Think Like a Rocket Scientist

Let's say that you're looking for a new job. You've created a resume and sent it to a few companies, but aren't getting any callbacks. You get a bit worried. You think the resume might be the issue.

What do you do?

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Ozan Varol is a rocket scientist-turned-law professor who wants to help you think through your problems and achieve massive success in work and life. To do this, he gives you nine chapters full of well-worn, battle-tested thinking strategies. These chapters are organized into three stages, each stage building on the prior.

• The launch stage educates you on breakthrough thinking, which involves harnessing the hidden power of uncertainty,
• accelerate takes the thoughts you developed in the prior stage and helps to refine them to reach your breakthrough, and
• achieve corrects our black-and-white perception of success and failure.

Each chapter is filled with stories of renowned individuals who made repeated breakthroughs in their respective fields using these tactics: Albert Einstein, Elon Musk and Steve Martin, to name a few.

We'll look at each stage to learn how we can make our next breakthrough happen.

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Stage One: Launch 🚀

"In this first stage of the book, you'll learn how to harness the power of uncertainty, reason from first principles, ignite breakthroughs with thought experiments, and employ moonshot thinking to transform your life and business (p 15)."

In order to make progress in our pursuits, we need to accept that there's a lot we don't know. "Certainty blinds us to our own paralysis (p 25)." To shed the illusion of certainty and open our eyes to what we have yet to learn, we must accept and admit to ourselves that 'I don't know.' "When we utter those three dreaded words, our ego deflates, our mind opens, and our ears open up (p 27)." And once our ears are opened, we find it easier to see new things in this uncharted territory into which we've entered.

But why is it so hard to admit that we don't know? Because we don't like uncertainty. We naturally tend to categorize things as either good or bad. But uncertainty eludes such a categorization by definition. It's easier on our mind when we can look at something and make a snap judgement as to its value. But snap judgements never solved anyone's problems.

Now that you've shed the weight of your own false certainty, you are primed to critically examine the conventional wisdom around your pursuit. Whether your pursuit is one of work or of life, there is some conventional wisdom surrounding it. Every coworker, parent, friend — every person you might try to learn something from — has "their own way" of doing that thing. It's possible that their own way is constrained by invisible rules, unspoken traditions which are actually better left unfollowed. When you can remove the crust of unhelpful or even harmful conventional wisdom around your pursuit, you are left with what Varol calls its first principles. And once you've discovered what these first principles are, you can make leaps and bounds in your pursuit that others haven't made or even seen yet. They'll be struggling with the crust of conventional wisdom, but you'll see right through it. "First-principles thinking allows you to see the seeming obvious sign that's hiding under everyone's nose (p 56)."

If all this talk seems too theoretical, Varol offers a modern-day success story precipitated by a return to first principles. Elon Musk wanted to send his SpaceX rockets/spaceships to the moon, but did not possess the large fortune required to build new rockets for every launch. Industry experts from the well-established aerospace corporations told him time and again that the rockets just couldn't be reused, since after they launch they'd be hurtling to earth at damaging speeds. So, how did Musk get around this? He decided to manufacture his own rockets with a GPS-powered system, capable of landing them back on the launchpad after separation from the spaceship. By bucking the conventional wisdom that a rocket just couldn't be reused after launch, he felt his way through to a paradigm shift in rocket reusability. NASA followed suit soon after.

How can you apply these things to our introductory example?

You ask your parents and friends for advice on why you aren't getting responses on your job applications, and they give you positive feedback on your resume. "Of course you're the best candidate for the job," conventional wisdom might say. "Your resume looks great." But this conventional wisdom could be smoothing over the real reasons you aren't getting any offers. What if you questioned the conventional wisdom? What if you thought, "Maybe it's my resume, but maybe not. Maybe prospective employers are justified in not hiring me." Conventional wisdom wouldn't acquiesce to the thought. Conventional wisdom wouldn't admit that you really might not be the best/qualified person for the job.

But by bucking the conventional wisdom, you've opened yourself up to a potential breakthrough.

But until that potential breakthrough comes to fruition, you're left with the uncomfortable proposition that you might not be qualified for the job. What do you do now?

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Stage Two: Accelerate 🏃

The second stage, accelerate, puts in motion the ideas you generated in the first stage.

You've uncovered the first principles of your endeavor, and maybe you have a possible approach to engage it. But rather than pursuing the first idea that spring to mind, "spend some time searching for a better question instead of a better answer (p 139)."

Far too often we pounce on the first question that pops up in our heads. We seem to make progress in the beginning. We spin our wheels and spend our time, fixating our minds on the question while looking for an answer. Our minds slowly orient themselves around the question instead of the pursuit. We eventually take off our focus blinders to realize we're stuck. We've entered Eintstellung, a fixed mental mindset towards the problem stemming from an overly narrow focus. We've confused our question with our pursuit, and have lost sight of the forest for the tree.

Here is where Varol meets us: he looks at our question, and instead of trying to answer it, he answers our question(s) with another: "Is that the right question to ask?"

We must develop the habit of questioning our own questions. As with our exercise in first principles, this can pretty hard to do. Sometimes too hard. If we've spent a lot of time on the question instead of the pursuit, we may actually choose to remain stuck with it. "'[Its] a puzzling thing', Robert Pirsig writes. 'The truth knocks on the door and you say, 'Go away, I'm looking for the truth' (p 166)." There's little hope for us unless we get out of this functional fixedness.

So how can we avoid einstellung, and how can we get out when we've realized we're in it?

One thing we can do is to regularly ask ourselves, "What am I missing?" The danger with einstellung is that you don't realize you're in it until you're already there. By asking yourself what you could be missing on a regular basis you're protecting yourself from the gradual slide into a one-track mindset.

Another method to steer clear of einstellung is to keep more than one potential solution to your problem in mind. Even better if you can entertain solutions that contradict one another. It's hard to let go of one brainchild, some thought or solution that you've come to hold dear. But if you have two (or three) brainchildren instead of one, you'll have a harder time overcommitting to either. You'll spend more time considering the different brainchildren, the different angles to solving the task at hand. You'll weigh different approaches to the problem instead of forcing one approach to "just work." And the longer you consider multiple approaches, the more likely you'll hit on the right one to solve the problem.

This is potentially painful mental exertion, to be sure. It doesn't feel good to reevaluate your work after some period of intense work and question whether you've focused too intently on one question. But its necessary if you're going to land that next job, finish that blog post, learn that skill. Any pursuit worth involving other people is worth reevaluating. Because "if we don't prove ourselves wrong, others will do it for us (p 185)."

How would the strategies from this stage inform our job seeker from last stage?

Perhaps his most expedient solution would be to add more bullet points to his resume. He could spend days tweaking each point. But after reading this stage, we hope he's learned that he shouldn't focus on the first possible solution to the exclusion of all others. Maybe he could hold off until he's come up with another potential solution. "Maybe", he thinks to himself, "I could reach back out to those companies that haven't responded to me yet." Now there's an idea. He might also consider asking his super-critical literary friend to look over his resume, or maybe an old friend from college who works in his field. They might provide actionable feedback on his resume, unlike his family members. Now our job-seeker has three potential brainchildren to work with: improve resume, email prospective employers again, and ask informed friend.

Handling three approaches is more work than just the one, but a three-pronged approach is going to be more likely to land a solid offer in the long run.

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Stage Three: Achieve 🙌

In this last stage, which takes more of a retrospective tone, we'll learn why it is important to view success and failure with a balanced perspective. Varol teaches us both the benefit of failure, and the likely handicap of success.

In order to see the benefit of failure, we have to learn to see it differently than we've been taught. Because we don't like when we fail. We've been conditioned to avoid it. Our ancestors avoided failure, because failure meant getting eaten by a large animal. We avoid failure, because over the course of our lives we've learned to associate failure with bad things. As children, failure meant going to the principal's office. As adults, failure means missing out on a bonus or flunking a class. This view of failure inhibits innovation, and simply does not comport with reality.

The reality is that all of us fail from time to time. In fact, many successful people fail. A lot. Isaac Newton failed quite a bit throughout his lifetime, so did Bach and Einstein and Shakespeare. Of the two hundred of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets, only a few are considered classics, while others are "'consistently slammed for unpolished prose and incomplete plot and character development.'" And companies fail in addition to people. Google and Facebook spend millions of dollars' worth of failure every year (see here for a list of the former's failures). But we don't know about these failures, or even if we do, we don't remember them. "When we judge the greatness of these individuals, we don't focus on their troughs. We focus on the peaks … We remember Gmail, not the Glass (p 224)."

If successful people and companies aren't overly afraid of failure, then neither should we be. In fact, if we were to investigate these successful ventures we would discover that they exist because of their failures, not in spite of them. Take modern science. Thousands of scientific discoveries in the last century are simply failures in one field repurposed for another: "Science weaves from failure to failure (p 232)." The same could be said of the failures of big companies.

To achieve success to any kind, failure is going to happen. And out of the seeds of your failure can come innovation and fruitfulness for your next endeavor, but only if you change your perspective and learn from it. Others have, after all.

So how can we shift our view of failure so that we can learn from it?

We have to be curious. "Curiosity takes a failure, turns the volume of drama all the way down, and makes failure interesting. It provides emotional distance, perspective, and an opportunity to view things through a different lens." With the "volume of drama" turned down, you can push through the self-condemning thoughts that accompany an unsuccessful endeavor, those like "I'm never trying this again", or "that was a train wreck", or "I hate myself for messing up this bad." One rather strange way of turning the volume down that Varol recommends is to literally "throw your arms up in the air and say, 'How fascinating!'" every time you recognize a failure or mistake (p 237). Over time you'll learn to see the failure as worth being curious about.

Once you're curious, you'll be able to perform a postmortem. A postmortem is simply an examination of an event after it has passed. When you examine why you failed with a curious mind, you'll be able to pick out the good things from the failure that are worth repeating, as well as discern those things that aren't.

And just as failure is more than "complete bad", so success is more than "complete good." In fact, the danger lies more in success than failure. Blanket approval of all the elements of your successful endeavor will allow your silent mistakes go undiagnosed. These mistakes will propagate to your next endeavor, possibly in an amplified way. So be careful of success.

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Let's return to our job seeker one last time. He has three potential approaches to find a job, you'll remember: improve his resume, contact to those companies who haven't contacted him, and reach out to an informed friend in his field. Let's say that he chose to execute the last option first. You email your friend with your concerns, with your resume attached. You wait.

The friend replies to you a day later and informs you that a lot of the bullets on your resume reference old standards and old tools that aren't the norm in your profession anymore. This is why you're not getting any callbacks. Rats. Fail. You'll need to do some research on those newer standards, add them to your skillset, and update your resume. But lest you throw out the baby with the bathwater, he points out that it is very well-structured and well-written. It's quite possible that those companies you've applied to would entertain employing you if your skills were more recent. So while your effort thus far could certainly be characterized as a failure, you don't have to throw out the whole resume and start over. In fact, maybe the resume edits are the easiest part.

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I hope you've enjoyed reading my take on Think Like a Rocket Scientist.

Shoot me an email and let me know if you buy the book!