Author Biography
From a young age, Ozan Varol was fascinated by astronomy and dreamt of becoming a rocket scientist. When he left his home in Istanbul at 17 years old to attend Cornell University, he got his chance. After spending four years studying physics and working on the Mars Exploration Rovers project, however, he realized that science wasn't for him. He left his work as a scientist behind in order to study law and become the youngest tenured professor at Lewis & Clark Law School. Still, he wasn’t satisfied working on research that only a handful of people would ever read. He started to build a blog that would eventually lead him to become a motivational speaker and the author of a mainstream personal development book called Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life.
Overview
Ozan Varol spent just four years studying the science of space travel and working with Steve Squyres on the operations team of the Mars Exploration Rovers mission, but he applies what he learned about critical thinking and creativity to this very day. He explains that many of the methods scientists use to discover gravity and land a drone on Mars can be applied to our everyday lives.
Scientists view success and failure, ignorance and curiosity, truth and fallacy, and right and wrong differently from the rest of the world. Questions, skepticism, and caution are built into every single stage of the scientific method. Dozens of questions are asked and endless research is performed before a working hypothesis is even proposed. The results of experiments—whether they confirm or deny the hypothesis—are thoroughly analyzed and, after being tested and retested, usually lead to more questions than answers.
Rocket scientists, especially, are venturing into the unknown and dealing with stakes that are larger than most of us will ever face. Mistakes cost billions of dollars and endanger lives. Their jobs simultaneously require bold ambition and extreme caution. No matter what our everyday lives look like, recalibrating our thinking to more closely mirror those who send people to the moon and put drones on Mars can help us shoot for grander goals, improve our aim, and feel better while doing it.
Varol’s ideas may seem daunting when we observe them through the lens of genius, but they are actually quite simple: embrace curiosity, abandon conventions, interrogate beliefs, set impossible goals, fail gracefully, and evaluate both success and failure with a critical but inquisitive eye.
As we talk through these methods, keep in mind that they behave more like cycles than steps along a straight path. We need intermittent periods of collaboration and isolated work, intermittent periods of hard work and contemplation, and intermittent periods of divergent and convergent thinking. Uncertainty leads to progress, and progress leads to uncertainty. Ask a question, propose an answer, then ask a question about that. You’ll need a great deal of patience as you totally alter the way you work and evaluate the world.
9 Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life
1. Set impossible goals
When President Kennedy announced in 1962 that the United States would put a man on the moon before the end of the decade, most balked at an idea that seemed impossible. Much of the technology needed to get there had yet to even be invented, but within seven years of that iconic speech, Neil Armstrong made his landmark first step on the moon.
When we aim for incremental changes, we gain incremental rewards. When we set goals that are entirely within our capabilities, we often succeed, but we don’t find our actual limits. When we set goals that seem impossible, we might fail, but we still go farther than we ever thought possible. It’s not always immediate, but big risks beget big rewards.
Creative thinking requires us to suspend the evaluative processes. If we want to imagine the impossible, we have to shut off that voice that demands reason, that voice that tells us what we can’t do. That voice is valuable later, but in this vital stage of imagination, it does more harm than good. Therefore, idea creation has to be totally segregated from the idea evaluation step. This is called divergent thinking. Divergent thinking allows us to think up ideas without considering the constraints.
The biggest impediment to your moonshot isn’t a lack of finances or power or capabilities—your biggest impediment is the voice inside your head that echoes decades of conditioning that asserts that you will fall hard if you leap far. When engaging in divergent thinking, you have to put all of your instincts toward practicalities on mute. Open the gates and let all of your ideas (no matter how awful) come rushing out.
It’s easier said than done, but one simple word may help you adjust your thinking. Instead of asking yourself what you should do to fix a problem, ask yourself what you could do. One study found that this tiny adjustment in diction helps us make that shift from convergent thinking (a pragmatic mindset in which one carefully considers the practical concerns inherent in our ideas) to divergent thinking (a free-flowing mindset in which one develops ideas without critical evaluation). It helps expand our thinking past the seemingly fixed options on the table to include unconventional and more effective solutions.
Of course, we can’t live in a persistent state of divergent thinking. We would never sort through the trash, never suss out the practical snags that trip even the best ideas up. Once you have a bunch of potential ideas or hypotheses, then you can listen to your inner convergent thinker that asks whether your ideas are actually feasible.
You have to imagine the impossible before you figure out how to make it possible. When we ask the world or ourselves more than either of us can seemingly offer, both tend to surpass their capabilities.
2. Embrace curiosity
We are hardwired to avoid the unknown. Back in the days of our Paleolithic ancestors, that fear or discomfort prevented us from tasting a poisonous berry or exploring a predator’s cave. Today, we are encouraged to repress any impulse that feels inefficient or unproductive. We eat lunch at our desk, block out doubts that might get in the way of accomplishing what is expected of us, and avoid asking questions for fear that we will look stupid. Questions are inefficient, but they are also where all great ideas start.
Great thinkers don’t just automatically know the right answers; in fact, they look at what is considered to be the right answer to their questions with skepticism. They pull the thread when something looks off to them. We need talent and intelligence to come up with great ideas; most of all, though, we need curiosity. As physicist Richard Feynman said, “It’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.”
According to Varol, the best thing we can do when we’re in the idea production stage is embrace our inner-child. This concept might sound fluffy, but one study found that when participants were challenged to imagine themselves as seven-year-olds with a day off from school, they performed better on creative thinking tests. With this concept in mind, MIT’s Media Lab started a section called “Lifelong Kindergarten” in order to find new ways to encourage people of all ages to engage in playfully creative learning.
We don’t have to break out the finger paints to activate our childlike curiosity; thought experiments call for a lush imagination and the curiosity to question seemingly fixed answers. Thought experiments allow us to address a question in our imagination where there are no variables, costs, or hindrances to our investigation.
Overturning an accepted theory about quantum mechanics is no small feat, but Erwin Schrödinger did just that with nothing but a simple (and slightly sadistic) riddle. In his time, the Copenhagen interpretation was the widely accepted answer to the mysterious subject of quantum mechanics. It stated that quantum wave functions do not have definitive qualities until they are observed.
Instead of simply accepting the theory, Schrödinger built an experiment in his mind. He imagined putting a cat, a vial of poison, a small amount of radioactive material, and a Geiger counter inside of a steel chamber. When the radioactive atom decays, the Geiger counter’s mallet would smash the vial of poison which would kill the cat.
Now, according to the Copenhagen model, the atom would be both decayed and not; but of course, a cat cannot be both alive and dead. It is either one or the other, regardless of whether anyone else is present to take the cat’s pulse. Therefore, the interpretation cannot be correct. Schrödinger disproved the scientific community without spending a dime or killing any cats. All he needed was his imagination.
Of course, Schrödinger didn’t stop there. Thought experiments don’t necessarily produce the answer; instead, they ignite the curiosity necessary to open your mind to alternative possibilities. As we’ve discussed, curiosity can be costly in terms of time and resources. In order to bypass what holds us back from trying something, we have to attempt it in the safety of our heads first. You can build any parameters, work out any hypothetical, and plan your way around any obstacle.
In a world full of answers, it is easy to find one that matches our question, but the external search for information can retard internal exploration. Turning inward allows us to question and interrogate existing truths.
3. Abandon conventional ideas, especially those you have about yourself
The fact that Elon Musk knew basically nothing about rockets before he decided to enter the private space race was actually his greatest strength. He was able to see what so many veterans of the industry couldn’t: rockets don’t have to be as expensive as they sell for. Instead of listening to those native to the field when they told him that it would be impossible for him to afford rockets on his budget, he asked why. After picking up a book or two on how rockets are built, he realized that the materials necessary to build a rocket within his own company were well within his means. He would just need to figure out how to make the resulting rocket reusable.
Being totally unimpeded by knowledge is both an advantage and a disadvantage of being a beginner. When one becomes an expert in their field, invisible rules (habits, behaviors, and routines that have become rigidified) govern their thinking in ways that impede growth and innovation. If we become too reliant on invisible rules, we start toeing the line of the status quo. When we do that, we make it easier for others to challenge our success and make our once innovative ideas obsolete.
Luckily, we don’t have to sacrifice the instincts we build up over the years of mistakes we make in order to evolve in our careers. Invisible rules aren’t always a bad thing—they make our lives easier and our work more efficient. All we need to do is practice challenging invisible rules.
One tool that we have at our disposal for challenging invisible rules is first-principles thinking, which calls for us to question everything we know or understand. Doing so helps us cut through the cobwebs of our knowledge and leaves us with “unquestionable truths.” It is challenging and exhausting so it’s important to only do this when you’re making significant decisions. This exercise helps us momentarily return to our original state as beginners: bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and sponge-like in our pursuit of knowledge.
When we get used to calling on first-principles thinking regularly, we learn to easily adapt without getting attached to our ideas or the conventions of the industry. When we do this often enough, we can even learn to disconnect from the ideas we have about ourselves. Varol calls this risking personal significance.
Take Steve Jobs. Getting forced out of Apple, the company he had built from the ground up, wasn’t the end of him; it was the beginning. Soon after, he helped make Pixar what it is today—a hugely successful, award-winning entertainment company—and started a company that developed software that would eventually be integrated into the iOS system most of us interact with on the daily. A little more than a decade after leaving, Jobs returned to Apple to create the iPod and the iPhone. He might have been forced to risk his significance, but the result is still the same: He didn’t lose who he was… he found himself.
We all create stories about who we are, and we build our lives around these stories. When we let go of these stories, when we discard the pieces of ourselves that we consider to be fundamental aspects of our selfhood, we leave room to discover who we really are and what we are truly capable of.
4. Work harder on the question than the solution
We have spent countless hours working through multiple-choice tests that expect us to choose the single correct answer to the supplied problem. This fixed mental thinking misleads us into functioning as if our reality also has set problems and clear solutions. To unlearn this flawed process, we need to spend more time formulating the question than searching for the “correct” answer.
In 2008, graduate students were tasked with creating cheaper incubators for developing countries in order to help reduce high mortality rates for premature babies. Upon visiting hospitals in Nepal, they realized that the problem wasn’t that incubators were too expensive; that was a tactical issue of a flawed strategy. People living in rural areas often don’t have access to hospitals or reliable electricity, so the incubators that these hospitals already had weren’t being put to good use.
In order to better solve the issue at hand, the students had to reframe the question. It wasn’t “How do we make incubators cheaper?” The real question was “How do we keep premature babies warm?” The result was the Embrace infant warmer, which was basically a tiny, sleeping bag filled with a wax that, after being soaked in boiling water, could keep a baby warm for up to four hours. By reframing the question, the students were able to solve a $40,000 problem with a $25 solution.
When we focus too much on tactics, we fail to see the alternative resources at our disposal. While a strategy is the plan to solve a problem, tactics are the tools we use to pull that strategy off. If you constantly feel bogged down in the minutiae of your plans, you’re probably not spending enough time contemplating the question at hand.
Before jumping to the idea-creation part of your process, spend some time defining the problem as clearly as possible and as broadly as possible. Doing so will open you up to a wealth of new solutions.
5. Sit back, relax, and let the answers come to you
When we imagine scientists at work, we imagine them studiously poring over stacks of books or diligently tinkering away in a lab. That is, of course, a piece of the story, but it’s not the whole picture. More often than not, great thinkers make their breakthroughs when they are on a break from all that hard work. James Crocker, a NASA engineer, figured out how to fix a defective mirror on the Hubble Space Telescope when he was in the shower. Werner Heisenberg devised the uncertainty principle while on an evening stroll.
Research has shown that the incubation period—or the dormant period when we get stuck on a problem—is an important part of the creative process. Varol doesn’t suggest we work harder in this period; instead, he prescribes the opposite: Get bored. We resent boredom as a deterrent to productivity, but one neurological study suggests otherwise. The same parts of the brain that are activated when we are paying attention are also activated when we are bored. Basically, our brain is still hard at work, even when we’re not.
The sensation of being bored is that of our brain grasping for stimulation. This impulse encourages associative thought, which is the unconscious linking of ideas. According to Steve Jobs, “Creativity is just connecting things.” Therefore, it’s possible that we are at our most creative when we’re not being productive at all.
Instead of trying to push through it the next time you get stuck, take a break. Go for a walk or do those chores you’ve been putting off. Resist the temptation to fill the space when you’re stuck in waiting rooms or on a long drive. Your next brilliant idea might just come to you when you’re staring out into space.
If you prefer to be busy, try learning about something totally distinct from your work. Having diverse interests and knowledge facilitates the cross-pollination of ideas. This is sometimes called “combinatory play,” or the interaction of concepts from distinct fields that together inspire totally new concepts.
Einstein credits the inspiration for many of his ideas to the things he learned from an informal group of friends (who jokingly referred to themselves as the “Olympia Academy”) who met up to discuss physics, philosophy, math, and literature. The results of one study suggest that the study of art can actually enhance the capabilities of medical professionals, which goes to show that we should take any opportunity to learn that we can because we never know how it will facilitate our own work in the future.
6. Work well with others
Our obsession with the concept of the “lone genius” misleads us into believing that we have to take on the work on our own, but the collective brain is undoubtedly more powerful than that of the isolated individual. Steve Jobs. Albert Einstein. Elon Musk. Each and every one of them had other people to balance them out, to steer them in the right direction, to feed their curiosity, and to re-energize their endeavors.
While Musk is the wacky idealist, Gwynne Shotwell—the president and COO of SpaceX—poses the practical questions that would otherwise go unanswered and manages the shift from divergent to convergent thinking that must always eventually come into play. Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia come from opposing sides of the political spectrum, but they relied on the opposition that their friendship offered to push their ideas and reveal the holes in their arguments that would otherwise go unseen. We need other people to challenge us, to help us see alternative perspectives, to ask the questions that we’ve overlooked.
There is, of course, a time and a place for collaboration. The creative process is uncomfortable and involves quite a number of bad ideas and questions that we don’t feel comfortable sharing with the rest of the world. In the best-case scenario, we would cycle between interaction and isolation: After spending some time working through our thoughts, questions, and research alone, we would exchange our insights with others, then return to processing on our own.
You don’t need to have a partner or a team to access this collaborative spirit. Mentoring a promising newcomer can help reenergize the first-principles thinking that becomes less accessible to us as we become experts in our fields. Explaining the project you're stuck on to a layman can help you zoom out and see the whole picture from an outside perspective. Asking someone about their work feeds our own cognitive diversity and may even indirectly provide us with the solution we’ve been looking for.
Working with others is not always easy; our coworkers may handle things in ways we don’t like, think in ways we don’t understand, and interact with others in ways that irritate us. However, if we want our fellow workers to feel comfortable enough to voice their opinions and admit their mistakes, we have to foster an environment of “psychological safety.” If team members are too worried about getting punished for missteps, they won’t push boundaries, ask questions that call attention to shaky ground, or challenge the status quo. Similarly, if leaders don’t acknowledge their mistakes, their employees won’t feel emboldened to challenge them and will worry that mistakes are incompatible with seniority. If none of this happens, your team’s progress stalls.
When working in a psychologically safe environment, we are more likely to report errors, ask for help, or question decisions because we know that doing so won’t result in punishment or humiliation. Teams that feel psychologically safe work better together, learn faster, and achieve more. A study of medication errors found that hospital teams performed better when they felt comfortable enough to admit when they made errors. The managers recognized that when nurses aren’t afraid to come forward about their mistakes, they would be able to work together to address the issues and prevent them from happening again in the future.
7. Don’t forget to test
Astronauts go through years of testing before they go up into space. They participate in countless simulations that mimic flight as closely as possible. When designing these simulations, a rocket scientist’s goal is to find the astronaut’s breaking point. They throw every possible type of malfunction or complication their way so they know that the men and women can handle every single one of them if they occur after takeoff.
Most of us don’t perform this kind of rigorous testing in our everyday lives. When we do test our ideas, we tend to either design the tests to get the outcomes we expect or dismiss negative results as inaccurate. Most retail companies, for example, test new products before launching them but blame unfavorable outcomes on external factors. Testing isn’t just a formality; it is your single best tool for preparing for the worst-case scenario before it happens.
In order to perform tests that actually tell us whether our ideas will perform in the real world, we have to mimic the real world as closely as possible. Amelia Boone didn’t spend hours on the treadmill when she was preparing for the World’s Toughest Mudder obstacle course challenge; she ran outside even when the weather was bad so that nothing would throw her off her game when it came time to compete. She pushed herself to her breaking point when she was training so that she wouldn’t stumble upon it when she was in the race itself.
This strategy doesn’t just reveal our limits or the flaws in our ideas before we introduce them to the world; it also helps us maintain a cool head when problems we don’t anticipate come our way. When John Roberts prepared for Supreme Court cases (before he himself became a judge), he practiced answering every single question he could anticipate so that a curveball wouldn’t throw his focus. All that practice made him seem like a natural when he finally went to court.
Testing should also continue after launch to ensure that everything is operating the way it should. “Testing as you fly” should include evaluations of the whole thing as well as its parts. The pieces may work correctly on their own, but malfunction when they are put together. If you’re enthusiastic about a job applicant, for example, it might be a good idea to test how they interact with different members of your team. If you’ve decided to make some last-minute changes to a product you’re about to put on the market, don’t do so without checking that the whole thing doesn’t malfunction as a result.
You want to test yourself and your ideas so intensely that you know that no matter what comes your way, you know that you can figure it out because you’ve done it a thousand times on the ground. If the worst-case scenario happens, you want to be able to say: It’s okay, I’ve prepared for this. That way, you can stay calm under pressure.
8. Fail gracefully
When we get used to aiming high, we will inevitably fail more than we succeed. Those failures can certainly teach us a lot, but only if we take certain precautions in order to ensure that they won’t result in catastrophe. Uncertainty tends to magnify our fears and anxieties, which makes us freeze up and stops us from pursuing the opportunity to discover something new. In order to bypass that feeling, we need to ensure that our fear cannot become prophecy.
First, we must determine the best- and worst-case scenarios and their likelihood of occurring. If your worst-case scenario seems very likely, it might not be the time to test your idea. Instead, return to the drawing board and find places where you can implement redundancies and margins of safety. Redundancies are like backup plans—they aren’t essentials, but they ensure that if one piece doesn’t work, the whole thing doesn’t fall apart. Margins of safety reduce the danger of failure and, therefore, ease our anxieties. They prevent the worst-case scenario from happening. The more complex an idea, the more redundancies you should have in order to prevent single points of failure. Similarly, the higher the risk of an experiment, the higher the margins of safety should be.
Let’s talk about it in terms of space launches. Space X installed their Falcon 9 rocket with nine engines so that the others could take over if one or two failed. Those redundancies guaranteed that a kink in the system wouldn’t bring the whole operation down. Spaceships are typically built with extra thermal insulation because it’s important to create high margins of safety when you’re doing something as dangerous as putting people in a vehicle that literally relies on explosions to fly.
You should also find ways to isolate moonshots so that they don’t threaten the stability of your entire operation. Netflix continued to deliver DVDs by mail until the company was sure that the streaming service would be profitable enough on its own. If you know you want to switch careers but recognize that you are not yet economically stable enough to make the leap, take on some contract work or work on your project in the evenings until you know that the likelihood of success is higher than the likelihood of failure.
Precautions are essential to planning moonshots—but if you wait for absolute certainty before making moves, you are never going to start. You have to be okay with the fact that things aren’t going to work out and things are going to go wrong because you are trying something. Failure is inevitable; catastrophe is not.
9. Learn from success and celebrate failure
Evaluation is the most important step toward long-term success, and yet, even the smartest people don’t follow through on this step. Most of us follow up a win with a celebration; doing so ignores the fact that success can easily be a matter of luck than an airtight idea. Most of us beat ourselves up when we fail; doing so can lead us to miss the potential opportunities implicit to learning from failure. In order to avoid these pitfalls, we need to treat both success and failure as equally deserving of celebration and criticism.
Typically, we only perform post-mortems (a term business borrows from medicine that refers to the process of surveying a project to see what went wrong) on “dead” projects or failed experiments. Because of the role luck can play in success, it is imperative that we post-mortem every single one of our projects and experiments in order to parse our process for mistakes and ineffective tactics that could fail under alternative circumstances. If we don’t figure out where luck played a role, success upon every try is not guaranteed.
Success feels good and is undeniably rewarding, but success can encourage complacency. Complacency inevitably leads to either failure or obsolescence. When companies find profitable means of doing business, they resist operating in any other way. “Path dependence,” or reliance on the past to shape the future, is an affliction that affects most of us as we age. We become less open to alternative possibilities. As companies become older and larger, they become more bogged down by procedure and rigid structure. We have to be wary of success, lest it fool us into believing that we will be able to replicate success over and over again without evolving. We are permanent works in progress; we can’t allow ourselves to get too comfortable.
Failure should be celebrated because it means we are still growing, innovating, and pushing ourselves and our ideas forward. That doesn’t mean that we should just brush it off and try again; if we do that, we’ll keep making the same mistakes over and over again. Let’s be honest: Failure hurts and can be quite demoralizing. In order to blunt the pain while also learning from it, we have to reframe it. We have to recognize that if we fail, it is partly because we are aiming for monumental progress. We pursued our biggest dreams even when others told us not to. It’s simple: If we’re not failing, we’re not pushing hard enough. We can’t control whether or not we fail—we can only control our reaction to it.
Shareable Stories, Facts, and Statistics from Think Like a Rocket Scientist
The (Real) Da Vinci Code
The Renaissance of the 15th century was a turning point for humanity. By inviting artists, scientists, and philosophers to study at their schools, the Medici family sparked an explosion of art, science, and discovery. Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticceli, and Michelangelo Buonarroti were just a few of the many great thinkers that studied in these schools. When individuals from different disciplines come together to exchange knowledge and work together, the Medici effect fosters an environment of innovation.
What’s boring about the Boring Company?
Cities like Chicago and LA are desperate for ways to reduce traffic on their highways. The best possible solution would be underground tunnels as they muffle noise pollution, offer the opportunity to distribute traffic across multiple levels, and, contrary to popular belief, are actually the safest places to be during an earthquake. The only problem is that tunneling isn’t exactly an advanced science; the Boring Company is working on changing that. They’re experimenting with automation, increasing the power output of tunnel boring machines, and reusing the dirt they pull out to build tunneling structures. Time will tell if the company will be able to provide the key to clearing up the roads.
I’d rather be right than consistent
Despite having spent much of his life as a slave owner, John Marshall Harlan went on to become a Supreme Court judge known as “the Great Dissenter” for his work defending civil rights. He was the only person to dissent to Plessy v. Ferguson (the case that upheld the “separate but equal” doctrine that allowed for segregation) and other cases involving discrimination. When critics accused him of flip-flopping, he said, “I’d rather be right than consistent.” Varol explains that one of the qualities of great thinkers is the willingness to change one’s mind.
Genius ideas always sound a bit loony at first
Google’s innovation company X came up with Project Loon in order to achieve the lofty goal of getting internet access to poor countries and areas that have lost their lines of communication to natural disasters. Project Loon used swarms of giant, solar-powered balloons to beam basic internet down to the people below. This audacious project is a great example of moonshot thinking, and demonstrates that moonshots aren’t just radical goals—they’re grand solutions to complicated problems.
The pain of independence
We are evolutionarily wired to conform, so not doing so is emotionally distressing. The amygdala (the part of our brain that processes emotion and social behavior) is activated when we feel the urge to deviate from the group. In one study of this sensation, 70 percent of participants changed their correct answers to simple questions when others in the group offered opposing responses. This experiment proved that social pressure exerts immense power over our cognition.
Flip it and reverse it
In the late 50s, two physicists from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory realized that Sputnik was sending out signals that could be picked up by shortwave radios. They realized that they could track the spaceship’s speed and trajectory by calculating the pitch of the signals. Deputy Director Frank McClure asked the physicists what would happen if they inverted their findings—could they use the position of the spaceship to identify the location of submarines on Earth? This question would lead to the creation of what is now called the global positional system, or GPS.
Quiz
Find the answers at the bottom of the page.
When you are in the idea creation stage, you should…
Think critically about budgetary restrictions
Activate convergent thinking
Imagine multiple hypotheses before settling on one
Settle on your first good idea and run with it
When testing your idea, you should….
Imagine the worst-case scenario
Make it as simple as possible
Dismiss negative results that were caused by external factors
Evaluate the individual cogs rather than the idea as a whole
When engaging in first-principles thinking, you should…
Think back on your previous experiences
Talk to people who are new to your field
Consider what successful people have done in the past
Recall your invisible rules
In order to build an innovative team, you should…
Fire those who fail to meet quotas
Make punishments for mistakes abundantly clear
Encourage team members to work alone as often as possible
Reward team members who come forward when they realize their mistakes
What is a thought experiment?
The plan for idea testing
A hypothetical scenario that challenges accepted theories
An imaginary test that proves your hypothesis
All of the above
In order to encourage longterm success, you should…
Meticulously define procedure
Get rid of people who challenge your interpretation
Isolate experiments so that failure can’t impact your operation as a whole
Focus on incremental changes instead of risky solutions
When you get stuck on a project, you should…
Go for a walk
Do more research
Scrap the project
Avoid talking to others about it
What does it mean to risk your significance?
Disconnect from ideas you have about yourself
Jump at the opportunities that inspire you
Think critically about your knowledge and beliefs
All of the above
When planning moonshots, you should…
Factor in a few redundancies
Avoid launching your idea until you feel 100% positive that you will succeed
Listen to other people if they tell us our ideas are impossible
Consider whether you have the finances and experience to take on the project
What is a strategy you can call on in order to fail gracefully?
Set modest goals
Celebrate failures as learning opportunities
Learn to be more cautious in the future
Restrategize in order to follow industry procedure
Discussion Questions
What, if any, are the political implications of the strategies that Varol proposes? Should our government engage in moonshot thinking or should it focus on the practical implications of policy? Can you think of any figures in the history of the United States who thought like rocket scientists? Where are the redundancies or margins of safety in the U.S. Constitution?
Varol’s chief exemplars of genius (Einstein, Jobs, Musk, Bezos, Squyres, Newton, etc.) are white men, and quite a few of them are controversial figures in contemporary society. How do you think this archetype warps our understanding of forward-thinking? What pressures do women or people of color experience that might obstruct their attempts to think like rocket scientists? How can they utilize rocket-science thinking in order to overcome these obstacles?
Interactive exercise
Now is the time to apply rocket science thinking to your own life and career. When tackling the questions below, keep in mind all of the strategies and perspectives that you’ve been introduced to so far:
Think of the traditional pathways to success in your industry. How are these pathways helping you navigate your own career? How can you reimagine these pathways to better suit your capabilities? What are the invisible rules that are obstructing your progress?
Call to mind your biggest career goals. What is obstructing your progress? Where can you implement redundancies? Are your ambitions audacious enough to propel you? Are you failing enough that you know that your goals are moonshots? What have you learned from your failures?
Imagine yourself as a potential employee or client. What reasons might they have not to fire you? What are your weaknesses? What does your competitor do differently that might make them a better fit for the job?
Quiz answers
c
a
b
d
b
c
a
d
a
b
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