Think Like a Rocket Scientist

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.

Einstein described his own discovery process in similar terms: “Our final results appear almost self-evident,” he said, “but the years of searching in the dark for a truth that one feels, but cannot express; the intense desire and the alternations of confidence and misgiving, until one breaks through to clarity and understanding, are only known to him who has himself experienced them.”

“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.”

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.”

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.”67

Determining what to be alarmed about requires following the timeless wisdom of Yoda: “Named must your fear be before banish it you can.”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?

The secret is to start walking before you see a clear path.

In his earlier years, Einstein used the phrase “it seems to me” in proposing that light is made up of photons.36 Charles Darwin introduced evolution with “I think.”37 Michael Faraday spoke of the “hesitation” he experienced when he introduced magnetic fields.38 When Kennedy pledged to put a man on the Moon, he acknowledged that we were taking a leap into the unknown. “This is in some measure an act of faith and vision,” he explained to the American public, “for we do not now know what benefits await us.” These statements don’t make for great sound bites. But they have the virtue of being more likely to be correct.

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

“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.”47

George Bernard Shaw once said, “Few people think more than two or three times a year. I’ve made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.”15 As Shaw knew, hustle and creativity are antithetical to each other. You can’t generate breakthroughs while clearing out your inbox.

cycling between moments of solitude and moments of collaboration creates the optimal environment for creativity.

When we backcast, we take our bold ambition and introduce actionable steps. We visualize our ideal job and sketch out a roadmap to get there. We picture the perfect product and ask what it takes to build it. Only when you face the real prospect of sketching a blueprint for success—now, not later—will you be forced to separate fact from fiction.

A strategy is a plan for achieving an objective. Tactics, in contrast, are the actions you take to implement the strategy.

The history of science, as clinician and author Chris Kresser says, “is the history of most scientists being wrong about most things most of the time.” Aristotle’s ideas were falsified by Galileo’s, whose ideas were replaced by Newton’s, whose ideas were modified by Einstein.

Our goal should be to find what’s right—not to be right.

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.

Consider a study of nearly nine thousand American entrepreneurs who founded companies between 1986 and 2000. The study compared the success rates—defined as taking a company public—of first-time founders and founders who had previously failed in business. You might expect that the experienced founders—having launched a business before and presumably learned from their failure—would be much more likely to succeed than those who had never started a business before. But that’s not what the study found. The success rate of first-time entrepreneurs was nearly equal to the success rate of entrepreneurs who had previously failed in business.22

Psychological safety means, in Edmondson’s words, “no one will be punished or humiliated for errors, questions, or requests for help, in the service of reaching ambitious performance goals.”

Exposing your vulnerability can make you more desirable in the eyes of others. But there’s one caveat. You must establish your competence before revealing your failures. Otherwise, you risk damaging your credibility and coming across as a mess—and not a beautiful one.

“If you’re not humble,” said former world heavyweight champion Mike Tyson, “life will visit humbleness upon you.” One way to stay humble is to pay attention to near misses.

With a premortem, the investigation comes before we have acted, when the actual outcome isn’t known—before we fire the rockets, close the sale, or complete the merger. In a premortem, we travel forward in time and set up a thought experiment where we assume the project failed. We then step back and ask, “What went wrong?” By vividly visualizing a doomsday scenario, we come up with potential problems and determine how to avoid them. According to research, premortems increase by 30 percent the ability of participants to correctly determine the reasons for a future outcome.

But here’s the problem: The causes of failure in a complex system—whether it’s a rocket or a business—are usually multiple. Numerous factors, including technical, human, and environmental, might combine to produce the failure. Remedying only the first-order causes leaves the second- and third-order causes intact. These are the deeper causes lurking beneath the surface. They make the first-order causes happen and may lead to them again.

In 2012, shortly before his death, Neil Armstrong reportedly invoked the baseball legend Yogi Berra to describe the agency’s predicament: “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.” After 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.”