You can’t win the lottery without buying a ticket.

Rocket science teaches us about our limited role in the cosmos and reminds us to be gentler and kinder to one another. We’re in this life for a momentary blip, making the briefest of stands. Let’s make that brief stand count.

In the modern world, we look for certainty in uncertain places. We search for order in chaos, the right answer in ambiguity, and conviction in complexity. “We spend far more time and effort on trying to control the world,” Yuval Noah Harari writes, “than on trying to understand it.” We look for the step-by-step formula, the shortcut, the hack—the right bag of peanuts. Over time, we lose our ability to interact with the unknown.

Our approach reminds me of the classic story of the drunk man searching for his keys under a street lamp at night. He knows he lost his keys somewhere on the dark side of the street but looks for them underneath the lamp, because that’s where the light is.

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.

We believe (or pretend to believe) there is one right answer to each question. We believe that this right answer has already been discovered by someone far smarter than us. We believe the answer can therefore be found in a Google search, acquired from the latest “3 Hacks to More Happiness” article, or handed to us from a self-proclaimed life coach.

Where certainty ends, progress begins.

When there’s a vacuum of understanding—when we’re operating in the land of unknowns and uncertainty—myths and stories whoosh in to fill the gap. “We can’t live in a state of perpetual doubt,” Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman explains, “so we make up the best story possible and we live as if this story were true.”

It’s far better to be uncomfortably uncertain than comfortably wrong.

Life offers more of itself when we treat uncertainty as a friend, not a foe.

Astronauts maintain their calm not because they have superhuman nerves. It’s because they have mastered the art of using knowledge to reduce uncertainty. As astronaut Chris Hadfield explains, “In order to stay calm in a high-stress, high-stakes situation, all you really need is knowledge.… Being forced to confront the prospect of failure head-on—to study it, dissect it, tease apart all its components and consequences—really works.”

When we face uncertainty, we often manufacture excuses for not getting started. I’m not qualified. I don’t feel ready. I don’t have the right contacts. I don’t have enough time. We don’t start walking until we find an approach that’s guaranteed to work (and preferably one that comes with job satisfaction and a six-figure salary).

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.

We treat our processes and routines like roads collecting traffic.

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.

You need to make a habit of asking, as Bezos does, “Do we own the process or does the process own us?”

Chinese proverb: "One dog barks at something, and a hundred others bark at that sound."

As the saying goes, argue for your limitations, and you get to keep them.

“To create the company of tomorrow, you must break down the bad habits, silos, and inhibitors that exist today.”

We’re too close to our own problems and weaknesses to evaluate them objectively.

The kill-the-company exercise isn’t just for mega corporations or law-school classrooms. You can employ variations of it in your own life by asking questions like the following:

• Why might my boss pass me up for a promotion?

• Why is this prospective employer justified in not hiring me?

• Why are customers making the right decision by buying from our competitors?

Avoid answering these questions as you would that dreadful interview prompt, “Tell me about your weaknesses,” which tends to induce humblebragging (“I work too hard”). Instead, really get into the shoes of the people who might reject your promotion, refuse to hire you, or buy from your competitors. Ask yourself, Why are they making that choice?

Simple also has fewer points of failure. Complicated things break more easily. “Every decision we’ve made,” Musk says, “has been with consideration to simplicity.… If you’ve got fewer components, that’s fewer components to go wrong and fewer components to buy.”

Without boredom, our creativity muscles begin to atrophy from disuse.

Steve Jobs echoed the same sentiment: “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.… [T]hey’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.”

In Zen Buddhism, this principle is known as shoshin, or beginner’s mind. As the Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki writes, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.” This is why Wieden+Kennedy, the advertising firm responsible for many of Nike’s blockbuster ad campaigns, encourages its employees to “walk in stupid” every day and approach problems from a beginner’s viewpoint.

This isn’t to suggest that all original ideas come from beginners. To the contrary, expertise is valuable in idea generation, but experts shouldn’t work in complete isolation.

The political strategists James Carville and Paul Begala tell a story about the choice a lion faces in deciding to hunt for a mouse or an antelope. “A lion is fully capable of capturing, killing, and eating a field mouse,” they explain. “But it turns out that the energy required to do so exceeds the caloric content of the mouse itself.” Antelopes, in contrast, are much bigger animals, so “they take more speed and strength to capture.” But once captured, an antelope can provide days of food for the lion.

The story, as you may have guessed, is a microcosm for life.

Most of us go after the mice instead of the antelopes. We think the mouse is a sure thing, but the antelope is a moonshot. Mice are everywhere; antelopes are few and far between. What’s more, everyone around us is busy hunting mice. We assume that if we decide to go for antelopes, we might fail and go hungry.

So we don’t launch a new business, because we think we don’t have what it takes. We hesitate to apply for a promotion, assuming that someone far more competent will get it.

We don’t ask people on a date if they seem out of our league. We play not to lose instead of playing to win. “The story of the human race,” psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote in 1933, “is the story of men and women selling themselves short.”

The primary obstacles to moonshots are in your head, reinforced by decades of conditioning by society. We’ve been seduced into believing that flying lower is safer than flying higher, that coasting is better than soaring, and that small dreams are wiser than moonshots.

What you strive for becomes your ceiling.

We have to generate ideas first before we can begin evaluating and eliminating them. If we cut the accumulation process short—if we immediately start thinking about consequences—we run the risk of hampering originality.

Regular makes vulnerable. Irregular makes nimble.

“A terrible idea is often the cousin of a good idea, and a great one is the neighbor of that.

The difficulty lies, as John Maynard Keynes said, “not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.”

“Preconceived solutions and limited searches for options,” Nutt concluded, “are recipes for failure.”

“When you see a good move, don’t make it immediately. Look for a better one.”

No one comes equipped with a critical-thinking chip that diminishes the human tendency to let personal beliefs distort the facts. 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.”

Opinions are sticky. Once we form an opinion—our own very clever idea—we tend to fall in love with it, particularly when we declare it in public through an actual or a virtual megaphone.

Over time, our beliefs begin to blend into our identity.

We don’t rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training.

Rockets and websites are different beasts, but they have at least one thing in common. They’ll crash unless you follow a cardinal rocket-science principle called test as you fly, fly as you test.

If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is—if it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong.”

A Sufi teaching: “You think that because you understand ‘one’ that you must therefore understand ‘two’ because one and one make two. But you forget that you must also understand ‘and.’”

Astronauts are workhorses, not space adventurers. They don’t fly in space for a living. They train and prepare for spaceflight for a living. “I’ve been an astronaut for six years,” explained Chris Hadfield, “I’ve been in space for eight days.”

The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war.

If you’re designing a children’s toothbrush, watch many children brush their teeth—lest you get the one miracle child who uses a toothbrush like an adult. If you’re deciding which job offer to take, consult multiple calibration targets. One person’s opinion might provide only a fuzzy perspective. It’s only through independent validation and multiple testing sources that you get closer to twenty-twenty vision.

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

Man errs as long as he strives. — GOETHE

In most aspects of life, there are no participation trophies.

To ward off the bogeyman of failure, we keep a safe distance from it. We stay off the edges, avoid healthy risks, and play it safe. If we aren’t guaranteed to win, we assume the game isn’t worth playing.

“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.

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

The goal isn’t to fail fast. It’s to learn fast. We should be celebrating the lessons from failure—not failure itself.

There are two responses to negative feedback from a credible source: Deny it or accept it. Every great scientist chooses the latter.

With a growth mindset, you can maintain forward momentum even as the explosions pile up, the work gets hard, and the obstacles begin to appear insurmountable. As Malcolm Forbes, the founder of Forbes magazine, put it, “Failure is success if we learn from it.”

When we learned how to walk, we didn’t get it right on the first try. No one told us, “You’d better think hard about how you take that very first step because you get one step and that’s it.” We repeatedly fell. With each fall, our bodies learned what to do and what not to do. By learning not to fall, we learned how to walk.

Poker players, as Annie Duke explains in Thinking in Bets, refer to this tendency to “equate the quality of a decision with the quality of its outcome” as “resulting.” But as Duke argues, the quality of an input isn’t the same as the quality of the output.

By taking the pressure off the outcome, you get better at your craft. Success becomes a consequence, not the goal.

When people feel free to speak up, ask provocative questions, and air half-formed thoughts, it becomes easier to challenge the status quo. Psychological safety also increases team learning. In psychologically safe environments, employees challenge questionable calls by superiors instead of obediently complying with the commands.

“Reward excellent failures, punish mediocre successes,” as a seminar attendee once told author Tom Peters.

People must know that intelligent failure is necessary for future success, that they won’t be punished for it, and that their careers won’t be ended for it. If the signals are mixed, employees will err on the side of caution and hide their mistakes instead of revealing them.

If employees are to share their mistakes, the leaders must do the same.

Everyone—and I mean everyone—is a walking imperfection. Even genius isn’t blunder-proof.

Whether you’re in the operating room, the boardroom, or the mission control room, the principle is the same. The road to success is filled with potholes. You’re better off acknowledging them than pretending they don’t exist.

Failure isn’t a bug to get out of our system until success arrives. Failure is the feature. If we don’t develop a habit of failing regularly, we court catastrophe.

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.

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

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.

The unsinkable sinks, the uncrashable crashes, and the indestructible self-destructs—because we assume their previous success secures their future.

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.

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

Mia Hamm played soccer with the same mindset. “Many people say I’m the best women’s soccer player in the world,” Hamm once said. “I don’t think so. And because of that, someday I just might be.”

The modern world doesn’t call for finished products. It calls for works in progress, where perpetual improvement wins the game.

“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. But catastrophic failures also tend to end your business or your career. “If you’re not humble,” said former world heavyweight champion Mike Tyson, “life will visit humbleness upon you.”

A postmortem is a Latin phrase that literally means “after death.” In a medical postmortem—also known as an autopsy—a dead body is examined to determine the cause of the death. Over the years, the term migrated from medicine to business. Companies now use a postmortem to determine why a failure happened and what can be done to prevent it in the future.

But there’s a problem with this metaphor. A postmortem implies that there must be a dead project, a dead business, or a dead career before we’re moved to action. The idea of death suggests that only catastrophic failures deserve a thorough investigation. But if we wait until disaster strikes to conduct a postmortem, the string of small failures and near misses—the chronic problems that build up slowly over time—go unnoticed.

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.

Asking the same questions and following the same process regardless of what happens is one way of taking the pressure off the outcome and reorienting our focus on what matters the most: the inputs.

A premortem works backward from an undesired outcome. It forces you to think about what could go wrong before you act.

Consider, for example, a three-year study conducted in Munich. One portion of a taxicab fleet was equipped with an antilock brake system (ABS). The remainder of the cabs had traditional, non-ABS brakes. The cars were identical in all other respects. They drove at the same time of day, the same days of the week, and in the same weather conditions. The drivers also knew whether their car was equipped with ABS.

The study found no tangible difference in accident rates between the ABS-equipped cars and the remainder. But one difference was statistically significant: driving behavior. The drivers of the ABS-equipped cars became far more reckless. They tailgated more often. Their turns were sharper. They drove faster. They switched lanes dangerously. They were involved in more near misses.

Paradoxically, a measure introduced to boost safety promoted unsafe driving behavior.

“If you don’t know where you are going, you might not get there.”

In every annual letter to Amazon shareholders, Jeff Bezos includes the same cryptic line: “It remains Day 1.” repeating this mantra for a few decades, Bezos was asked what Day 2 would look like. He replied, “Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.” The rocket-science mindset requires remaining in Day 1.